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Las diagrammas suivsnts illustrant la mMhoda. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 MiaoCOfT nsolUTION Iltl CHAUT (ANSI 0"d ISO TEST CHART No 2) /APPLIED IM/IGE In, CIRCUIT AKCnC OCEAN BOOKS BY HUDSON STUCK, D.D., F.R.G.S. rxmutmn iv CHARLES SCMBNER'S SONS A wiNTca cncuiT or otm akctic coait Aa wcount o( ■ wfntrr'i ioanuj Mrmtni ihf cout q( AlukK «- HT!r *5!^'"'V »?"^M. "d by otMervaiioM oa Arctk hunt- ■"••In* mttt* rrf cold, tiM utRMMMnWl pbraomrim. etc., whkh u fL?*Sr ^TV* * "pt*^ puoniM of Arctic KCMty tad iMui £«^S? h^^ wd of tbc mteloBwiM ud toucbv os » bun. VOVAOU ON THl YUKON AND ITS TIIIBUTAXtU A Nantivt of tufiiRMr Travtl In tbt Intnior at Alaaha "A recofd whkh cmbncn both d«cripiive kd>I hitlorkaliKMrmtiby •sUvetMd by panoiul ramintacnica and otb«r anrrdotn, andirivn eoodltieM tod prableim ol devdopmnl ."^TA* FiM, UmJUi. THE ASCENT OF DBNALI (MT. McKINLBY) "A wonderful ncont of indooiitablr pluck and endtinoce " -Bmimm 9ftkt Amtfifan GMgnHikat Smitly. •• Its pun make one with that til mountain climben mlgbt be trcb. detcMull ibdr accounU mUht thiu laln. in the imeiat <.f hapocB- iBfi by tbe wty, emotional vuton and intcUectutlMitlook." ^^ Stm York Timm. TEN THOUIAND lOLBS WITH A DOG BLED A Nnmtlm of WlnMr Ttiwtl In Intnter Alaka "Om 0* tbe moit UKlntUu tnd altopther ittUftctory booka irf tnvd wbkh we bare aeen tbS yetr. or. Indeed, any yetr." -Ntm York Trihmt. •qUt lUMliagljr briUiut book."— £Jb. jry DiguL A WINTER CIRCUIT OF OUR ARCTIC COAST f^f . %7;- '^..J,„u'/'r"'^/ff.' //•'// //^/>' .A-,^> ,1,1,/ ^/ff/j 'ter ..,.f,/ /./.n/f /«// /„^^/ /f-Mr..// Mt:^ ^--.-d- ^//>/.- /S^2 /3^2 A WINTEE CIRCUIT OF OUR ARCTIC COAST A NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY WITH DOG-SLEDS AROUND THE ENTIRE ARCTIC COAST OF ALASKA BY HUDSON STUCK. D.D.. F.R.G.S. ABOBOUOOR OF TM TOKOH ASO THS ABOTIO WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS igao ComiaBT, 1920, n CHARLES SCKIBNER'S SONS PlblUhad AnU ISO 880673 IN tOVmO MEMORY OF WALTER HARPER COMPANION OF THIS AND MANY OTHER JOURNEYS STRONG, GENTLE, BRAVE, AND CLEAN WHO WAS DROWNED IN THE LYNN CANAL WHEN THE "PRINCESS SOPHIA" FOUNDERED WITH HER ENTIRE COMPANY Sin OCTOBER, l«lg !,, PREFACE Thm is my fourth, and will, I am sure, be my last, book of Alaskan travel; indeed I bad thought the third would be the last. When one has described winter travel at great length, and then summer travel (which means the rivers) at great length, and has described the mountains and the ascent of the chicfest of them, there would seem little need to chronicle further wan- derings. But my journey of the winter of 1917-18 carried me completely around a distinct region of great interest that had been no more than barely touched by my previous narratives— the Arctic coast— and seemed suf- ficiently full of new impressions and experiences to be worth writing about. That coast has of course been well known for seventy- flve years; I have no discoveries or explorations to re- cord. Yet in one respect the journey was fresh and even singular. Whether anyone ever made the circuit of that coast in the winter-time before I know not, but I am sure it was never made before in the winter-time by one having for his purpose a general enquiry into Eski- mo conditions ; yet the winter is the time when the normal activities of the villages, with their schools and missions, are in operation. All such visits of bishops and super- intendents and inspectors and interested travellers— not to mention wandering archdeacons— have been made hitherto in the summer-time, when the annual trip of the revenue cutter offers suitable opportunity of passage, and when the natives are scattered and their norma! ac- tivities intermitted. For it is more and more true as one goes further north that the winter life is the normal life, since it comprises a larger and larger part of the year. These people are "scientifically known"; the heads of vU PBBFACB nearly all the living have been measared and the bones of nearly aU the dead have been gathered and shipped to in- stitutions of learning in the United States. That great chamel house, the Smithsonian Institution, boasts several thousands of their skulls. Their language, their primitive onltnre, their myths and legends, their handicrafts, their dress, their manners and customs, have been sufficiently examined and Ulustrated, and the shelves of museums everywhere groan under the result. I have no contribu- tion to malce aloag these lines. My purpose was an en- quiry into their present state, physical, mental, moral and religious, 'adustrial and domestio, into their pros- pects, into what the government and the religious organ- izations have done and are doing for them, and what should yet be done. Moreover, the Arctic coast of Alaska has a history of great interest, with which I have long been making my- self familiar, with much of which I have been familiar all my life, for the narrative of the Arctic explorers of the early decades of the last century over which I used to pore as a boy, gave me my first intellectual stimulus. Those modest and simple narratives are, I think, as much superior to recent books of polar travel as their delicately beautiful steel engravings are superior to the smudgy photographic half-tones with which most modem Arctic books are disfigured— including the present one. Unless one can carry along such an artist-photographer as Her- bert Ponting or Vittoria Sella, winter photography north of the tree line is likely to be a disappointment to the photographer and anything but an "embellishment" to a book. As I have retraced my own steps along the coast of Alaska in this narrative, I have sought to introduce the accounts of the first acquaintance of white men with it, have drawn freely upon the great explorers and naviga- tors who determined and described the limits of the North American continent, and opened the shores of "the frozen ocean" to the knowledge of mankind. PBEFACE Ik ii the main tbe country travenod U aa dreary and naked m I wppoae oa.i be found on earth, and cnraed with aa b ^r a cUmate; yev it i» not without aoenea of mat beauty and even auWiinity, and ita winter aspet.' have of ten an aUnoat indeeoribable charm, a radiance of Ught, a dehoate luatre of azure and pink, that turn jagged ice and windawept snow Into marble and alabaater and cry.v ' »"*'• one 'ancles oneaelf amidat the courts and tow- tWr dwS?n " """^ ^''e''«5»d where the peris fixed Mie scattered inhabitants the reader may call savage* If It please bun, they are certainly primitive and have some habits and customs that are not attractive. But I think they are the bravest, the ohemest, the most indus- trious, the most hospitable, and altogether the most win- ning native people that I know anything about, the most deserving of the indulgent consideration of mankind Whether or not I shall :,ave succeeded in interesting others, so soon as it was begun this narrative assumed for me, at a stroke, the most poignant and tragic interes'. to "^II^^ ^7" ^^" ''""^°- ^«""*"'" ^^o have been ^™7jT°i ° ""'i" *''" P"'* '^ remember without d^culty the figure of my young half-breed companion ti f / \°'"™*y'" r" '««" him at the handle-bars of the sled at the steering wheel of the Pelican, in the lead mL 1 fi^?' °' ^^^'"^ '"°'"'t«^- He accomp^ med me on the journey herein described. Going "out- ^niZr "' '^D''' ^"'^ "" «>« •«"<«» "o^e five months after our return, to offer himself for the army if ttere were yet need, or to enter college and begin his preparation for the career of a medical mission^, he was drowned when the Princess Sophia foundered S the m^f °M !?"• ^'.«°«'e company of 343 souls, the most ternble disaster in the history of Alaska. His bride of seven weeks, a graduate nurse from our hospital hwe going out undertake Red Cross work, shared S fate' If incidentally to my narrative, I have succeeded in leav-" «g some memorial in the reader's mind of a verj swwt « PBEPACE •nd oleau character, moat gentle and moat capable, aoma vindication of tlie poiaibilities of the much-deoriod half- breed, it will be a alight oonaolation for a very heavy lota, a very deep aorrow. There ia thia to add: that I had provided thia volnnie with an elaborate apparatua of nc'ea and reforencea, giving chapter and verae for every citation of voyagea and travels, but that, upon ita revision, I swept almost the -hole away. The reader may take my word for it that I have never quoted without turning up the passage in the original work, unless I have stated the contrary It seemed unwise to break the continuity of the narrative with frequent footnotes, and there seemed a certain pedantry in bolstering up with authorities a book which does not aspire to the formal dignity of a work of refer- ence. It is too free and discursive, too personal— the reader may even think too opinionated— for such char- acter. I have to express my grateful thanks to Dr. and Mrs. Grafton Burke for every possible domestic convenience and relief during the composition of another book; and to make my warm acknowledgment to Mrs. Kathleen Hore for her careful, intelligent transcription of another manuscript, and for the patient preparation of what I trust will be a satisfactory index. Thanks art also due to Mr. Alfred Brooks, the chief of the Alaskan Division of the United States Geological Sur- vey, for permission to reproduce Mr. Ernest De Koven Leffingwell's new map of the North coast of Alaska, the resnt of so many years' devoted labour. Fon VUKON, AU1K4. AprU, ISIS. CONTENTS __ FAN vii I Prom Foht Yukon to Kotzebub Souiro ... 3 II KoTZiBuc Sound to Point Hopi ... ga III Point Hope .-. IV Point F jfe to Point Barrow J55 V Point Barrow 209 VI The Northern Extreme 239 VII Point Barrow to Plaxman Island .... 263 VIII Plaxman Island and the Journey to Herschel I^^'^N" 289 IX HEBRcaEL Irjum and the Journey to Fort Y^o" 319 ILLUSTRATIONS Bocks of Cape Lisbarne . FroiUitpiece Cape Thompson "°" The Igloos at Point Hope 102 116 120 124 134 Point Hope— The School and the Children . Point Hope-Jigging for Tom Cod . The Three at the Point Hope Mission . Natural Arch at Cape Thompson . . [ Lingo— The Superannuated and Pensioned Dog, Playmate of Convalescent Children at the Port Yukon Hospital 150 The Departure from Point Hope-The Mission House Point Hope— The Native Council The Point Hope Reindeer Herd at I-Yag'-A-Tak The Gulch of the I-Yag'-A-Tak River Down Which We Came to Cut Out Cape Lisbume Dan^rous Travel Around Open Water from Which the Ice Has Been Blown by an Off-shore Gale .... Point Lay— Arrival Wainwright— Schoolhouse . . . . A Point Barrow Mother and ChUd ...'.' . 218 The Church and Congregation at Point Barrow '. '. Flaw Whaling at Point Barrow . . . . ' Flaw Whaling at Point Barrow The Actual Point Barrow— The Northern Eztrane of Alaska March Sun at Point Barrow .... Stop for Lunch— North Coast The Thirteen Dogs— Cape Halkett ■...., Tent Within Wal', of Snow— Harrison Bay . Beacon at Beechey Point Bough Ice Near Betam Beef of Franklin . 156 162 164 166 174 186 194 222 232 234 240 240 268 272 276 280 ILLUSTRATIONS X. r. J . . 302 North Coart-Cooking Dog-Feed ^ Rough lee off Barter Island ^^^ The North Coast . • • ' ' . ' ' ' ' qin Demarcation: Point-Weleome by the Natives . ■ ^ Mng the Firth or Hersehel Island Rive^The First ^^ Willows '. „ 11A The Firth or Hersehel Island River-The First Spruce . 334 Hocks on the Firth River / " t Dr. Burke and Mr. Stef4nsson and His Attendants, as I Met Them on the Porcupine River MAPS Map of the North Arctic Coast, Alaska . At end o! v«.>^e Map of Northern Alaska to illustrate a jour- ney around the Arctic Coast . • • PAST I FBOM FOET YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND FHOM POET YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND Seiko minded to spend the winter of 1917-18 amongst the Eskimos of the Arctic coast and having the bishop's consent thereto, I laid my plans, as is necessary in the north, well-nigh a year ahead, had certain supplies that were not procurable, or that I supposed were not pro- ccrable on the coast, shipped to Point Hope and to Point Barrow, and wrote letters to these and other stations announcing my intention, and setting approximate dates. I had carefully worked out the distance from Fort Yukon to the coast, all around the coast and back to Port Yukon again, and judged it well within the compass of a leisurely winter journey without travelling at all in the month of January. I judged, moreover, that with good fortune in the matter of weather and an early season, I could reach Point Hope, where the Episcopal Church has its only mission on the Arctic coast, for Christmas, and made that appointment with my friend who had just gone to that lonely charge. There I would lie, as I planned, not only over Christmas, but throughout January, not desiring to reach Point Barrow until the 1st of March, or to leave there for the journey along the north coast until the middle of that month. I set from the 5th to the 15th April for my arrival at Herschel Island, being without definite information of the little-travelled country be- tween, and the 1st May as the latest safe day for my re- turn across country to Fort Yukon. Approaching Fort Yukon by the Porcupine river, one can reasonably count upon travelling a week later than if one approach by the Yukon, since the Porcupine ice is usually a week later in breaking up. Thus I expected to avail myself of the earliest and the 4 A WINTER CIRCUIT latest travel of the winter, as well that I might have abundant leisure at the important settlements of Point Hope and Point Barrow, as that I might avoid travelling in the storms and darkness of mid-winter. I had set 5th November as the day for starting on the journey, well knowing that unless the winter season were early I should have to defer it. But everything in the way of weather was favourable. The Porcupine having closed on the 18th October, the Yukon closed on the 23rd, a very early closmg indeed, eight days earlier than the previous year, seventeen df.ys earlier than in 1915 and twenty-five days earlier than in 1914. So it was a very early season. There was just enough snow on the ground to permit travelling; the closing of the river was accom- panied by a sharp cold spell, which was, of corrse, the reason for its earliness, and for some days thereafter the thermometer fell so low as to guarantee the sealing of all waters that we should use and the thickening of ice to a state of safety. All natural conditions were pro- pitious. Yet was the start deferred, and, for awhile, the whole enterprise in jeopardy. On th-> 14th October my com- panion, Walter Harper, having been ailing for some time, went to bed in the hospital with a high fever, and when Dr. Burke returned on the 15th he suspected typhoid, which a few days' observation confirmed. On the 23rd, the day the Yukon closed, the doctor told me that at best Walter would be in no condition to travel for a month and it might be much l^^nger. Now a start at the end of November would put Christmas at Point Hope out of the question, would throw out the whole itinerary and arouse anxiety wherever I was expected along the route. Yet to take another companion was not only most distasteful but would overthrow one cherished part of the winter's plans. It is not every chance Indian with whom one is willing to enter upon the unrelieved intimacy of travel ' on the trail ; eating together, sleeping together, living in ^ one another's company all the time. But apart from that FROM FOET YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND S I had an obligation to Walter that unless we spent the winter together I could not fulfil. I had brought him back to Alaska from a school in Massachusetts where two years' more work would have made him ready for college, on the u iderstanding that his preparation should pro- ceed. For three years before he went out he had been my pupil, and the relation was to be resumed. He had jumped at the chance of returning to Alaska and I had been no less glad of his companionship again, but while he had done a good deal of work it had been sadly interrupted during the previous summer, part of which I had spent away from Mm on a visit to Cook's Inlet and Prince William's Sound. To go off on this six months' journey and leave him behind was to give up all chance of his being ready for college in the contemplated time, and in his twenty-fifth year, with college and medical school be- fore him, he had no time to waste. Had there been means of communicating with the Arctic coast I would have abandoned the journey for the year, when the doctor pronounced his judgment. But upon weighing all the circumstances I decided that my plans must be carried out. With a heavy heart I set about finding another companion and at last made a tentative arrangement with a reluctant Indian who had little stomach for so long and remote a journey. But on the 30th October Walter was so much improved that he was allowed to sit up a little. He had lost twenty pounds weight in his sickness, but day by day his strength returned, his appetite became enormous, and I began to entertain hope, which indeed I think I had never com- pletely abandoned, that he might be able to go. On the 4th November Dr. Burke said that if the improvement continued without any setback and I would take special precautions, he thought Walter could travel in a week, and on the 7th the doctor gave his unreserved permission for Walter to go. Never was such a rapid convalescence. There is something very mysterious about typhoid fever. It has never, I think, been epidemic in Alaska, IM • A WINTEE CIRCUIT though in the early overcrowding of Dawson there was an outbreak of some severity, but sporadic cases are not uncommon. Where does the infection come from! Wal- ter had been absent during the latter half of September on a moose hunt. He went up the Yukon about an hun- dred and fifty miles to the Charley river on a steam- boat with an Indian companion, and for twelve days or so was out in the hills killing and skinning his game and bringing it out to the water. Then they constructed a raft, loaded the meat upon it, and came floating triumph- antly down to Fort Yukon with some 2,500 pounds of prime meat-enough to supply our hospital for a great part of the winter. It was two weeks after his return that ne went to bed sick. There was only one other case, the doctor's little son, and whether he contracted it from Walter or Walter from him, i. was impossible to deter- mine. But where did the infection come fromt However it was, a load was lifted from my heart and from my spirits when it was decided that he could accom- pany me, and on the 8th November, only three days after the date I had set, we left Fort Yukon. I had engaged a stout Indian youth .0 accompany us for the first 200 miles that Walter might be relieved in every possible way, and had undertaken to see that our oonvale8ce^t, only mne days out of bed, had hot soup from the thermos bottles every two hours. All preparatitas and disposi- tions had long since been made and only the actual load- ing of the sleds remained. It was one o'clock on Thurs- day afternoon the 8th November, the sleds all lashed, the dogs hitching, when I slipped away from the mission to avoid the long agony of native good-byes and took a back route to the Chandelar trail. They knew whither I was bound, these Indians, and had, of old, none too good an opinion of the "huskies" as they call the Eski- mos, and some of the elders had expressed a fear that i would never return. When the sleds left, Dr Burke commandeered a passing native team with the purpose of accompanying us for a few miles. A recently arrived FROM FOBT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 7 white man with an nnsnspected commission from a Fair- banks journal for news, seeing the doctor start with my teams, jumped to the conclusion that he also was going on the journey and, without making enquiries, sent a message to that effect. The news was sent from Fair- banks to Nome, was telephoned across the Seward penin- sula to Candle creek, appeared in the bulletin there, was carried by the mail to Kotzebue and thence all along the coast; and simost as far as Point Barrow I was annoyed by enquiries for the doctor. Our new "radio" station is a great convenience, but at times something of a nui- sance also. It was a surprise and an annoyance to find that communication with the Arctic coast could be so prompt and so misleading. The teams caught up with me in about five miles and we made no more than another five and then camped. It is next to impossible to get an early start from a mission, and that is why we pulled out a few miles and made camp. It was cold in the tent that night, 40 degrees below zero, but we had plenty of bedding and the two boys and I were snug and cosy. Outside twelve well-fed dogs made themselves comfortable on their brush piles also. Poor beasts ! ten of them were intended to go all the way, and would of ien have cause to regret the good food of the interior and the spruce brush that kept them off the snow, were dogs capable of regret; two of them were to take Paul back when his stage of attendance was done. Snug as I was I did not sleep— I never sleep the first night or two on the trail— but I lay and thought. I had never expected to be so happy leaving Fort Yukon again, but I wap eager for this journey with the keenness of my first Alaskan travel, and my heart was full of gratitude that things had turned out so well. The reaction from the heaviness of ten days ago had sent my spirits high. There is something very attractive about the complete detachment from the world which such a journey as we were started upon involves. Three or four oppoi tunitiea for the despatch of letters I should have during the win- i A WINTER CIRCUIT ter, but no opportunity whatever of receiving any. The anxieties of my affairs fell off me like a mantle as I re- alized this. What I could do to make provision for the hospital at Fort Yukon, which threatened to be in finan- cial straits ere I returned, I had done by writing of a pamphlet to bo printed and circulated. Such arrange- ment as I could make for the visiting by others of places usually included in my winter's itinerary, but this year omitted, had been made. And since no further exercise in any such affairs could have any result whatever, I cleared my mind of them as a merchant clears his desk, and there lay nothing before mo but the business of the journey and what thereto appertained. Not a letter in six months 1 My correspondence is perhaps the most eagerly expected thing in my life and perhaps the most enjoyed, yet now that I knew it must suffer this com- plete cessation, it did not trouble mo at all. What an accumulation I should find upon my return 1 And though I could not hear from my friends I could write to them, and write to them from most interesting places. Not only no letters but no newspapers, no magazines, even, as we thought, no news at all, would reach us. But in that we were wrong. Not until we were travelling the north coast were we actually taking the news with us. It is written in my diary that night that I was at peace with the whole world— except the Germans— and was very happy. The journey was one that I had long wanted to make. When I came to Alaska thirteen years before I had car- ried a commission as "archdeacon of the Yukon and of the Arctic regions to the north of the same," but I had never so far had opportunity to visit the hyperborean part of my domain. My acquaintance with the Eskimos at the Allakaket and on the Kobuk had whetted my desire to see more of them; the long stretch of the west coast had always appealed to me; the little known and more mysterious north coast called even louder; and here, by my side, was the one person of all manKnd I PROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZSBUB SOUND had rather have, and ho miracnlonsly restored when it had seemed inevitable that be be left behind ! I ran over the work we would do together. In little India paper volumes wo had all Shakespeare's plays, Macanlay's es- says, the Oecline and Fall (my own steady reading on the trail for years but this winter to bo of use for Walter also, as I hoped). I thought that in six months we could cover much if not most of this ground in English. Fol- lowing two severe seasons, please God this would be a mild one, with light snow, and we should not have day after day the labour which leaves men exhausted at night with a craving for sleep which makes study impossible. If Walter lay awake and thought, I judgo that his an- ticipations were as pleasant as mine, though of a different cast. Keen for the journey as I was, I think they cen- tred round a polar bear, with occasional excursions to a seal and a walrus, and I will not venture that even a whale did not come within their scope. Ho had killed all our large land mammals from boyhood up; this fall he had killed seven moose and two caribou ; and mountain sheep, black bear, brown bear, were old stories to him. I knew that he had set his heart on a polar bear and was resolved that he should have one if it could be compassed. It was hard fo' me to think of him as a man, approaob- ing the end of his twenty-fifth year as he was; he was always to me the boy that 1 had found on the Yukon, the boy who had blundered and kindled as he read Robinson Crusoe aloud to me, that immortal work of genius, and later Treasure Island, of which its author was justified in saying "If this doesn't fetch the kids they've gone rotten since my time"— and not the kids only;— who had gained his first fragmentary acquaintance with history in that most deligLtfnl of ways, a long series of Henty's books, also read aloud. I am sorry for the boy who does not know Henty; Walter had built up no con- temptible grasp of the great events of history by string- ing together these narratives and hanging them on cer- tain pegs of dates that I had driven home. Some time 10 A WINTER CIRCUIT i ■ince I read a condemnation of 'li^io booki on the loore that they convoyed falie views ^,' hiatory, bat a falae view or a true view of any history depends largely upon the standpoint and I suppose Henty was as mnch entitled to his as another. Beside, what do a boy's "views" mat- tert The thing is to get the information into his head, to fire and fan bis imnginntion, to extend his horizon. And whatever may come to him later I would rather he were nurtured in the generous and chivalrous school of Scott and Ilenty than in the sordid and cjmical school prevail- ing today, however painfully and impossibly impartial it may strive to be. Shakespeare's history may be true or false — one thinks sometimes that the writers of Queen Elizabeth's reign were not so utterly ignorant of the Lancastrian and Yorkist affair as their critics of three centuries later maintain — but true or false Shakespeare's history is likely to remain history for nine-tenths of English-speaking people. We had fallen into the habit of calling Henty 's boy- hero, whose footsteps echo down all the corridors of time, "Cedric," and when a new story was begun, whether of ancient Egypt or cf tl ■ CruBad;'S or of the American Revolution, Walter would say "Here comes Cedric," when the gallant and fortunate youth made a new reincar- nation in the first chapter. There must be fifty or sixty of these books, and there may be an hundred for aught I know, and "Cedric" bobs up in all of them with the same gallantry and the same marvellous luck. Together they fom. a most valuable and interesting compendium of history for youth, and I have often been glad of the refreshing of my own knowledge while they were reading. I will confess that I had my first clear conception of Peterborough's astonishing campaign in the war of the Spanish Succession and my most vivid picture of his storming of Barcelona, as also my clearest impressions of Wolfe's campaign against Montcalm and the taking of Quebec, from hearing Henty read aloud ; to which per- haps the deliberation of the reading contributed. Wal- FROM FOBT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND II tor wa« yeari past Hcnty, but ho told mo that in hii hi«- tory work at scliool the recollection of these stories had filled out the skeletons of text-books and had often jfivcn him a surprising advantage over his fellows. "Some- timoi I knew what the teacher was tnlkinj? about when none of tho others did," ho said. Ocometry and algebra now took much of his time, in which I was of little use to him, and Latin, in which I was not much moro. Nearly thirty years' disuse of subjects leaves one ill-equipped for teaching. I had made other arrangements about them and confined myself to pressing literature and history upon him, and in making him write. The night passed quickly, even though without sleep, wholly concerned with such reflections as I have indi- oatod, and I was up at five and soon had breakfast ready. Onr course was a familiar one as far as tho Allakaket ; over the frozen lakes and swamps of the Yukon Flats to the Chandelar village, sixty miles or so away, up tlio Chandclur river for eighty or ninety miles, over another portage of twenty-five miles to the south for- of tho Koyukuk, over a low pass and down a stream to Cold- foot on the middle fork of the latter river, and then down thai river an hundred and twenty miles to tho Allakaket mission. Theno© we had some sixty miles up its tributary tho Alatna, another portage of forty or fifty miles to the Kobuk, down which some three hundred miles would bring us to its mouth in Kotzebue Sound; then a journey np tho Arctic coast of about an hundred and seventy-five miles and we should bo at Point Hope, our first objective, and altogether something over nine hundred miles away. At Coldfoot Paul would go back. It was essential to our programme that we should make good travel in these early stages of the journey, for we knew not what awaited us on the Arctic slope. The lightness of the snow, not more *han a few inches deep, which was a drawback on the . >■ gh portages, would bo a great advantage on the smooth river surfaces, and we might hope to have that advantage not only on the Chan- 12 A WINTER CIRCUIT delar but on the Koynkuk, if we pressed on. Through scattered brush, and scrub spruce, and burned blackened trunks of a forest fire, o\'er lake after lake, the going very rough and heavy for our loaded sleds except when we were on ice, we reached an inhabited cabin by eleven o'clock and stopped for our lunch; and then on through similar country, crossing the Christian river, tributary to the Chandelar, with great pitches up and down the banks, until we came within five miles of a cabin at which we had discussed spending the night. This place is off the main Chandelar trail and we had hesitated about going to it, but when wo reached the point where the trail to it leaves the main trail, we found a great fire burn- ing, a dog-team hitched, and two Indians waiting. To my surprise they were waiting for us ; had been engaged all day in straightening and improving the trail and cut- ting out brush, and had brought the dog-team to help us in with our loads. Word of our approaching departure had been brought from Fort Yukon and they had expected we would come along this evening. I was much touched by this attention; we gladly discharged an hundred pounds or so of our load into the empty toboggan, and in a short time were in Robert John's comfortable two- roomed cabin, one room of which was placed entirely at our service. A couple more families were housed within a stone's throw, so that the place was quite a little settlement. There was a good fishing stream near-by, firewood was handy, potato and turnip patches had been cultivated, and it was in a good region for moose and not far from the threshold of the caribou country; alto- gether an eligible situation for outlying Indians. That night all the folks gathered and we had native service with many hymns and a brief address, and so to bed. Luminous-dial watches are i great convenience, and the wrist, I think, "s the only place to wear a watch that is intended for use and not as mere appendage of a chain or a fob— unless one be wielding an ax, when the jar is too great and the watc'. had better be detached and put FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 13 in the pocket; I have not found any other occupation interfere with it. And despite all that the watchmakers say I have proved to my own satisfaction that a watch keeps just as good time on a wrist as in a pocket. It is curious what a ferocious prejudice there was in some quarters against the wrist watch, until the war. Then it v.as generally discovered that no other place in which a watch can be carried compares to the wrist for general convenience. Hereafter, I think, it will be the normal wear, and beyond any question the luminous dial will be- come the normal dial. I had worn my watch on my wrist ever since I came to Alaska, but I was new to the lumi- nous dial, and the next morning I read the time as 5.10 when it was really 2.20. The boys had been aroused and a fire was going before the mistake was discovered and then we went back to bed for a couple of hours or so. The Chandelar village would be our next stop and there we would spend Sunday. Where there are three men and but two sleds one man must travel loose and I like to start well ahead of the teams when there is any good sort of trail; so leaving the others hitching the dogs I struck out by myself and was able to do quite as well as the teams over that rough ground, so that by eleven o'clock when I reached another little old cabin they were not yet in sight or sound, and here I awaited them. With the thermos bottles full of hot soup, lunch is a very simple matter, and with the compressed and concentrated Swiss cubes, enriched with a few bouillon capsules, soup-making is very easy. But why, save that salt is cheaper than meat extract, should these cubes be so saline ? Their use for the strengthening and enriching of soups and stews is strictly limited be- cause of the excessive content of salt. One would gladly dispense with the sticky and messy jars of beef extract altogether and carry nothing but the cubes, if this were not the case. Here I had a chance of a lift, for an Indian with an empty toboggan was proceeding to the village, and I M A ;WINTEB CIRCUIT stayed with him until the Chandelar river was reached. Here it grew dark and the descent from the bank to the ice was so sudden and precipitous that I would not leave my teams to come upon it unawares, and I let him proceed alone. The empty toboggan shot down the pitch, the dogs on a dead run, and they were soon out of sight on the smooth ice in the gathering gloom, while I built a fire on the bank and waited. These trails in the Yukon Flats follow the same line throngii the woods year after year, but there is likely to be a different approach to a river every season. The Chandelar is notorious for "over- flows" and open water, and every year there is open water in the neighbourhood where the Fort Yukon trail reaches it. Sometimes the trail runs along the river bank for a mile before it finds a place where it can de- scend to safe ice. This year the descent was partic- ularly abrupt and there was open water close to the safe ice at the bottom. A toboggan can go over these head- long pitches without much danger; there is little to break about a toboggan; but while the lesser of my vehicles was a toboggan, the more important was a birch sled carefully made with a prime view to other country than the Yukon Flats, and heavily loaded. It was quite dark when the teams arrived, but my blazing brush pile illuminated the bank and the wide river with its patches of swift black water beyond, so that we made the desceit in safety, and five miles of good ice-going, following the track of the precedent toboggan, brought us the twinkling lights of the village and the glad sound of distant dogs. These folks are also, in a special sense, my own people; Fort Yukon is their mart and metropolis ; thither they go to be married and take their children to be baptized, sometimes spending weeks there at a stretch. It is very pleasant to receive their welcome and enjoy their hospi- tality, to stand aside and let them unhitch the dogs, un- load the sleds, pack the stuff into the cabin, put the empty vehicles and the harness high up on some cache-platform i FROM PORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 15 where they will be in no danger from the teeth of loose dogs, and start an outdoor fire for cooking dog-feed. This year dog-feed was exceedingly scarce. The sal- mon mn, upon which dog-food entirely, and man-food largely, depends had been a partial failure in the previous summer. During the early summer, when the king salmon ran, the Yukon had been persistently bank-full, and the driftwood that always accompanies flood had clogged and stopped all fish-wheels. The later runs of silver and dog- salmon scarce came at all— for what mysterious reason no one knows— and the whole fish catch had been the least within recent recollection. Here in November many natives were cooking cornmeal and tallow for their dogs ' —both imported and bought at war prices. This may not seem the place, nor this even the book, to speak upon the necessity of the salmon to the native life and to de- nounce the recent iniquity of permitting salmon canneries to be established at the mouth of the Yukon, yet dog-feed is one of the most important winter requisites, and has the most intimate connection with travel. Disguised as a war measure for increasing the world's food supply (it has become almost a public duty not to say "camou- flaged") it is in reality only one more instance of the way in which the people of Alaska are deprived of their coun- try's resources by commercial greed. A government which permits the natives of the Yukon and its tribu- taries to be robbed of their natural supply must pres- ently face the alternative of feeding chem itself or letting them starve. Such fluctuation of the fishing from year to year as is due to the operations of nature may be ex- pected and must be endured, but the cannery will cause a steady and increasing diminution until at last the na- tives of the upper and middle Yukon will find their water as void of fish as from like cause the natives of the Copper river already find theirs. The Indians of the plains were largely exterminated because the white settlers needed their lands. Free for ever from any such danger, shall we let the Indians of the interior of Alaska be exter- 16 A WINTER CIRCUIT minated because a greedy packing company, already grown rich on the coast, needs the fish of the inland rivers also? * ^ i ui j Should it bear proportion of space to the trouble and expense and anxiety which it caused us all the winter through, the matter of dog-feed would indeed occupy no small part of this book. The principal difficulty of such a journey as this lies there; especially was this true in a season of scarcity, exceptional under old condw.ons but likely to be normal now. For the present we were pro- vided I had bought of the scant king salmon when no one supposed there would be dearth of the later-running varieties, and had cached it for the first part of this journey I knew that at the AUakaket mission they would have fish cached for me were any procurable at all, and some sort of intermediate provision could be made at Coldfoot and Settles. The Sunday rest at the Chandelar mission was very acceptable, not only because it gave me a chance of min- istering to this group of fifteen or sixteen natives, but because I was anxious that Walter be not unduly fa- tigued. He was standing the journey well, was eating heartily and often, and I was encouraged to believe that danger of relapse was past. But for all the first week I was rather uneasy at the responsibility I had taken (notwithstanding the doctor's permission) in startmg with him so soon after his sickness. The resourcefulness of one of the native women and her intelligent application of the teaching at Fort Yukon, made a strong impression on me. Her boy of six or seven had suffered a terrible, deep cut from the middle of the nose down to and through the upper lip right to the bone a few days before by running within the swing of his father's axe. It was God's mercy that the •Since writUg the aljove the gloomy forecast it contains has been fully realized. The operation o! the cannery in the soinmer of 1910, canaed Inalmoet complete failure in the native flsh J and the «««>'« 'n«;t«^ parte have r.lready had to kill thdv dogs and are facing a winter of prir., tion. NovemlA?r, 1919. FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 17 child's BkuU I's skull was not cleft in twain by the blow. The woman had thoroughly washed the wound, had pulled one of the long coarse hairs of her head, had boiled it and a common needle, and had taken fifteen stitches tlierewith in the wound. I had the bandage removed and found the wound looking perfectly healthy, its edges in good apposition, and apparently healing "by first intention." She had also made an aseptic dressing by boiling some moss and then thoroughly drying and heating it in the oven. The wound will leave its inevitable conspicuous scar, but, I think, will have no other ill result. The same resolute and sensible woman, when in Fort Yukon a few months before, had brought the same boy to the doctor (who is also our dentist) with two decayed milk teeth. Pointing out the teeth that were giving the trouble and wrapping her stalwart arms about the boy, she said, "Me hold-um, you puU-um"— and it was done. Most Indian mothers refuse to constrain a child to a dreaded operation of any kind, for which refusal "He no like" is held suffi- cient reason. The use of cereals, or perhaps sweets, at any rate the departure from a predominantly if not ex- clusively carnivorous habit, seems to be introducing de- cay of the teeth amongst our native children, and our doc- tor has to resort to rewards, and to the arousing of emu- lation in fortitude, that he may remove teeth that befoul and infect the children's mouths. We lay long, and had no more than breakfasted when it was church time, and the afternoon slipped rapidly away while Walter read aloud to me from the Maccabees. Having read the greater part of the Bible aloud to me in previous years, I had chosen the Apocrypha for the win- ter's Sunday reading, and, since it is strangely omitted fron juost Bibles, had brought it along in an additional slim India-paper volume. I was again struck by the vigour and restraint of the narrative, equal to any other of the sacred narratives, and superior to many. Of Antiochus Epiphanes the author writes "He spoke very proud words and made a great massacre." Walter 18 A WINTER CIRCUIT looked up and said "That would do for the Kaiser." I have thought of the verse in that connection many times since, and I know not where else in literature so curt yet adequate a characterization of William 11 of Germany may be found. I submit it for his epitaph: "He spoke very proud words and made a great massacre." What a record I I was amused and interested at hearing some instruc- tion and reproof administered by Walter to Paul, the Indian boy I had brought along. Paul was an adopted boy, and like most such amongst the Indians had been worked pretty hard and given little chance for schooling. "Say 'yes, please,' " said Walter, and waited till he said it; "Say 'no, thank you;' now say it again." "Say 'yes, sir,' 'no, sir,' and remember to say those things all the time." The boy was already beginning to exhibit an almost dog-like fidelity and docility to Walter, who never failed to win a native attendant. Another Indian service by candlelight, when the brief day had closed down, brought supper time and bed. Be- cause there was no trail at all above this place and much overflow water to be expected on the river and we were pressed for time, I made an arrangement with one of the Chandelar men to accompany us for a couple of marches. So we set out early on Monday morning (I cannot say "bright and early," for it was pitch dark) three teams and four men strong, and made that day an excellent run on the Chandelar ice. Most of the overflowed water we were able to avoid, but one slough that we had taken for a short-cut was completely covered with an inch or two of running water. The dogs could have been forced to go through it, though at 20 degrees below zero one does not wet their feet unnecessarily, but the loads in the toboggans would probably be wetted and the toboggans themselves encrusted with ice. Here came the utility of the large sled, its bottom raised four inches or so above the runners. My large toboggan was lifted up and set bodily on top of the sled, and Jim's little toboggan set FBOM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUB SOUND 19 bodily on top of that ; the dogs were turned loose to clam- ber up the steep bank and make their way pround the water in company with the two Indians, and Walter and I, who were dry-shod with Eskimo water-boots, seized the tow-line of the sled and drew the whole top-heavy load easily enough through the hundred yards or so of water that was running over the smooth ice. It was done in a few minutes; it would have taken an hour or more to break out a practicable trail for the sleds through the thick brush of the bank; and to have driven through it would have risked wetting our toboggan loads. The be- ginning of a flght amongst the dogs, loose from one another but still in their individual harness, was quickly suppressed with a heavy whip (there is no use in stand- ing on cevemony when dogs are fighting), the animals quickly hitched up again, and we passed on through the Chandelar Gap in perfectly still weather to the cabin at the mouth of the East Fork. I am not sure if it be nine or ten times that I have passed through that gap in the winter coming or going, but this is only the second time that I have passed through it without a gale of wind blowing. Commonly, although it be dead calm a few miles above and a few miles below, the wind sweeps cruelly between its narrow jaws and the ice is bare and polished however deep the snow may lie elsewhere. I remember that Walter wanted to go on to the long- abandoned Chandelar store ten miles or so further, and had I yielded to his wish it would have saved us from a notable vexation and delay later, but I was still solicitous that he be not over-fatigued. Seven and a half hours' good ice travel the next day brought us to Caro, the abandoned mining town of the days of the Chandelar stampede, though several cabins are still kept up by men who have claims of some value on distant creeks, in one of which we were comfortably lodged. A few miles be- fore reaching Caro we passed the recent tracks of a herd of carbon and the dogs were wildly excited. Jim said he had never known the caribou to come so far down the -O A WINTER CIRCUIT Chandelar river before, and this is one of many indica- tions that big game is increasing in this part of Alaska A httle further on Jim got a useless far-away shot at one but there is no restraining an Indian -vith a gun in his hand and gurae in sight. So far our travel upon the Chandelar had justified my expectation of good early going on the ice. Our course lay yet on the river for a day's march, but now we had a trail made by two young men who had been working on one of the creeks referred to. It was an unexpected piece of good fortune to find a trail in these parts so early in the season. They were Kskimos, and we had heard that they were intending to go across country to Point Barrow by one of the branches of the Colville river, in quest of wives. Not many natives will apply themselves steadily to a white man's occupation as these two youths had applied themselves to gold mining, but one was mission- bred at the Allakaket, and, I am afraid, to some extent spoiled for native vocations. At any rate, he and his partner had worked a claim on shares for two years and were sufficiently well ahead to permit them to spend the winter m a journey to the coast. Having their trail as far as Coldfoot, and finding such good travel on the Chandelar, I dismissed Jim, who had been of much service to us, and who was anxious to go after the caribou on his way home. The trail which had left the ice only to reach the cabins at Caro, returned immediately to it, and the tracks of the Eskimo boys' sleds were plain. But there was another trail leading out of Caro over a twenty-mile portage to anothsr fork of the Chandelar, on its way to the distant creeks referred to, by which the boys had come. Early in the morning, having paid Jim and bidden him good- bye, I started ahead of the teams as usual. For two and a half hours I kept a steady pace and must have gone ten miles, but to my surprise the teams did not catch me up although the going was excellent. The weather was mild when T started, about at zero and overcast, and as FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 21 the morning advanced it grew milder and a light snow began to fall. I stopped and sat down and waited for my party a full half hour. Listening intently one can always hear distant sled-bells; I know no more persistent illu- sion of the trail; but unless they gradually grow louder until there remains no doubt, it is a more trick of the ear Puzzled and anxious I turned back, casting in my mind what could have kept the boys. I thought of the portage trail, but dismissed it at once, for I knew that Walter knew that the trail was on the river. What seemod the most likely hypothesis was that after my departure the herd of caribou, upon the skirts of which wc had pressed yesterday, had come streaming through Caro in their usual foolish way and that Walter had been unable to re- sist the temptation. Yet I had heard no shots. Then I thought that Paul, who had shown signs of wishing to re- turn with Jim, had deserted Walter and left him with no one to handle the toboggan— but again that would have been no cause for detention ; Walter would have thrown both teams together and trailed the toboggan behind the sled. As I approached Caro I looked eagerly for smoke from the cabin we had stayed in, but saw none, and when I reached the place it was deserted. What had happened to my companions and my teams ? About an inch of snow had fallen since I left, but careful examination in the dusk (for it was heavily overcast) showed me that for some inscrutable reason the teams had passed up the portage trail and had not taken the river at all. Then I did as stupid a thing as I ever did in my life. I should have stayed at Caro. There was a cabin and a stove and plenty of wood, and I might have known that whatever the cause of the mistake Walter would have returned to Caro for me as soon as he found it out. Instead of which I started up the portage trail following my teams. This trail was most horribly rough. There had been but one previous passage this season; there was not snow enough to cover the niggerheads, and as it grew dark I was stumbling and slipping at every step. For full three 1 i 22 A WINTER CIRCUIT honr« I pushed on, intent upon catching up with my teams, until it was utterly dark and I could go no further I stopped in the midst of some smnll burned-over timber —mere poles— and managed to pull down enough with my hands to start a fire. I had a cake of milk chocolate in my pocket, a bunch of sulphur matches, and a few pipefuls of tobacco, and I commenced a vigil that I thought would last till morning— fully aware now of my mistake and resolved to return to Caro at break of day. Half my time was occupied in breaking down jjoles to supply the fire, and the elasticity of these half-burned slender sticks is remarkable; they could be pulled almost to the ground without breaking. I had walked, I suppose, twenty-five or thirty miles, had had no lunch and would have no supper, but fortunately it was mild weather. I had now ample leisure for chagrin that after all my many years' experience on the trail I should have had such poor judgment in a quandary. I dozed a little, squatting by the fire, until it was time to get more sticks, and I thought of an old Tanana Indian, Alexander of Tolovana, who had been suddenly paralyzed while out hunting in the previous January and had fallen across his camp fire and severely burned himself. It was during an unusually mild spell of weather and he lay for sis days unable to do more than crawl around and painfully pick up little sticks to keep his fire going. He told me "all the time I prayed God, don't let it get cold," and it did not get cold again until a search party had discovered him and brought him home; then it went to fifty below zero the next day. About 8.30 I thought I heard the sound of bells, but I had been hearing them all day. Presently, however they were unmistakable, and I knew that Walter was at hand He had brought some grub and a thermos bottle of soup and a robe m the empty sled, and I was never gladder to see anyone in my life. Strange as it seemed to me then and seems to me now, he had blundered as badly as I had. Starting in the pitch dark, with heavily overcast FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 23 sky, he had not noticed particularly the route his leader took, but supposed that the trail wojld strike the river when it had wound around the cabins sufficiently, and when it had quite left the town, supposed it was but avoiding bad ice or open water and expected every min- ute that it would strike to the river. When at length fully awake to his blunder, he did not turn round to re- trace his course, and that was his second blunder; the trail was so narrow that he would have had to clear a space to turn in with the ase, and ho thought he could reach the river quicker by striking across country to it. But this involved him in unexpected difficulties of dense brush and steep gullies. He had to make wide detours, and it was a long time ere he reached a slough, hidden by an island from view of the main river, and the bank so high and steep that the sleds had to be lowered by ropes. Sunning round the island to the main river he saw my tracks, both going and returning, and made quick camp. Then, leaving Paul in camp, he took the dogs and empty sled and returned to Caro, only to find that I had gone up the portage trail. Even though it was nearly dark and snow had fallen I should have noticed the place where the sleds left the portage trail and cut across country— and that was another blunder to my discredit. It was eleven at night when we were safely at camp, and one in the morning when we had eaten supper and turned in (though this was one of the few nights of the whole winter when we did not read at all), and since we did not arise till eight and were not started again till eleven, here was a day and a half of our precious early season wasted, and snow heavily threatening. I had no reproaches for Walter and he none for me; each knew himself also vuhierable— and beside, what was the use? My chief feeling was of gratitude to him for hunting me up and saving me from a hungry, cheerless night. Had we passed by the East Fork cabins and pushed on to the old store, as Walter wanted to, we should have passed Caro by daylight, and this series of blunders would have • I 2* A WINTER CIRCUIT been impossible. But you never can tell. One thing I was really resolved npon-not to get out of sight of my teams any morel Three hours brouKht us to the mouth of the West Fork, to a cabin ocPupitKl by the paren' • mid grandparents of one of the Eskimo boys referred I.., where also were two other Kskimo men just returned from hunting, and they had fifteen or twenty caribou carcases piled high on a cache. Tliey gave us fresh meat for our dogs, u welcome and highly appreciated change, and we pushed on up the tortuou.s West Fork until dusk and th.-n camped on its bank. The next day for some twenty miles we still pur- sued this stream, grown so crooked that 1 doubt if two miles travel gave one mile advance, and troubled, as usual here, with frequent and extensive overflow water But the thermometer stood well above zero and Walter and I, in our waterboots, went right through it, Paul, who was in moccasins, perching upon the sled. Thus dry- shod, and in moderate weather when ice does not rapidly collect, overflow wi.ter, if it be not too deep, offers no impediment to travel, for the ice is always smooth under- neath. Although the water obliterated the tracks wo were following, whenever we came to ice that had not been inundated we found them again. At last we reached the place where the trail "takes up" the bank to cross from Chandelar to Koyukuk water, and the chief advantage of having a trail to follow was that it led us directly to this spot, with no necessity of casting hither and thither to find it. A grinding ascent of a very steep ridge brought us to the open country and to twenty or thirty miles of very rough travel. The lightness of the early snowfall which had given us such quick passage of the rivers was now no small disadvantage. Heavy snow fills np and smooths out the inequalities of the surface, but a few inches has httle effect. Our sled suffered considerably and our progress was slow. Here, as well as in deep, loose snow, the toboggan fares better; with its flat bottom it slips FROM !ORT Yl'KON TO KOTZEBIJE SOUND 28 nnd ilides amongst tlii> hillockii of the niggerhead*, tat- {er» an overturn with no jar or damage, and is easily righted, while tlic sled, high on the benches of its runners, falls with a crash and is righted with Inliour. By dork we were at a rest cnhin and camped, and after another day of banging and HJamniing over the niggerlieads of the South Fork Flats, had crossed that branch of the Koyukuk, disilainiug the caliin at the crossing, and had pushed on up Itoulder Creek towards Coldfoot on the Middle Fork, making a ciunp in complete darkness, with the weather grown decidedly cold again. Few more beau- tiful winter scenes could be imagined than that which had gladdened my eyes all the evening. The mountoins at the head of the South Fork nie finely sculptured sharp peaks, forming a crescent. Their tops gave us the sun long after his brief visit to the valley, and when the alpine glow faded and died there came out one brilliant star right over the point of the middle peak and there hung nnd glittered. Paul, who had overcome his desire to return, which was prompted merely by Jim's return, and had grown marvellously and anxiously polite, now expressed his determination to "go all the way" with us. "I see Husky country too; I go all the way— please, Sir!" he said repeatedly of late. Both Walter and I had taken to the boy, who was willing and good-natured and very teachable, and I should have liked to keep him, but it was out of the question. J"'rom time to time I expected to add a third to our p-irty, but it would bo one with local knowledge and speech ; Paul would be but an additional expense, he would bo ou* of hia laDjjuage range when he reached Coldfoot. The next day was Sunday, but we had wasted this week's day of rest and it was no more than half a journey into Coldfoot, so we broke up another camp where we had been snug and comfortable at forty below zero and passed up to the lakes of the low "summit" and down Slate Creek to Coldfoot. My old friend who bad been 26 A WINTER CIRCUIT working on an "hydraulic proposition" at the head of Slate Creek ever since I knew this country, was gone somewhere else, "working for wages," which means earning a little more money with which to pursue his special project. Some day he will finish his ditch and bring the water down from the lakes and I trust that then he will wash out gold enough to make his fortune. But however large a stake he may make I doubt he will never be as happy as in his cabin at the head of Slate Creek. The first winter mail had not yet come and the camp was without news of the war since the last steamboat, so that we were eagerly questioned as soon as we arrived. Our news was bad news — the overwhelming of the Italians by the Austrians and Germans and the increased destructiveness of submarines. After many camps, however comfortable, a roadhouse is welcome, but there was much to do if we were to start down the Koyukuk in the morning. My customary visits to the men on the creeks were given up this year, or Christmas at Point Hope would have been out of the question, but there was service to hold and, as I learned, a baptism to perform. Our supplies had to bo replen- ished and Paul to be equipped for his return. A little rude, discarded toboggan we had picked up at one of our stopping places and had brought along on top of our sled. This would hold his blankets, his grub and dog- feed, and two stout dogs that we had brought for this purpose would haul it without difficulty. With this rig he could almost certainly make a cabin every night whatever the weather and should be back at the Chan- delar village in five or six days. I was rejoiced to realize that Walter was entirely him- self again. Upon the scales at the store he weighed as much as he did before his sickness and I dismissed all anxiety about his condition. When I stepped out that night before going to bed I thought again that Coldfoot is one of the most pictur- esquely situated places I know. The little squat snow- FROM FOBT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 27 covered cabins were mostly dark and uninhabited, but the sharp white peaks around it glistened in the clear starlit night, a splendid aurora wreathed and twisted Itself about them, gleaming with soft opalescent greens and yellows, and a keen wind was blowing. Just so had I seen the place thirteen years before, on my first visit and the occasion came vividly back to me. The glistening peaks are outlying spurs of the mountains of the Arctic divide, the Endicotts, beyond which I had never hitherto penetrated. On this journey we hoped to flank them at their termination on the sea coast and afterwards to pass eastward along their northern aspect as now we should pass for awhile westward along their southern. So far our progress on the whole had been good; the Koyukuk river stretched before ua with no more snow upon it than the Chandelar had; two days of such ice- travel should take us to Settles and two more to the AUakaket, and I should be ahead of my schedule. A day's rest I had thought would not hurt Paul and I had settled with the roadhouse keeper before going to bed with such day included, but upon arising Paul decided to return at once. He was too shy, I think, to relish remaining with strangers in our absence, and was packed up and gone, with his modest equipage, before we left; a willing useful boy with a bnad happy grin and one that I wish might have had more chance. So Walter with six dogs and the sled, I with four and the toboggan— we launched upon the smooth ice of the river and made fine time for ten or twelve miles, a wind almost behind us, charged with drifting snow, urging us onward. Then we began to be troubled with overflow water and had much to do passing the Twelve-mile creek mouth where the river ice suffers successive inundations all the winter long. Should one reach these stretches just at the time when the cold has re-consolidated the surface, there is swift going with a wind behind ; the dogs have no work to do at all. Put at any of the intermediate stages, either of running water or of half-formed or thin ,1 28 A WINTER CIRCUIT ice, one is detained and bothered. Sometimes by keeping along the edge of the overflow and making wide detours one may stay upon solid footing, but at others there is nothing for it but to plunge right through. In such aqueous passages in cold weather a toboggan is a nui- sance; the water freezes on the bottom and along the edges until presently so much ice has accumulated that its progress is retarded. Then it must be upturned and the ice beaten off with the flat of the axe. It is not easy to remove it all, yet a little adherent ice doubles the labour of hauling when snow is reached again; and when the process must be repeated every mile or so much time and effort are consumed. The Koyukuk river in the region of the "canon" consists of a bend of wind-cleared or overflowed ice followed by a bend of snow-covered ice, and this alternation keeps up for many miles. At last, as it grew dusk, we emerged from the narrow wind- ings of the cafion region and were out upon the broad river again, and by dark were at the roadhouse halfway to Settles. Our host, who jessed by the name of "the Dynamite Dutchman," was not the owner of the house and had few claims to be considered a professional victualler. I do not think his nickname hinted at plots against muni- tion works or shipyards, but rather at some ludicrous incident connected with quartz mining. Wherever his sympathies lay, he, like most Teutons in Alaska, I think, had heeded the warning — possibly the more effective for its cmdeness — set up at every post-office in the land, to "keep his mouth shut" about the war, though loquacious enough in his broken and sometimes puzzling English on every other subject. Crowded into this roadhouse were two horse-freighters, bringing miners' supplies from Settles, the head of navi- gation, and two dog-mnshers, so that paucity of accom- - modation was added to indifference of table and the usual dirt and neglect. Some few years ago a land trail was out from Settles to Coldfoot which avoids this part of FROM FOET YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 29 the river altogether, and so soon as there is depth of snow enough for overland travel the river trail is aban- doned. So there is really no incentive to anyone to take much pains with this house. We awoke next morning to changed conditions ; two or three inches of new snow lay on the earth. And all day long it snowed and a drifting wind filled up the trail and sledding grew heavier and heavier. The toboggan be- came such a drag in the wet snow from the remains of yesterday's ice, lingering notwithstanding repeated beat- ings, that by and by we set it bodily on top of the sled and hitched the ten dogs to the double load with advan- tage. It took us five hours to make the eighteen miles to the next roadhouse, and here we stayed for lunch and took the toboggan into the house and thawed oil the ice in front of the stove. Here we for, ^'athered with an old-timer from the pre- Klondike days— there remain such yet in Alaska, but they grow very few— who knew Walter's father, the first white man who ever came to the Yukon seeking gold, and who spoke highly and interestingly of him. It always gave me pleasure that the boy should hear his father spoken well of— and indeed I have heard no one speak ill of him. Ogilvie in his Early Days on the yukon has much to say of Arthur Harper and his partners, McQueston and Mayo. He died in 1897 when Walter was only five years old. It had been wiser, I suppose, to have spent the night here, but we were resolved to reach Settles if possible, another eighteen or twenty miles away, and had already lingered longer than we should have done. Then began a dismal grind of seven hours. The day passed and it grew dark and the wind arose again. Soon it became ex- ceedingly difficult to detect the trail at all, yet, with the increasing snow, increasingly important. With a candle in a tin can— the best trail light all things considered- Walter was ahead peering and feeling for it for hours while I brought both loads along; starting one and then 80 A WINTEB CIRCUIT going back and starting the ether when he gave *he word to advance. Thus we plodded until we were ent.»r.raged by catching the loom of the cliffs below the John river month and knew that we were within a few miles of Bettles. In another honr dogs and men alike revived at the distant twinkling lights, and shortly thereafter we were at the roadhouse, the heaviest day's travel, so far, of the jonmey behind us. It was too heavy; dogs and men were weary; and I resolved to lie here a day. With the late start that so late arrival would permit we should not reach the Allakaket over the trails that lay before us in two days travel; with a day's rest and an early start we might do it. So we spent a ijuiet day of refreshment at Settles. Some supplies to be procured, some repairs to make to the sled, service for the few whites, and for the Kobuk Eskimos (attracted to this undesirable place of residence by the employment in freighting with dog-teams which it affords), occupied the day, which had its chief interest in the presence in the town of two families of northern Eskimo newly come across from a tributary of the Col- ville river to purchase ammunition and grub, who were never here before, or at any othf r post of white men in their lives, save once, a long time ago, at Point Barrow; and who were all nnbaptized. It was not until the eve- ning that I discovered them and I did my best to persuade them to accompany us to th>, Allakaket, where they could be instructed, offering them the hospitality of the mis- sior. But I did not succeed; there were those who awaited their return; and I had to content myself with such primary instruction as I could give them, with un- practiced interpretation (for their speech differs a little from the Eobuk vernacular of my interpreter) on this one occasion. Their presence whetted my appetite for our northern journey. Walter and I had an hour also, in the afternoon, wherein we finished the first reading of Hamlet. It was characteristic of his delicacy of mind that he should have FROM PORT YUKON TO K0TZE3UE SOUND 31 revolted at the occasional grossness which Shakespeare admits. "They say the Indian stories are vulgar, but there's nothing in any Indian story I ever heard more vulgar than that," said he with reference to Hamlet's coarse remarks to Ophelia in the play scene. "Well for boys' and giris' schools they have editions of Shake- speare and all the classic writers with the grossness left out; we call them 'Bowdlerized' editions; but there comes a tune when one prefers to have what an author wrote rather than what someone else thinks he should have written. So soon as a man is prepared to make first- hana acquaintance with literature he must be prepared w u <,.^'^^' *^"' °^"'^ ^^" "But," continued Walter, if Hamlet were in love with Oph^Ua why should lie msult her by saying things like that I" "There are P great many puzzling things in Hamlet," I said "that scholars and critics have been disputing about these two hundred years Was Hamlet in love with Ophelia or only pretend^g? Was he really mad or only feigning mad- ness I Then you must remember that three centuries ago gentlemen jested with ladies about things that would never be referred to in their presence nowadays by de- cent men." I did not trouble him with the theory that Shakespeare had carelessly transcribed the passage from an earher play in which Ophelia was a courtesan, which raises more difficulties than it solves. The subject came up agam and again as we ranged through the plays. Othello was read once only; I could not bring Walter to a re-reading because lago's continual ribaldry and ob- scenity were so offensive to him. "But don't you see that Shakespeare is making lago paint his own picture by what he puts in his mouthf Therein lies the art of the dramatist; we are nowhere told that lago is a low- minded beast who believes in no man's honou. and no woman's virtue; who cares for no one but himself and will use any base weapon for his own advancement and gratification-he is permitted to unfold his own charac- ter solely by what he says, and that makes the picture a «• A WINTER CIRCUIT thousand times more life-like and convincing." "It's so life-like," said Walter, "that I don't want to see or hear any more of him." Yet he could appreciate Othello's fine comparison of his changeless passion for revenge to "the Pontick sea, whose icy current and com- pulsive course ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on to the Propontick and the Hellespont." "And that is why," I said, "the British failed to force the Dardanelles and take Constantinople. Had there been ebb and flow in its waters the mines set afloat by the Turks would not have streamed down incessantly upon the war-ships." We went thence to a discussion of the many great rivers received by the Black Sea and the constant outflowing current they gave rise to, and were presently comparing the Black Sea with Bering's Sea, and the Danube with the Yukon. Thence we went back to Constantinople it- self, its incomparably strong and important situation and the long, long series of momentous events that have sprung and may yet spring therefrom. Thus our litera- ture lesson would become a geography lesson and that would develope into a history lesson, illustrating my favourite theme of the unity of all knowledge. " Except mathematics, ' ' said Walter, slyly. ' ' Except mathematics and a great many other things so far as I am concerned, ' ' I answered, "but that only shows my limitations and does not at all detract from the truth that all knowledge is connected and is essentially one." "Well," laughed Walter, " if all knowledge is connected, what is the connection, for instance, between Constantinople and chemistry I" "Questions like that are not always easy to answer," I said, "for the connection is not always on the surface, but that particular question is dead easy; Constantinople was preserved from the Turks for cen- turies by the Greek fire and fell at last into their hands by gunpowder." And that recalled to him the Henty book that dealt with the fall of Constantinople and he allowed the cogency of the connection. I do not in the least remember its name and it does not in the least i FROM PORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 83 matter; there are scores of them and they are not litera ture in any h.gh sense, though not withouflitcra^ merh • but they served an excellent good purpose for Walter TorrrtrretreTr^a"^^'^--^^ Zllf i'^" ""* ^'°"^^' ^^ ^"l' i' """«. though my diary of this journey contains many notes of Wahe^s stud.es and progress, but it illustrates the necessarily onted so far as I was responsible for it, snatchinir an hour here and there, now and then, but res'oS to7t Z day pass without doing a little work. He wrote a d^,^ as regularly as 1 did, and in a little red book he ke^ account of our expenses; for I had turned over to him tr """ ^'r*^ "" '^' '"""^y I b^-J provided for th" journey and he made all purchases and payments The for E. " *'' '^^PO-^bility I thought aU^e desirabte hou?s' thrLl^r' "^"^^ "J""^ '"^"^ «'''"1 of twelve tothl TnT^ Mf "'°'^' ^""^ ^^ '»'"^« *e thirty miles to he Indian village at the mouth of the South Fork quite exhausted, long after dark, having started W sight and we had to seek for it all day long. But that we followed a fresh track from a fish cache for the last ten miles we should not have reached the viUage at all An old nervous trouble in my shoulder that for years has accompamed excessive fatigue was so alarmingly acute that I began o doubt if I could stand a long continuance tTt *r"- Y'"*' ™'"'^'» " ^"t menthol bato Lr half an hour and the pain subsided under his sZn/ Tder S '"" ^'^P*' •'°* ' ^"-^^ '^^' " would tZ' Sn wnri' ''•""T*""""^' ^"'J '^'' *Ws attack had been worse than any before, there was no telling to what exacerbation it might rise There come times in the life of any man who turns |l'l 84 A WINTER CIRCUIT middle age when he realizes with surprise, but if he be in any way a wise man, with resignation, that he can no longer safely do the things he used to do; that he has no longer the reserves of strength and endurance— no longer the quick resilience of recuperation. The first of such occasions came to me when I was climbing Alaska's great mountain five years before, and I put away thence- forward the excessive strain of great altitudes ; this night was the second sharp reminder and I realized that long winter journeys with stress of weather and labour would soon also be things of the past. Meanwhile, did I hope to accomplish the project immediately before me, it was clearly my business to relieve myself of all unnecessary fatigue and I resolved that night to spare no assistance that it was within my means to obtain. Accordingly next morning I procured a native and his team to take part of onr load and accompany us the remaining thirty miles to the Allakaket. With this help we made the day's run, tired but not exhausted, and came to the glad wel- come and care and refreshment of the mission at dark. I have availed myself of several opportunities in pre- vious books of speaking of this remote, isolated mission station just north of the Arctic Circle, in the wilderness of the Koyukuk country; in this book I am hastening to the Arctic coast and am perhaps already overlong get- ting there; so I shall say no more than that the Saturday and Sunday at the Allakaket were very happy days, spent ministering to a kindly, docile people and to the two gentlewomen, a teacher and a nurse — the only white women, I suppose, in a circuit of an hundred miles— who serve them with such devotion and success. Yet while four or five hundred miles from the coast, we were already among the Eskimos, and henceforth should encounter few if any other natives. The mission here serves both Indians and Eskimos, now living in per- fect peace and friendship together after ages of hostility and distrust; an Indian village standing on one side of the river and an Eskimo village on the other, and the FROM FORT TCKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 35 rivers by which we should pass from this place, out of Koyukuk waters into Arctic Ocean waters and down to the sea, are occupied almost entirely by scattered inland fiSkimos. An enthusiastic amateur versifier, who does me the honour to say that his productions are inspired by what I have wnttcn, but who is not aware of the syllables that carry the accent in Alaskan names, sent mt hese lines: "Far up the lone Koyukuk, Oft mantled in deep snow, There docile folk learn daily The things they ought to know." His lines reminded me of the gentleman at a public dmner in New York who said to me, "Haven't you a place up there called N6m-el", to whom I was not quick enough to reply, " Yes, that's near my homy." hl/Jt-^ fortunate in finding that two of our mission- bred Eskmio boys were intending a journey to the Kobuk on a visit to relatives, and I made arrangement to meet their travelling expenses (which means, where we are now come, to provide the food) in return for their assist- ance on the trail; but however carefully a good start may be planned it is next to impossible to secure it when na- tives are included, especially should Sunday intervene I was not sorry that the delay on Monday, 26th Novem- ber, when we left the AUakaket, allowed me an hour or two in the schoolroom, for however hurried a visit it is incomplete and unsatisfactory unless it include the work of the school, but I was annoyed that our start at eleven in the mormng proved a false start. My sled and toboK- gan had been taken safely down the steep bank to the ice ot tHe river, making the awkward sharp turn of the trail just as soon as the ice was reached, but Oola, with a new large sled, well loaded, essaying the same, his dogs hav- ing reached the bottom and made the turn, the sled caught on a piece of rough ice and the jerk of the chang- I M A WINTER CIRCDIT ing direction was strong enough to break all the benches on one side of the sled and wreck it completely. Not only had another sled to be procured bat I was called upon to settle a dispute between Oola and the man from whom he had just purchased the broken sled, who was also its maker, as to whether some part of the pur- chase money should be refunded. The construction of the sled was too slight for its size, there was no doubt about that, but the only safe way to get a heavily-loaded sled down a steep bank with a bend in the trail at the bottom is to turn the dogs loose, let them go first (they will always follow the trail), and then shoot the free sled down the bank, allowing its momentum to carry it as far as it will in a straight course. Then the dogs can be brought back and attached. Walter, with his strength and his skill, prided himself on making such steep descents, dogs and all, trusting to his weight at the handlebars to swing the sled clear at the right mo- ment; but Oola, not as skilled, should not have attempted it. I divided the loss between the maker and the breaker of the sled and, another sled procured and lunch eaten at the mission, we started again. This incident gave further point to a reproof I had delivered on Sunday; to a danger that accompanies mission work among natives, wherever it be carried on. Here was a youth of twenty, mission-bred for ten years, well-grown, well-appearing, polite-spoken, with a fair English education and a good deal of general informa- tion, who had been used for a long time as Eskimo inter- preter. But he had never made a sled, or a pair of snow- shoes, or a canoe, in bis life, and was unpractised in the wilderness arts by which he must make a living unless he were to be dependent upon mission employment. What was true of him was true in lesser degree of other bright boys at the plEce, and I found the same tendency admitted — and deplored — not only at mission stations but at places where there was only a governmental school, along the coast. I make no doubt that it might be found FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 87 at miisioDs in Africa or the Piiilippines or wherever else education in the common sense of tuc term has been taken «hir"". " T^!'- ^' " '"" """o'"^"' that to a .ohool-teaoher school-leaming should assume an unrea! iTi'^'r"".?"""*'"? ^P°'""'"='" '* '« °«t unnatural tha adies of gentle rearing should fail for a time to see that he essential part of an Indian's education is training to make an Indian living. We are all of ns drilled °n statL'Tf t"""""^' *'' P''P""'"°"« "f «»- V rfou" states of the vanous nations of the world, are graded. t^ r, ;h°° ."P°° '"'"''"''■ °°* "P°° comparative Indus- ZX "' °f ' "P"" '^' percentage of criminals, but upon the percentage of illiterates, and in our lofty way we regard the people of Mexico and Russia as hoTe essly brutalized and degraded because in the ma^ and 1870 were said to have been won by the Prussian itaZT'. ^'r;.*.'"'" '•^ '""^ """J - entirely ee hand, had redoubled his eflforts for a generation and a half, and when in 1914 he laun-.aed the world war Prus ZrT *'"' T' *'>°™°S^W>- «choolmastered count.?, ever known. The complete defeat and downfall of th^ Prussian system, the astonishing collapse of swolS pnde and ambition ^ith which the war has ended, maj merfil I *'""?'"■ ' ^^' ^"'"''^ » J"^*^'- valuation of "reader. "mtv'LoM""*^' '",' '""^ ^P«"'°^ '"""^ «'«' '^e reader may not loom so large. But almost all edu- cated people of today are still saturated with the delusion !5 ma°nMnd ^^' """^'"^ "^^ ''"*^'"'"'' "'^ '^' ^"l^""'"' « J! '" r' T^ *" "^'"^ *^' «^'' ^^f*"* °f this prejudice even when its results are evident amongst primiUve peop e who must foL.w the exacting pursufts of ZS t^^ r " ^Zf^°'>^- ^ bright boy to whom the first antechambers of knowledge are opened would fain press further, and duller ones are continually urged by his example, fathers who would take their sons huntinjand trapping are reluctant to break the continuity of the 88 A WI^fTER CIRCUIT sohooling which they have been told ii bo important, though they theniBclvcg had it not. I declare that one «ometimei sympathizes with Jaoli Cade's arraignment of Lord Say; "Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the yonth of this realm in erecting a grammar school ; it will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that commonly talk about a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear." The wise teacher, the wise missionary, will not seek to keep boys at school who should be out In the woods serving their apprenticeship, but pride In u school is often too strong for the self-denying ordinance that would bereave it of its most creditable and promising pupils. I have felt the freer to make these animadversions in connection with one of our own missions in which I am especially interested, where the school moreover is our own and not a government school, and in connection with an Eskimo boy of whom I am personally fond, because I found the same situation at many other places where criticism might seem invidious. The danger is rec- ognized, and that is the first requisite towards averting it. I had told tlie assembled people on Sunday that I was much more ashamed of an Indian or an Eskimo youth who could not build a boat or a sled or make a pair of snowshoes or kill a moose or tend a trap-line, than of one who could not read or write. "Reading and writing are good things, and the other things the school .teaches are good things, and that is why we put the school here to teach them, but knowing how to make a living on the river or in the woods, winter and summer, is a very much better thing, a very much more important thing, and something that the school cannot teach and the fathers must. Let us have both if we can, but whatever happens don't let your boys grow up without learning to take care of themselves and of their wives and children by and by." The elders were much im- pressed and pleased, the younger not a little surprised, FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEnUE SOLND 39 and the old chief, Moses, came and thanked mo and said ho waa alwaya trying to tell his people the same thing We made one, or is it twof, false starts from the Alia- kaJcet, (I always linger at the Allakaket), but we got away at last aboat one in the afternoon and ran np the Alatna river by a portage r -o «„d on the iee, for Three and a half hours to "Bl k J .k'. Place," wkere were several Eskimo families wintering and fishing through the ice, with one of whom we took our lodging for the mght. It proved to be for three nights. When we left the mission with the thermometer at -36, already the coldest spell of our whole winter had begun, though wo knew It not. The thermometer stood at -49 when we went to bed, the next morning it stood at -56, the "n^ '•, ' """^ "■* "*"* «' -^' ""uch too cold for trav- elling If a man have any choice. Throughout the whole m erior of Alaska this winter of 1917-18 was one of the coldest on record. The mean temperatures for the months of December and January at the meteorological stations on the Yukon were lower than any previous means of those months in the twenty years during which records have been kept. These low temperatures did not extend to the coast, which has a distinct climate of its own, but we were still within the continental climate of the interior. The dwelling we shared was not a typical Eskimo dweUing; the country being well timbered it was built of logs; but It had distinctive Eskimo features, notably the window of seal-gut, the dim translucence of which did but sufficiently light the cabin around noon. That same window was just about as good a thermometer as my own registered instrument with its certificate from the Bureau of Standards at Washington, and it indicated the degree of cold by the thickness of the layer of hoar-frost which accumulated upon it. The old woman of the house would take a goose-wing and a piece of board and gather the frost from ,t periodically with much advantage to the Illumination of the cabin, and without stepping ontdoors it t 40 A WINTER CIRCUIT I: was possible to keep track of the intensity of the cold at any time by observing this window. Nothing that these people could do for our convenience and comfort was omitted. They kept plenty of wood and water on hand, they brought forth frozen fish and frozen ducks and geese; the old woman insisted on washing our dishes after every meal, and was scrupulous to do it in my way rather than her own ; the men would have made the out- doors fire and cooked our dog-feed had we allowed them. Morning and evening men, women and children gathered and sat, awaiting the arrival of my interpreter, who was lodgec! in another cabin, for the instruction I was glad of the opportunity to give. Although I began to be anxious at the delay, and was ever counting up the days that remained till Christmas and dividing their diminishing number into the approxi- mate distance to be travelled, I did not find the detention tedious. I should, of course, at any rate, have supported it with the philosophy of the Arctic, and there is no better region to teach a man patience, but the days passed so cosily and so busily occupied that I look back upon the stay at Black Jack's with pleasure. Outside, in the utter stillness of the "strong cold," lay the snow-sprinkled spruce forest right up to the river bank, save for the little clearing around the cabin, and from the bank stretched open expanse of frozen river, the jagged ice of the middle only partially smoothed over by snow. The slow coming and going of daylight, accompanied as it always is in low temperatures by zones of teilliant pure colour on the horizon fading far np into the sky, was reflected most delicately yet faithfully upon the river surface in all its changing tints. Yellow sunUght with- out heat suddenly struck that dead, opaque surface with a fairy's wand, and for an hour or so every snow-crystal sprang to life, gleaming and glancing like a diamond. At night a white splendour of waning moon and such a sparkling multiplicity of stars as is known, I think, only in these latitudes and this weather, were attended by a FROM FOBT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND « notable exuberance and vivacity of many-tinted aurora. Never did these strange radiances give me stronger im- pression of conscious exultation in tlie silence and the cold. Had the writer of the Benedidte been famiUar with the northern lights, I am sure he would have ad- dressed to them a special invitation to join his chorus of praise. We are told that the Arabs owed their re- markable proficiency in astronomy to the clearness of the desert skies; I think that the natives of the north would have surpassed them were not clear arctic skies always accompanied by a cold that forbids star-gazing. Our mild winter weather goes with leaden skies, and in sum- mer there are no stars at aU. But it is on our indoor occupations that I linger with chief pleasure of recollection. A dirty little hovel enough, no doubt, our lodging would be counted by my readers, yet with our robes and bedding thrown down in a comer on a pile of skins, a stool and a box to sit on, and a pocket acetylene lamp, it was comfortable and even commodious for study, and Walter displayed an eagerness to learn and a new-sharpened quickness of apprehension that made teaching him a delight. We were starting Macbeth; first I gave him a general sketch of the play and read an act aloud to him; then he read the same act aloud to me, and this, with its correction of mispronunciations, its assimilation of new words and thoughts, was always the most valuable part of our work. I marvel that reading aloud has fallen into educational disuse; there is simply no other exercise that can take its place. The dark and bloody tragedy made strong appeal to Walter, and its supernatural machinery of witches and apparitions called up remembrance of the old Indian stories with which his juvenile mind had been familiar, and thus there needed not the half-contemptuous, apologetic explanations which the average high-school teacher of EngUsh appends now- adays to his edition of the play. Our half-eduoated youths grow too wise to appreciate the classics of litera- ture, and turn eagerly to Popular Mechanics and The i ■Ml 42 A WmTEB CIRCUIT Scientific American, while the deep emotions of their dwindling souls remained untouched. From the weird sisters on the blasted heath was an easy transition when the reading was done to the tales of his childhood re- ferred to, and he told me how the children would gather in the firelight round some old woman and beg her for a story, and sit still for hours while she wound the in- terminable course of some piece of Indian folk-lore, so replete with delicious terrors that sometimes they were afraid to go home to bed. The dissimilarities which a new strange people present make first appeal to the ob- server; afterwards it is the underlying resemblances, and at last the fundamental identity, that most promi- nently stand out, and, in particular, the more I see of Indian and Eskimo children the more I am struck with the oneness of childhood the world over. Once grown reminiscent, Walter told me much more of his early recollections, and in the two or three nights at Black Jack's Place I gained a clearer and more intimate view of his very interesting early years than I had ever had before. When we h .d said our prayers and gone to bed, instead of reading myself to sleep with Gibbon as was my wont, I sat up again and wrote in some of the blank leaves of my diary what he had told me of himself. One prank amused me specially, as a pleasant variant of the "freshman" toe-pulling that used to prevail at the lesser colleges. In the warmth of suimner when the tent- flaps were raised for air, he and his companions would find a particularly tough piece of dried fish and tie it firmly to one end of a stout string of caribou hide, the other being attached to the great toe of a sleeping Indian. Presently some prowling dog would come along and bolt the piece of fish. On one occasion, lingering too long or laughing too loudly, Walter got a sound thrashing from his exasperated victim. On the morning of Thursday, 29th November, being Thanksgiving Day, the thermometer stood at —58, when we arose, but by noon had risen to — 53, and as a coinci- FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 43 dent fall of the aneroid barometer gave me reason to hope that the cold spell vras breaking, I decided to move, aiough but to another cabin some ten miles further on The run was very chUly and I had great trouble in keep- ing my feet warm and was rejoiced to see smoke issuing from the cabin when it came in sight. We found an old Eskimo fnend Sonoko Billy, who was making it his trap- ping headquarters this winter, a bright good-natured chap whom I was glad to see again, and the five of us made what cheer we could for Thanksgiving dinner with a stew of moose meat, dried vegetables, soup powder and beef extract, and th<^n said the service for the day The next day. Re. Andrew's Day, the last day of No- thTl2T 'J"" l^'t ''°"i^«"-«'"7 of my ordination to the priesthood. Making an altar of the grub box lit by wo candles in the darkness of early morning, I cele- brated the Holy Communiou before breakfast, and was happy to have two o Jimunicants, Walter and Oola to kneel and receive the sacrament with me arrStr/*^*"'-""' "P"" *•"" °''<^^'°°' '^''^ «"«t as rL^i! « T.v" "'y ^"''^' I ^J"*" "lot trouble the reader J sufSce ,t that the grimy cabin, one window of gut tPnW V ™'*^' '^'"'^'^ ^*°^« P'P«' *« <""»dles gnt- tenng m tin cans, and the natives of two different races beside me made not unfitting scene for the amiiversary i™rsn"esr '^^' "' ^'"^"^ ^^ "-- ^p-' '^ Wo had travelled, I suppose, some twenty-five miles mTh r '" t\' ^"'^'"^**' *^«' ^"^ ^« ""^de almost a much more The temperature was slowly and graduallv nsmg, as I had expected, but it was still cold wefther and there was a light air moving downsl .am that cut the face and rendered travelling unpleasant. All day the themometer stood around -35 to -38, the former being the reading at noon when we made a rousing fire on the 3^^?/ A "°"f'j """^ *' '""^-^ *^« '^^-Ji"? when at d.20 we found an old convenient camping place of Sonoko 44 A WINTBB CIRCUIT Billy's, with spruce brush already in place, and stopped for the night. Four pairs of hands made quick camping, the tent was soon up, the dogs tied at sufScient intervals to prevent fighting, a dry tree felled and split, a supply of ice chipped out of the river; and I was shortly cooking ' for the boys over the camp stove while they were cooking for the dogs at a great fire outdoors. There are two incidents noted in my diary for that day that are of interest, one pleasant and one painful. As we turned the bends of the river after leaving our lunch camp, we opened one that had a due north and south di- rection, and the sun's direct rays, growing more and more unaccustomed as the winter advanced and there- fore more and more welcome and delightful, fell full upon the little party. Walter was at the handlebars of our main sled, just ahead of me, and was wearing a cari- bou skin coat with a broad band of beadwork across the shoulders in the gay Indian fashion that he loved and that his graceful figure carried so well. As we turned into the sunshine and the light fell full upon his back, the greens and golds of the beadwork gleamed like the iri- descent wings of a beetle, and for half an hour or so I had a continual pleasure in watching its sheen. The sharp diamond sparkle of the snow crystals all around returning the sun's light, did but emphasize the softer lustre of the emerald and malachite, the turquoise and lapis lazuli and gold upon his shoulders. So devoid of colour is this country in winter (save for the tinting of the sky), so black and white is everything that the eye normally falls upon, that there is a keen pleasure in any bright colours, hard for outsiders to understand. The tiny opaque beads massed together in rich harmonious shades relieved and divided by gold and spread out in graceful flowing patterns, give beautiful bodies of colour. Beadwork I used to regard as barbarous, but in its best productions (and only its best is worth anything at all) it can be highly artistic and attractive and is akin to fine Venetian mosaic work in its effect. The art, of course, PROM POET YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 46 i« not indigenous. It is continually strange to find people who miagine It to be:-where did the beads come from until the white man brought themt Probably the only indigenous Indian decorative art was embroidery with porcupine quills stained with vegetable juices, and the best of that is skilful and beautiful also; but while be d- work began only with the importation of beads, for fifty or seventy-five years or more in the interior of Alaska It has been a distmctive native art. Those who judge it by some chance piece of cheap work offered to visitors at an Indian store on the Yukon may form very poor and very wrong opinion of its possibilities, but those who have seen its best productions will acknowledge that it has a beauty of its own. When upon a solid background of white beads a simple, symmetrical, conventional de- sign IS worked in well-selected shades of a colour, the vlTJT? °, °'°"'''' ^"^^ '^ «'"'^'°»' «nd I ™ con- vinced that only m such measure as the limitations of j mosaic work are observed, may artistic result in bead- bei fL°T T''- ^u'""'^'' *^« ^'"^^^^ had beads before the Indians, nowhere has any art of bead embroid- ery sprung up amongst them, and such Eskimo work as I have seen is merely a very poor imitation of Indian A book that might teem with interest and romance is No Zlv • T-""" *? "^"^ °° *■•« «°''j'^''t of beads. Not only is their antiquity enormnus, going back to E^tian and Phenician times and . et^hfng throuj aU subsequent history, but they have ev.r been in thetre front of man's progress in knowledge of tl.e world. They oTr/^'T^^'""* '^'"^ adventurer who opened inter- course with new, prmiitive people, as his chief medium rll^t T .r°f/''^ "'"^' "P'' ™d peacocks, th^ rarest and costliest furs, even human flesh itself, cargoes of slaves, robust men, beautiful women and children have been purchased with them. They have traveUed from hand to hand over whole continents far aheld of any explorer, and form no inconsiderable factor in the 46 A WINTEB CIRCUIT i I long romance of trade. Their very name is redolent of anchorites in the desert, of monks in cloistered cells, of wandering Buddhist priests and lamas in the mountains of Thibet, for the word "bead" means simply a prayer. Here is a bead that I take from a drawer in my desk and set before me as I write; a large, cylindrical piece of blue glass, pierced through the centre and dulled with constant wear. It was the labret, or lip ornament, of an aged Eskimo from the Colville river, who died at the Al- lakaket some years ago, and it had been the chief per- sonal treasure, not only of himself but of his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather, as he told us. No price whatever would induce him to part with it, though while living at the mission he never wore it, and it is interesting that Beechey in 1826 found the same im- possibility of purchasing just such large blue beads used as labrets, and conjectured therefrom that they were insignia of rank. (Vol. I, p. 458.) I counted up that its known history must extend well over a century and prob- ably half as much again, and thus go back to a time long before any white man had touched the north of Alaska. It probably reached the coast by barter with the natives of Siberia, had been procured by them from Cossack traders, and ultimately came from some Venetian glass blower, perhaps of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Nay, for aught I know it may have been brought from Venice by Marco Polo himself, who was the first to tell the world of the Asiatic hyperboreans, their dog-sleds and reindeer-sleds, for a skip of four hundred years is a little thing in the history of indestructible glass. Could lifeless objects acquire taint or tincture of human per- sonality by long, intimate association, surely this bead, afBated by every breath of four generations of Eskimos, should carry something of the spii-it of that brave and sturdy race. See how far Walter's beads glistening in the sunlight have carried met The imagination is prone to vagrancy as one trots along, hour after hour, at the handlebars FROM POST YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 47 of the sled, for the mind must occupy itself in one way or another. Presently the brief sunlight fades, the long, slow twilight begins, the dead black and white reassert themselves, and shortly before we come to our evening halt there la a disturbance amidst the smooth snow ahead, a httle off the trail, a jumping and scuffling that excite the dogs to redouble their pace. When the sleds are stopped and the dogs controlled with the whips, two of us approach and find a lynx alive in a steel trap and notice that the leg caught within the juws of the trap has been gna.ved almost in two. The kg was, of course, fro- zen; the pressure of the steel had stopped all circulation of the blood in it, and in our winter temperatures an inert limb does not long retain vitaUty, so there was no pain in the gnawing. But the lyns would have endeav- oured to free himself in the same way had its leg not been frozen; trappers all tell me that. Often it is suc- cessful; a trapper will find no more than the leg of a lynx in his trap, and may even catch the same lynx again in the same trap by another leg. The gnawed stump seems to heal up perfectly and I am assured that sometimes a three-legged lynx will live a long time and thrive. It is a ghastly business at best, this trapping, and I had rather make my living chopping steamboat wood than follow it Most of the animals caught in the cold weather freeze to death after exhausting themselves in ineffectual efforts to escape; some are attacked in their defenceless state by other animals and killed and eaten; or have their eyes picked out by the ravens and are then torn to pieces and devoured. A large percentage of all trapped animals bring no profit to the trapper, especially if he have a long trap hue and his visits therefore be not very frequent I am not denying the legitimacy of the occupation— I wear a marten-skin cap myself-but am only expressing my own distaste for it. It brings up the whole subject ot the right to inflict pain upon the animals, and I hold that man has that right, but I am glad that it does not faU to me to do it for a livelihood. Athlanuk took his 22 i 48 A WINTER CIRCUIT I' rifle and shot the lynx through the head and presently hung him up on a driftwood pole where 86n6ko Billy would find him and add a fifteen-dollar pelt to his win- ter's catch. Here, if rest and supper were not so dose at hand, and we newly returned from a long excursus, the imagination might again take flight. Furs are as potent a wand as beads to open the chambers of thought, and besides their power of association they constitute no insignificant part in value of the actual trade of the world. What is the early history of Canada and the United States but a his- tory of the fur trade t From emperors and kings who wore them as robes of state, from the heralds who set them in armorial bearings as emblems of dignity, down to the war-millionaires who have made the price of them soar today so that fox and lynx and marten bring ten times what they did a few years ago, they have al- ways been an object of desire to luxury and pride. But I have wondered whether the fashionable women who flaunt the animal's skin after it has been made "soft and smooth and sleek, and meet For Broadway or for Eegent Street," as Oliver Herford writes,— not with the legiti- mate purpose of warmth and protection, or the prepos- terous fashion of summer furs would never have been introduced— but merely for purpose of ostentation, ever think upon the torturos that the procuring of it in- volves. I am of opinion that there would be something to be said in favour of sumptuary laws if there were any possibility of executing them. Having travelled some forty-five miles up the Alatna river, we knew that the spot was now not far distant where we must leave the river to strike across country. Oola and Athlannk had made the journey within a year or two; my own single excursion into these parts was twelve years before, so that I depended upon them to recognize the landmarks that indicated the beginning of the portage. Within a couple of hours' run the next morning they found the place and we left the ice for the 1 FROM FOET YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 49 forty miles or bo of rough, broken country that lay be- tween us and the Kobuk river, malting immediately a steady gradual rise of several hundred feet. Only a few mches of snow covered the inequalities of the surface, the recent Koynkuk snows not having extended hither; there had been no previous passage of the winter; the trail we must discover by such ancient blazes on trees, such slight and partial clearing of brush here and there, as travellers of other winters had left behind them. The main direction, however, was plain; a wide gap between the mountains to the right hand and to the left, between those forming the watershed between the upper Alatna and the Kobuk, and those forming the watershed between the Hogatzatna and the Kobuk, was our open highway, and striking almost due west we would be sure to reach the Kobuk. The trail, however, could we keep it, would advantage as by avoiding dense brush and impossibly steep gullies ; by leading us to such lakes and stream-beds as would afford easiest progress. We covered, I think, no more than ten miles of that portage, winding about through the scrub timber, essay- ing first one opening and then another, until it was grown too dark to detest the old, discoloured blazes, and we made camp. That day was the Ist December, and by my programme of itinerary I should already be on the Kobuk river. The rapidly shortening days were ren- dered yet shorter for us on this portage in that we needed a good light to travel at all; we could not start until day was well come nor continue after it began to be spent. With a plain trail one may travel early and late, but our present search for signs of the road denied us both. My chief recollection of this portage journey of forty or fifty miles is of pleasant noon rests, with great roar- ing bonfires and piles of spruce boughs to sit upon, of bacon eaten sizzling just off the frying-pan— the only way I can eat it at all,— of beans (previously boiled and then frozen) heated with butter and sprinkled with grated cheese and eaten piping hot. My boys had tre- k^'i so A WINTEE CIRCUIT mendoas appetites and scorned the thermoi bottle Innoh to which Walter and I were accustomed. They would top off a meal like this with crackers spreac* thick with butter and jam, and a can of the latter would serve for no more than one occasion. We found ourselves indeed joining them with zest; the winter trail makes one al- ways keen set. Four pairs of hands made all the work light and both men and dogs lost nothing, I think, by rest and substantial food in the middle of the day, but I was careful that no more than an hour be thus spent, the brief daylight was too precious. Natives generally have no notion of the use of one kind of food as a relish or condiment to another. I well remember the native boy of my first winter journey falling upon our one can of pre- serves with a spoon and remarking "Strawb'y jam is de onlies jam dey isl" When it is gone it is gone "and there's an end on't"; so long as it lasts it is just a can of food, no more to bo spread thin than if it were a can of pork and beans. This is why it is difficult to stock a grub box for natives and whites at the same time. My two Eskimo boys, brothers, were helpful and will- ing on the trail and gentle and polite in camp, and it was a pleasure to have them with us. Under ordinary cir- cumstances I should have taken pleasure in attempting some slight addition to their education as we journeyed, but the exigencies of Walter's college preparation left no leisure. I was gratified, however, that at our evening service one of them was able to read aloud with intelli- gence the first lesson for the day, and the other, the sec- ond, and to find, in both of them, some understanding and appreciation of what they read. The Bible was their chief, almost their only, literature, and, after all, where will a nobler, a wider or more varied body of literature be found within one volume I They had grown up at the mission, the family having come to the place when it was established and remained there ever since, and while the elder had neglected his wood-craft and snow-craft for his studies, as I have intimated, for which the mission PROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 61 was as mnoh to blame as he, the younger bad broken •way in greater degree and wag fairly well accomplished. The teaching at this mission has always been earnest and painstaking; an unusual series of cultivated and devoted women has had charge of it, and, such slight criticism ai I have felt free to make notwithstandinfr, it hag been a centre of sweetness and light for a remote neglected re- gion, and the whole condition of native life therein has been modified and meliorated by it, let who will be the judge. With Walter beside me, however, past-master as he was of all the skill of the woods and the trail, I could never admit that the neglect of native arts was necessary to advancement in book-education; the two can go on and must go on side by side, and if either be neg. lected no one with the good of the natives at heart will maintain that it should be the former. We reached the Kobuk at midday of the 4th December, three days behind my schedule; the latter half of the portage journey having been mainly on lakes and streams draining into that river; and crossing its broad surface immediately to the north bank we found there a tine old camping place, evidently, from rude inscriptions, the site of a considerable hunting camp of the previous Septem- ber. Two lop-sticks spoke to me of the presence in that party of someone from the Mackenzie country, for the practice of stripping a tall tree of all but its topmost crown of branches to mark a site or commemorate an event, is common on the Canadian side but almost un- known on the Alaskan side of the boundary; and so, on enquiry later, appeared. A glorious fire and a good lunch, the raising of our spirits by the completion of one more stretch of our journey , the prospect of quick travel on the smooth surface of the river— for the smaU quan- tity of snow that, so far, had fallen this winter was now become a great advantage to us again— all helped to make this noon camp notable and enjoyable, to which, also, mild and still weather contributed in no small degree. 83 A WINTER CIRCUIT Aorois the whole portage there wai no riding at all; we were all on foot all the way. Now there was oppor- tunity to jump on the sled from time to time without stopping the teams, and becanso our dress had been ao- oommodated to the more active travel and one does not while riding immediate'.^ realize how cold the extremi- ties are growing, we all bocamo miserably chilled towards evening. Stopping to add a sweater to my clothing, beating my bands against my breast and stamping my feet, I looked back some distance to see Oola and Athla- nnk similarly employed, and we all ran or trotted for several miles before warmth was restored. Moreover, the higher ground of a portage is always warmer than the low level of a river bed, besides being more sheltered from moving air. Wo had an habitation as goal that night, and so ran on well after dark, making twenty miles, I judge, after noon, and at last reached the old igloo, not then occupied but evidently a native trapper's headquarters, which is called " Ok-ko-thi-a-ra-wik," "the beaver hnnting-place." This day's run carried us past the mouth of the small stream which drains Lake Selby, one of the considerable lakes of this region, and this lake, while not in sight from the river, is but a few miles off and calls to mind Stoney 's explorations of the Kobuk in the years 1883 and 1886. While the exploration of most of the interior of Alaska, the tracing of the course of the Tanana, the Koyukuk, the Copper river, the Sushitna, and, in part, the Kus- kokwim, was performed by officers of the United States Army, it happened that the early reconnaissances of this region, and the first mapping of the Kobuk, the Noatak and the Selawik rivers, oil falling into Kotzebue Sound, were done by naval detachments, and it is interesting to note that it so happened by accident. Merely noticing the early reconnaissance of Captain Bedford Pim of the Franklin search parties, whose well- known journey was southward from Kotzebue Sound to the Yukon, it is the name of Lieut. Stoney that must ! ! PROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEUUE SOUND 53 •Iway* bead the utory of the exploration to the north- ward and webtward of this ri.(rion;-iind it happened thna. In 1881 the Rodgera wag despatched to seek for the Jeatmettc, the ill-fated vessel which Mr. Gordon Ben- nett Bent under De Long in nn attempt to rcacli the North Polo by way of Bering Sea. The Itodflcrs, after vainly iearching Wrangell and Herald Islnmls and the Siberian coast, was accidentally burned in St. Lawrence Bay I, ml the ship's company was saved from 8tar\'ation by th" kindni "1 ,? Kskimos. Two years later Lieut. Stent y, ono nf !li officers of the Rodijfrs, was sent wilh pr.-, Bts f-on the United States government to ••i"ac rn*ivf>, .,ii.\ ' k mission accomplished in the rov- onu. cut, or (:o,ciiii. je left that vessel to make her fur- ther CI 'Iso to (he n. rth, and while he awaited her return grati.iod V\n dvsire to search for a large river reported by Capt.-m I;iv ch'^y more than fifty years before as fall- ing ill", llcthani'.s Inlet. Stouey had no more than time to verify the report on this occasion, but induced the secretary of the navy to send h'm back next year with a small schooner and a steam launch to prosecute his discoveries, and upon bis return from a successful journey up the Kobuk as far as this lake, which he named, induced the navy depart- ment to send him once more, this time with a wintering party, upon which occasion— the winter of 1885-86— the various members of his party made extensive journeys and the country between the Yukon and KotEebuo Sound and the northern ocean was pretty well explored. So little real interest was there in the matter in govern- ment circles, however, that Stoney's report, after being ordered printed by Congress, was lost for ten years and, so far as I know, never has been found. In 1900, through the Naval Institute at Annapolis, Stoney published an account himself. Stoney's name is as closely associated with this region as Allen is with the Tanana and the Koyukuk. The 54 A WINTER CIRCUIT M names of most of the tributaries are his: the Reed is named for one of his companions, the Ambler for the surgeon ol the Jeannette, who died in the Lena delta. Lakes Selby and Walker, and the large Lake Chandler at the head of one of the branches of the Colville, are his names ; the Chipp river which flows into the Arctic Ocean a little east of Point Barrow was named by him for one of the officers who perished on the Jeannette expedi- tion. Perhaps his most important geographical dis- covery is that of Lake Chandler, for in the region just south of it the Kobuk, the Alatna, the Noatak, the John, and one branch of the Colville, all head together. The map of this whole region of interlocking drainages came into existence from his labours. But his two most conspicuous names on the ordinary map, by an odd chance, are of no importance whatever : the existence of one of them, "Zane Pass," I have heard denied more than once in the position in which he places it, and, at any rate, there are many easy passes from the Kobuk to the Koyukuk, and the other, "Fort Cosmos," has certainly today no existence at all. It was simply Stoney's headquarters camp, named for a club in San Francisco. Lieut. Stc-er doubtless did excellent work, and his surveys are notable as the first instrumental surveys made in interior Alaska, but I do not think he belongs in the front rank of our explorers, with W. H. Dall and Lieut. Allen. His narrati.e is very bald; though per- haps the original draft that was lost in Washington was more interesting; and some of his observations are as ill-founded as they are positive. Here is his deliverance upon the malamute dog: "they obey tolerably well through fear and not affection, for there is no affection in any Eskimo dog's nature." As my mind runs back over the names of my pet malamutes, as I go to the door and whistle the reigning favourite— a dog, as it happens, from that very region— and he bounds up and muzzles against my face and nibbles at my ear, I smile at our ill PROM FOET YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 55 naval lieutenant's pronouncement. Let ns be thankful that his determined attempt to change the name of the Kobnk river to the "Putnam" was a failure. Yet am I glad that the name of Charles Flint Putnam has found place in Alaska without removing an important native name. It has been put upon a peak of an island of the Alexander archipelago, and there commemorates an of- ficer of the Rodgers who was carried out to sea on an ice-floe and perished, in 1880, even if there it does not commemorate Stoney's loyal devotion to an unfortunate brother oflSeer's memory. The travelling was now rapid, though cold river-bot- tom winds rendered it none too pleasant. We made up for lost time on the smooth ice of the Kobuk with its light sprinkling of snow. Here is another trapping note in my diaiy that belongs to the region of the river; we came across a fine fox frantically strug8;ling in a trap. As Walter approached with his .22 to shoot it through the head, it seized the trap in its teeth, and when it was dead the poor little beast's tongue was frozen to the steel of the trap. There is Something very pitiful to me about the whole business. The skin of the fox is a beautiful pelt, and this was a handsome fellow. The vagaries of fashion have set fox as the favourite fur just now and, as I write, I hear of a cross-fox pelt that would have brought ten or twelve dollars five yoars ago bringing upwards of an hundred, and I wonder to what greater height folly and extravagance will go. With such prices as stimulus, fur trapping will be pushed so intensively that in a little while the whole north will be utterly stripped and the animals will be exterminated. Even the musk-rats that used to sell for ten cents apiece are now brinsing $1.50. Easily as they are caught, every lake in Alaska will be cleared of them. When we left our night quarters of Wednesday the 5th December, a little group of two or three Eskimo dwellings where we were made very comfortable and welcome, Walter's team, instead of being in advance, f 56 A WINTER CIRCUIT [|: [ got away last, and instead of catching np and passing Qs, lagged further and further beh^d. At last we stopped and waited to discover what was the matter, and when he approached we found that one of his dogs, in- stead of working in liis harness, was bting hauled on top of the sled. There had been much barking and disturb- ance of dogs during the night, but since all our teams were stoutly chained I had not worried about it. Now it appeared that one of our dogs had broken loose and had been attacked and badly torn by the native dogs of the place. At the noon stop it was evident that the dog would not live, and Walter made ready to shoot him, but even as the dog was taken off the sled to lead away, he died and the merciful shot was rendered unnecessary. It is difficult these dark and cold evenings and mornings to make sufficiently sure that the dogs are safely chained. The snow clogs the snaps, the metal itself becomes brit- tle in low temperatures and it had been 36 deg. below zero that night, one's fingers fumble in gloves, and yet the naked hand must be but very sparingly in contact with metal or there will be frostbite. Do what one will, accidents like this are likely to happen. I was sorry we lost "Moose," who was a good, hard-working dog, but 1 looked forward to supplying his place with a fine mala- mute when we reached the coast. That night we stayed at another Eskimo hut, and the occupant thereof, finding himself sleepless during the small hours of the morning, relieved the tedium of his vigil by breaking into a doleful wailing Eskimo song. When my remonstrance induced him to cease, some grave domestic mishap in a family of small pups provoked another prolonged disturbance. Children and pups are the most privileged members of an Eskimo household; if they do not cease howling or whining of their own free will, they simply keep on; no one tries to make them atop or even tells them to stop; they howl or whine tkemselves to sleep ultimately. A couple of hours next morning brought us to Shnng- PEOM FOBT YUKON TO KOTZEBUB SOUND 57 nak, the considerable village that one thinks of as a hclf- way station in a journey down the Kobuk, though in distance it is much less than that, intending to spend but the rest of the dry there. The urging of the schoolmaster and many of the natives of the place, however, overrode my intent and we lay there during Saturday and Sunday as well, the more willingly that the good travelling had brought u« up to our itinerary again and the prospect of reaching Point Hope for Christmas seemed reasonably secure. Here was a man, school-teacher, postmaster, agricul- turist, general superintendent of native affairs, who with his wife and children had lived here for several years and at other Eskimo points several more. Of more" edu- cation along some lines than others, he secmod specially proficient in mathematics and astronomy, and he had taken advantage of a favourable situatio7i to produce what I had never seen in my life before, a «ef uf genuine photographs of the aurora borealis. Postcard pictures of the aurora may indeed be bought at Dawson f>nd Whitehorse, but they are produced to supply a tourist demand and are admittedly "faked." I had read that the thing had actually been done and had seen a seriet reproduced in one of the scientific magazines, but I think I had lingering doubts. The latest books of Polar ex- ploration, opulent beyond example with the results of the most expert photography, both in black and white and in natural colours,— I refer to Scott's and Shackle ton's and Mawson's sumptuous volumes. — although re- plete with observations of the aurora, have no attempt at photographic representation thereof. I femembered that Mr. Frederick Jackson during hi.s three years in Franz Josef Land attempted again and again to secure negatives of the most brilliant displays without result, and I had myself made many fruitless attempts. But 1 had not made enough, nor had Mr. Jackson. Here was an enthusiastic amateur who would not be denied; who tried a new combination of diaphragm and length of ex- I it 58 A WINTEB CIRCUIT posnre after every failure, and kept at it until he suc- ceeded. He had a dozen or more really good negatives, besides several score of poor ones, all in their natural state, quite untouched, as I determined with a magnify- ing glass, and he showed me with pride a letter from the director of the Smithsonian Institute warmly commend- ing his work, asking for more specimens and offering assistance in the matter of apparatus should it be de- sired. The fascinating problem of auroral photography, he told me, when once a proper exposure had been arrived at, is "Will the arch or the streamers hold steady long enough to make an impression on the plate?" The light is very faint. In the darkness of the midnight sky it may seem brilliant, but almost always any stars that are visible at all are visible through it. There must there- fore be "a continuance in one stay" of sufficient dura- tion for the light to affect the silver salts of the plate, or, howpvfr brilliant the appearance, there will be no photo- graph. Now, nc.\t to luminosity itself, the special char- acteristic of the aurora is its whimsical eccentricity of movement. It darts and flashes. While you arc regard- ing it in one quarter of tlic heavens, suddenly it makes ite appearance in another; while you are adjusting your camera to an exhibition near the horizon, behold it has climbed to the zenith. Yet now and then one holds steady long enough to bo ph(jtogriiphcd if a man will but have the patience to be continually disappointed and yet not despair. Consider, too, that photographing the aurora is, un- avoidably, an outdoor business. I suppose that it could be done through large windows of glass that should bo optically perfect planes, but our windows in the north are small and the glass of the cheap, distorting kind, to say nothing of the frost that commonly accumulates upon them. And the clear skies that afford the only oppor- tunity are almost always accompanied by extreme cold. Once at a dinner following an address, I was asked by a PROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 59 college professor if I would not carry back to the north with me a bulky instrument for spectroscopic analysis, haul it aronnd all the winter in my sled and endeavour to discover whether the lines of a certain element were present in the auroral light or not. He was so naively unaware of the conditions under which such an investi- gation must be pursued, and of the utter impracticability of the whole proposal, that I was not even flattered at my supposed capacity for it, and said no more than that I was sorry that I must decline. I remember that he had produced or embraced a theory of the cause of the aurora which depended in some way upon the fact that the most brilliant displays almost always precede midnight, just as Sir John Franklin thought that his observations in- dictated a greater frequency during the waning moon, neither of which beliefs has any foundation as far as my own observation goes. It is dangerous to generalise upon insufficient particulars. It has been mentioned that the situation at Shungnak was specially favourable for observation of the aurora. Due south from the place the mountains break down en- tirely into a broad level gap, through which, doubtless, at one time a glacier flowed, for the banks of the river in the neighbourhood are of solid ice only lightly covered with humus and moss. With the smooth river surface for an immediate foreground and this gap giving free scope down to the distant horizon, the photographer com- manded the skies as few spots that I know would have enabled him to do. The reader may imagine this man, his day's work done, taking advantage of any night in wliich the north- em lights were active, setting up his camera, turning it to right and left, upwards and downwards, "lo here" and "lo there" as the dancing radiances mock him, wait- ing and watching hour after hour in the cold, night after night, eagerly developing his rare exposures, accumulat- ing failure upon failure, and at length succeeding; and then prosecuting his success with renewed zeal and in- 60 A WINTER CIRCUIT terest until he bad secured his collection of photographs. There is to my mind something very admirable about this patient and resolute devotion. Naturally I put to him the query about the sound that some have maintained accompanies certain sweeping movements of the aurora, because his lonely, silent vigils must have given excellent opportunities for hearing it, if such sound there ever be, and I was not surprised at his decided negative. For years I have had an interest in this matter, born of a heated controversy I was pres- ent at soon after coming to Alaska. I have tried to keep an open mind, listening intently many and many a time, winter after winter, on the bank of the Yukon, in still, cold weather, when the heavens were alive with the charging squadrons of the northern lights, sometimes so swift and so enormous in their sweep across the whole firmament that it seemed as though in all reason there •must be some resultant sound — ^but there was not the slightest. Then in the course of the re-reading of some scores of Arctic books, I began to note down the testi- mony of their authors, pro and con. I traced the begin- ning of what I am bold enough to call this auricular de- lusion to Samuel Hearne, who in his famous journey to the Coppermine river in 1771 says, "I can positively af- firm that in still nights I have frequently heard them (i. e. the northern lights) make a rustling and cracking noise like the waving of a large flag in a fresh gale of wind." • Now although Hearne 's bona fides has been ques- tioned and his astronomical observations cannot be de- fended, I am very loath to cast any further discredit upon a gentle and unassuming character who has pro- duced one of tv.j best narratives of the northern wilds. Indeed I would rather ^ enture the suggestion, in defence of what has been called the deliberate untruth of his •Hearnf'B Joumeit to tht Northern OceMit: Chatnplain Society edition, p. 236, admirably edited by J. B. Tyrreli, the only man ^fbo has ever croued the country doHrribod by Hearne from that day to this. FROM PORT YUKON TO KOTZEBDE SOUND 61 statement, that he saw the sun at midnight at the Bloody Falls on the 15th July, that by an nnnsual high refrac- tion it may have been a fact. At Fort Yukon, which is in 66° 34', I have seen the midnight sun on the 5th July by standing on a fence post, and as the Bloody Falls are more than a degree further to tha north, I think he may possibly have seen the midnight sun ten days later. De Long records an extraordinary refraction by which the Jeamette's people saw the sun on the 9th November, al- though it had altogether disappeared from their latitude on 6th November. Thomas Simpson, whose narrative ranks little below Heame's in my esteem, quotes one of his companions (Retch) Hs having distinctly heard the aurora, and adds "I can therefore no longer entertain any doubt of a fact uniformly asserted by the natives, insisted on by Heame, by my friend Mr. Deaae, and by many of the oldest resi- dents in the fur countries, though I have not had the good fortune to hear it myself." This is all the first- hand evidence I have been able to procure on the affirm- ative. The records of the polar voyages lean much to the other side, from the earliest to the latest. I have a long list of extracts, but it is not worth adducing them, for the matter seemed to be definitely settled by what I read in David Thompson's Narrative of His Explorations in Western America." When wintering at Reindeer Lake in what is now Northern Saskatchewan, in 1795, he tried an ex- periment which seems to me quite coiiclnsive. His com- panions declared that they heard a sound accompanying the rapid movements of a very brilliant auroral display, •Champlain Sooiriy. Toronto, lf)I«. p. 15 If the Socirty bad done nothing beyond recovering and puhlishing this long and mo.t valuable manuetript narrative of journeys and surveys from 17S4 to 1812 it would have jii»tiHed its exiBt.nee. It is said that Washington Irving tried to »i-ur,- the manu«Tipt for use in writing his Astoria hut would not pav enough to warrant i„ «le The ,u.o..m,>li.h,.d editor of this voliiie' ,r. B. Tyrrell who also edited Ilearne, i,i,n»,.|f a noted wrvevor ud explorer, ealls Thompso. " one of the world's greatest gi^ographers," lai I think, after a careful nading of it, with justice iii 62 A WINTER CIHCT'TT 10 be blindfolded thorn by turns and they became gensible that tbey did not hear the motion when they conld no longer see it, though when the bandages were removed they thought they heard it again. It is an experiment that anyone who thinks he hears sound accompanying this phenomenon (and many people so think) may try for himself, and I believe that the result will in every case be the same. At all events Mils experiment has seemed so decisive to me ever since I had the good for- tune to secure a copy of Thompson that I have dismissed the thing from my mind as any longer a moot question, and, as I said, am emboldened to set down the sound as a delusion of the ear. Let me describe, in concluding this digression, how very nearly I once came to hearing the sound of the aurora. I was standing one cold, still night on the vivcr bank, with the wide stretch of the frozen Yukon before me, gazing at a majestic draped aurora which was rapidly unfolding its fringed curtains across the skies and gath- ering them up again, advancing towards mc and reced- ing, dropping towards the earth and rising again. And just as one of its sweeps approached nearer to me than ever before, I heard a soft distinct sound, not like the rustling of silk but liko a iKvp suspiration. I was startled and surprised. Had I then been wrong all these years t Was there after all a sound accompanying the anroraT Again and again the curtain approached without sonnd, though it did not approach a^nin so closely as when I had heard the sound. Still standing, intently listening, again I heard the prolonged sigh-like sound, but this time not coinciding with a movement of the aurora at all. I looked eagerly about mc for a source from which it could have arisen, and presently, hidden by a bush, I saw a sleeping dog, who, whether or not he "urged in dreams the forest race" like the stag-hounds in Brank- some Hall, was from time to time emitting deep breath- ings, once of which had happened to coincide with a specially near approach of the auroral curtain. FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 63 Mr. Sickler had been intelligently active in other ways; he had made a star map of the nortliern heavtns, show- ing those constellations that appear above the Arctic Circle; he had gathered some valuable data regarding the migrations of the inland Eskimos who occupy the Ko- buk, and had satisfied himself that the Kobuk used to be occupied by Indians whom the Eskimos drove out. Wal- ter and I, knowing pretty well the distance we had cov- crcd by the route we had followed, had discussed how far we had come in a straight line. Shungnak being al- most m the same latitude as Fort Yukon, the distance depended upon the value of a degree of longitude in the neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle, and I found myself unable to determine that value. This schoolteacher, however, quickly worked it out with a pencil and paper at about twenty-eight miles, as I recall his figures, and when, later, I had an opportunity of consulting Trnut- wem's tables, I found his result correct. It is not quite as easy a problem as perhaps it looks. His Eskimo-migration enquiries had brought him into communication with another section of the Smithsonian Institution, and the insatiable Custodian of the Charnel House, boasting of his grisly treasures, had urgently pleaded for more skulls. There was a picture in my juvenile Pilgrim's Progress (which must have been ad- mirably illustrated from (he impressions it left) of Giant Despair, lurking at the gate of Doubting Castle, with a great pile of human skulls beside him, picked cIcb'; So do I picture this sexton-scientist of the Smiths": i«r. add ing to his piles as a miser to his bags of moneys ■'lout ing o\>r them and counting them again and as'ain Of if my r«^der resent the extravagance of this eon.u:.nu,a he must allow me the lines of the Ingoldsby Lege.rh: "And thus of their owner to speak began As he ordered you home in haste, No doubt he'a a highly rcRppotablc man But I can't say much fur his taste I" i i 64 A WINTER CIRCUIT ill? [! I wish that a law might be made that the iknlU of all persons who hnd engaged in this ghoulish body-snatching together with the skulls of their sister* and their cousins and their aunts, should, upon their decease, be "care- fully boiled to remove all the flesh" (as the circular of instructions ran) and then added to the museum collections! So might "tho punishment fit the crime," and professors of the "dismal science" of anthro- pology be reminded that even Eskimos have naturu. feelings. While we were at Sbungnak the monthly mail came, and it brought Mr. Sicklor a letter, which be handed to me to read. It was from one of bis official superiors, in reply to an enquiry made several months before, as to whether be would be retained at Sbungnak for another year; a not unnatural enquiry for a man with a wife and family. The letter said, curtly and harshly enough, that the writer could not answer that question at present, but that if Mr. Sickler were retained it would not be because he had made photographs of the aurora. 'What I am interested in," the letter continued, "is the development of agriculture in the Kobuk valley." I knew the official who wrote the letter (he is not always so harsh and curt) and I asked Mr. Sickler, who was dejected by it, if he would mind my answering it. Iloving received permis- sion I wrote that I had been feasting upon Mr. Sickler 's vegetables, his carrots and turnips, his potatoes and cab- bages ; that so little snow was on the ground that I was able to see for myself with surprise how extensively gar- dening operations bad been carried on in the village dur- ing the previous summer, and that I was sure that a moment's reflection would convince bim that preoccupa- tion with the aurora borealis could hardly interfere very seriously with the cultivation of the soil. He had laid himself open by that vicious thrust and, presuming to take the encounter upon myself, it gove me much satis- faction to get in so clean a riposte. Seriously, one would think that such work, outside his duties though it FROM FOBT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 66 were, a. Sioklcr had been dom» at ShuDgnak. would b. matter of pnde to the Bureau of Kduoation There was other more contentious matter in real Quei- tmn but we will leave that till we get dowi to it. ."a^ near the mouth of the river. of^n^nT" '''?."^ o "''" " '"•"*"» f™"' ">« "^wng town .rZ .'%"■■,""" •'" '""^ -"«-»«"<'" after ev/niTg ad^rd to n? ''^' *"' ''^I'''""'«<"'« -""llontly well adapted to nat.ve capacity. The news was gloomy, as all the news of the winter was, but the village w^sfer SLTuf "'""^ "^ '"""°"'' «°"8'' *"h enthusiasm. Smbra?,, fK"""' rr™"' ^''"'''•' ^'"' threatened Cambrai had boon retaken from Byng, but Shunwak was confident and undismayed. -^ '^' ""■• ""ungnaK On Monday morning the Sicklers were np I know not how early, they had a fine breakfast for us at five and at seven we were loaded and lashed and gone, bound for a eabm at he mouth of the Ambler full forty iiles away Athlannk stayed here, but Oola and his team w«eo keen us company nearly to the mouth of the river. I gathS that the girl he had expected to find at Shungiak was mt; The fi rrr °^"'*''°''« •^""^^■-•' '■■^ -- w!n „ ,. .V.'' ^^"^""^ "'"''« ^"^ on the river and went Sn v fivf i^f '' '"!!•"''''* " P"^"'^^ "' twenty-fJuTor ^^^f •'''■ """^ *""'° '»»'« the light snow that speeded our r.ver travel hindered us across countr^ When we reached the wind-swept river again it was S JS butoTa" S: r? ^' ^""^'•^ was'not olr £n Im) fll * , ^^' '' '"'* ^^^''"tial we keep the trail and the tra.l was difficult to follow, so that it took us two hours to make the remaining f;ur or five mUes to Happy Jack's Place, where we were received ve,^ pitality and kindness. There was no man at home but the woman came out with a lantern and helped orteams up a very steep bank and helped to unload ,« 1 h MICtOCOfY MSOIUTION TEST CHART (ANSI and ISO TEST CHART No. 2) ^ll^l^ A APPLIED IM/1GE Inc ^r 1 65 J EqsI Mom Slreel '^ Rocftesler, New rork U609 USA (7161 [i 66 A WINTER CIBCUIT I,? I ' 1. The next day we hoped to pass the mouth of the Hunt river and reach a cabin some distance beyond, a run of nearly fifty miles, nearly all on the river; but when we had travelled perhaps thirty-five miles and had reached that confluence, there sprang up a strong head wind, and since all snow was swept away we found it increasingly difficult, and at last impossible, to make any way on the glare ice. The wind carried dogs and sled where it would, so we went to the bank and made camp in a clump of trees, a very pleasant camp with plenty of time for study after supper. I felt a little sorry for Oola; our Shakespeare left him out altogether, and I should have liked exceedingly well to have been of some service to him, but the demands of Walter's preparation were peremptory. I knew not what plays of Shake- spe'ire would be required at entrance to college and I was resolved to read all the important ones with him, and read them thoroughly. The wind that continued all night fell in the morn- ing and we passed rapidly over several miles of glare ice that we should never have been able to pass with a high wind against us. We learned that this stretch of the Kobuk is noted for its windiness, like many a stretch of the Yukon and the Tanana. Coming in from the north through a gap in the mountains, the valley of the Hunt river forms a natural channel for air-movements, and snow, we were assured, is rarely allowed to lie on the ice in the vicinity of its junction with the valley of the Ko- buk. Elver confluences are always likely to be windy. Another day of quick travel brought ns to the month of the Salmon river, and on the next day by ten o'clock we were at the coal mine twenty miles below the Salmon, where, twelve years previously, I had found a man pick- ing away at a coal seam in the bluffs, gloomily confident that it would very shortly play out. It did not play out; it developed into a coal mine; and a gold mining camp springing unexpectedly up another twenty-five miles or so down the river, gave a sufficient market for coal during *t FROM FOBT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 67 the last nine or ten years to provide him with a reason- able competency, I judge. Such are the vicissitudes of prospecting. I well remember, and I have recorded else- where, this man's determination to abandon the place in the spring, and his petulant references to the obstinacy of his partner who wished to remain. "I told him it would pinch out and now it's a-pinchin' and I hope when he comes back he'll be satisfied and quit." It was pleas- ant to recall to this man, as we drank the sloaming coffee he had ready when we arrived (for ho had seen our teams on the river and had set the pot on the stove and a dish of meat in the oven immediately), his dyspondency on my previous visit, and we laughed over it together. Yet had not gold been found on the Siiuirrel river (of which there was then no sign) I do not think his coal mine, however productive, could ha\e been profitable. Kyana, which in the Eskimo tongue means "Thank you," is the town at the mouth of the Sciuirrel river which supplies this camp ; new in years but already old and decadent though not yet quite derelict. A couple of stores, a saloon or two feverishly trembling on the verge of extinction as the 1st January and the prohibition law approached together, a commissioner and a marslial, and 8 large assortment of half-breed children, were its promi- nent features. Here, for the first time since leaving Settles, and for the last time in our journey, we stayed at a roadhouse. It was comfortable and clean, but there was neither leisure nor privacy for our studies, and that night they defaulted entirely. The whole population dropped in upon us from time to time during the evening and I found myself not without acquaintances and friends; some from Candle who remembered my one visit to that place, some from the Koyukuk. Here by all right and reason I should have stayed and gathered the people and done what little was in my power for them, and so, were this one of my ordinary journeys, I should have done; but my prime object this time was to' reach Point Hope for Christmas, and Chri .mas was but 68 A WINTjJR circuit .1 twelve days off. Could we cover the ninety or one hun- dred miles to Kotzebue in the next two days, we could lie over Sunday at that place, have a clear week for the journey up the coast, and still arrive a day or so ahead of time. But that left little margin for the vicissitudes of Arctic travel, and we could certainly not reduce it any further. Contrary wind, which often hinders travel in the incerior, often forbids it altogether on the coast. There was another new place, twenty-five miles beyond Kyana, which called even louder for a stop, and called in vain. Beforf we left the Koyukuk we had heard strange wild rumours of Noorvik, the government-Quaker establishment near the mouth of the Kobuk, which was even reported to have a wireless telegraph of its own and electric lights, and all down the river we had heard fresh accounts, growing more definite as we came the nearer. Noorvik is a new and somewhat daring experiment of the Bureau of Education, an experiment in Eskimo con- centration. Now to anyone familiar, even by reading, with Arctic conditions, it would seom that for self- preservation and subsistence it is necessary that the Eskimos should scatter. The officers of the bureau, quite as well aware of this as any others can be, are trying by the extension and stressing of the reindeer industry, by the encouragement of the cultivation of the soil, by the introduction of new industries, to overset the disadvan- tages of concentration. Situated near the head of the delta of the Kobuk, the place teems an eligible one for fresh-water fishing; it is witliin the timber country, though not far enough within it, one thinks, for good trees, and it is still near enough to salt water "to satisfy the hunger of generations for the see i the seal" as the teacher's report runs. Most of th; pie of the vil- lage of Deering on Kotzebue Sound wei t removed hither at the government expense two or three years ago, I will not say forcibly, but certainly with great pressure, li PROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 69 the legitimacy of which has been hotly questioned, and every effort is made to induce the inhabitants of the Kobuk river itself to gather and settle here. A large schoolhonse, boasting a tower with an illu- minated clock (much the finest I have seen in Alaska), a sawmill, an electric light plant, a wireless telegraph station, have all been established. The report from which I have quoted insists, rather pathetically, as I think, upon the value of the electric light in the "uplift" of the natives. "In the semi-darkness of the candle or the seal-oil lamp the weird fancies and ghostly supersti- tions of the by-gone days flourished," it says. One is reminded of Henry Labouchere's saying of many years ago, that the English House of Lords had somehow man- aged to survive the electric light but he did not see how it could survive the telephone. I suppose there exist more ignorance and superstition and general degradation under the glare of the electric lights of New York or Chicago or London than rush light or tallow candle ever glimmered upon since the world began; such things have nothing to do with "uplift" or Germany would be the most uplifted country on earth. They are simply other matters, and only a confusion of thought connects them. The real issue of the whole experiment is, of course, the school. A school at Noorvik with an hundred children in attendance can do better work at much less cost than half a dozen little schools scattered up and down the river and the coast. That is the real reason for it. Here also, in part, was the real issue with Mr. Sickler at Shungnak. His people make a reasonably good living, are attached to their village and are making good prog- ress along the desired lines. He does not set why they should be persuaded, or cajoled as he would probably put it, into going somewhere else. That was part of it; now I must deal with the other part. The ott 3r part is connected with religions matters and it is not at all necessary to make apology for introducing them even in a book not specifically religious, because to if 70 A WINTER CIRCUIT Hi* ignore them would bo to ignore an essential factor of all native problems. It is generally known that wh i the Alaskan Bureai' of Education began seriously to attack the task of tlie education of the natives, it accepted the parcelling out of the country amongst the various Chris- tian bodies which had already more or less fortuitously taken place. The Presbyterians were at work along the southeastern coast and at Point Barrow, the Episco- palians occupied the Yukon river and Point Hope, the Methodists had some work on the Aleutian Islands, the Moravians on the Kuskokwin, the Swedish Lutherans on Norton Sound, and the California Society of Friends on Kotzebue Sound. Because the Kobuk river flows into Kotzcbue Sound the Friends claimed the Kobuk river and its inhabitants, and the bureau has recognized that claim. Accordingly its Noorvik experiment is under the auspices of this sect, which, in the main, evades the ex- pense of maintaining missionaries of its own by securing their appointment as government school-teachers. Now the attitude of the Quakers towards war is well known, and it was reported to me again and again, by white men and by natives, that the Eskimos on the Eobuk were being induced to settle at Noorvik on the plea that if tiiey did not they would soon be taken away to fight for the government, while if they came to Noorvik and joined the Quaker community they would never be required to fight but would be protected against all enemies by that same government. I cannot vouch for this, but it was told me so repeatedly that I am compelled to beUeve there was some foundation for it; one Eskimo family with whom we stayed up the river, gave it as the reason for their intention of removing thither. It is easy to be seen that this attitude was calculated to ronse indignation in any patriotic breast. Not all the white men on the Kobuk were patriotic; there was the usual sprinkling of rabid and bitter Bolsheviks who talked about a "capitalistic war." Alaska sends out more insane men every year in proportion to her popula- PROM PORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 71 tion than any other country on earth— and sometimes it takes one form and sometimes another. But the greater part were intensely patriotic and very resentful of this attitude of the agents of tlie Society of Friends, con- spicuous amongst them being Sicklcr. The feeling was aggravated by the circumstance that the missionary- teacher at Noorvik was a German. I have tried to deal with this thing as gently and im- partially as possible. The usual complaints against missionaries that one hears from white men do not, it is hardly necessary to say, make much impression upon me. I know that very often the measure of the unpopularity of missionaries with certain classes is the measure of their usefulness. The memory of many a conflict of my own is still vivid, and I have often thought that the main matter was well summed up by an indignant deck hand on a steamboat during our fight at Fort Yukon some years ago: "Why, it's got so at that place that a man can't give a squaw a drink of whiskey and take her out in the brush without getting into trouble!" Moreover in earlier writings I have set forth an appreciation of the efforts of the Society of Friends in this very region. Other complaints there were of intolerance that sound strange to the ears of one acquainted with the history of this singular sect, perhaps in the past the most generally despised and persecuted of all Christian bodies. Tobacco smoking is f.nathema to them, and abstinence from it is, as nearly as they can make it, a condition of residence at Noorvik. They will not permit the marriage of one of their girls to an Eskimo not of their professed company, and a man who has been baptized must publicly renounce his baptism before he will be accepted as a suitor. While again I do not state this of my own knowledge I think it is true: again and again in the mournful history of Christian divisions a persecuted and intolerated sect has in its turn become persecuting and intolerant. ' ' Setting a beggar on horseback" has application to spiritual jjli 'I H f 72 A WINTER CIRCUIT as well as social pride. But It is the alliance with the government and the opportunity which that alli- anoo gives for the enforcement of strange and peculiar tenets which is the chief cause of irritation, and it atTords another illustration, were another illustration needed, of the mistake and unwisdom of such alliances under our system. When a government at war maintains such an alliance with a professed pacifist sect, it becomes go inconsistont as to be grotesque. The p<.licy of the concentration of the Eskimos will come again under our notice. I am very conscious that in a book dealing with travel on the Arctic coast I am a great while in reaching salt water; and that, despite the glare ice and the quick, easy passage which it gives, I linger overlong on the Kobuk. But, after all, we are not mainly concerned with snow and ice, with rocks and sandspits, but with people, and we have been amongst the Eskimos and confronted with Eskimo problems ever since we reached this interesting river. Our stay at Noorvik was no more than two or three hours around noon, and I saw for myself only what a man may see in that time. We were kindly received at the teacher's residence, where father and mother, son and daughter, all engaged in teaching, were met, and a meal was hospitably provided, and I was pleased with a general air o' Intelligence and refinement which seemed proper to the commodiousness and comfort of the house. The wireless telegraph plant, in touch with the sta- tions at Nome and Nulato, was, it appeared, the volun- tary work of the teacher's son, by him constructed and operated; and we were furnished with a sheaf of recent bulletins to carry with as t" the north— gloomy with ominous tales of submarine activity. While it was against *he regulations to send any private message from th d station, the young gentleman was obhging enough to include in the news he sent out a mention of our passing by, that our friends might possibly receive word of our movements. I 'i ' FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 73 Most of the cabins at the place were of frame construc- tion from lumber produced at the sawmill; many were nnfinished; sawdust seemed the chief road-making mate- rial and thoro were patches of plank sidewalk here and there. Tho general effect was of the outskirts of a raw mining town, familiar and unhandsome enough; to which the rectangularity of the streets contributed. Why is the picturesque irregularity of the ordinary native village regarded as so pernicious and ''epravedt Things that grow naturally, 'ike a tree or a language, are always irregular; cities like Paris and London and Boston grew crooked while they grew naturally and only when they became self-conscious and sophisticated did they bepn to "lay themselves out." Up here— and, I suppose, elsewhere, nowadays— regular rows of cabins seem es- sential to native "uplift," and if they be of lumber rather than of logs, by so much the more are they uplifting. Naturally material that requires a mill, and an engine to run it, must be superior in its civilizing and uplifting tendencies to material that anyone who goes into the woods with an axe can procure for himself. As a friend of log building where logs may be obtained, and as one who is perverse enough deliberately to prefer irregularity to cLiquer-board uniformity, I find myself sadly out of accord with many of the good people of the north; while there are certain uses of certain words, repeated till they seem to have no real meaning left, that almoat annoy me. Here we left Oola to pursue whatever he was pursuing with what success he toight achieve; a clean, willing, courteous young man, whom I remembered in his tenth year as one of the sturdiest, handsomest children I had seen in the country; now in his twenty-first year he was personable and pleasant, but he had scarcely fulfilled the high promise of his boyhood. I g?.ve him my tent and stove, deeming them henceforth superfluous baggage, and saw to it that his sled was well provisioned for his return. Having procured a young man and team, and set our if ; i ill 74 A WINTER CIRniT ■I !/•' watches back an hour to make up for the fifteen de- grees of longitude we had travelled to the west since we left Fort Yukon, we star'ed late in the afternoon for the one stopping place between Noorvik and Kot- zebue, a cabin belonging to a native who enjoyed the sobriquet of ""Whiskey Jack," in the delt* of the Kobuk. This delta of the Kobuk is a maze of waterways, no less than thirteen mouths of the river being counted, connected and reticulated by vast numbers of interme- diary channels. The trail left the river again and again to cut off a bend, and we should never have fourd our way in the gloom, and, presently, in the darkness, had not someone with familiar local knowledge guided ns. Whiskey Jack's cabin is in the midst of the delta, be- yond the tree line, out on the tundra. We found it carefully padlocked, and our guide had foi<;fotten that he had been bidden to bring the key. When with some trouble an entrance was effected we looked in vain for the possessions the padlock guarded, for the place was bare. The old broken rusty stove of a coal oil can that stood in a comer made me already regret that I had parted with my own, and the sodden driftwood which waa our only fuel gave equally futile regret that the pair of primus stoves with which we were provided had not been charged. Altogether it was a thoroughly uncom- fortable camp. I rose at four next morning and started a fire, and was very glad to crawl into bed again and snuggle up against Walter while the stove slowly heated the cabin, for it was as cold indoors as ont and the thermometer on the sled stood at —30. It was six ere the wretched incompetent little stove had cooked breakfast and 7.15 ere we were hitched up and gone, ihe boy return- ing to Noorvik. He was of the "smart-Alec" or "wised- np" type of native youth, with no training of manners at all and much voluble criticism of Noorvik, tinctured with profanity, until I sharply pulled him up. It was impossible not to compare him mentally with the polite I ,''•■'1 II FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 75 and gracions youth from whom we had just parted com- pany, and once more I was proud of the gentlownmen w(> have had at the AUukaket. The reader who is at all interestod in this narrative, and is not familiar with the region, is urged to refer to the map for this day's journey. The mouths of the Kobnk open not di'-ectly into Kotzcbue Sound Imt into Hotham Inlet, a shallow body of water formed by a nar- row peninsula that stretches about sixty miles due northwest from the mainland, roughly parallel with its general trend, and enoljses not only this inlet, for which the local name is the Kobuk Lake, but the extensive Sela- wik Lake also, into which empties the Selawik river. Just before the inlet opens at its northern end by its very narrow mouth into Kotzebue Sound, it receives a third considerable river, the Noatak, the "Inland R.,er" of the early navigators, by «hicb and the Colville from time immemorial native traffic has been had with the people of the northern coast. Receiving so much river water, Hotham Inlet is naturally neorly fresh, and is much filted up. I think that anyone studying the map will be surprised to find that this extensive peninsuLi bus no name, although a small peninsula projecting from it bears the name of Cboris, and I often wondered ■ lijr Ott von Kotzcbue, who discovered Kotzebue Sound in l"'* and named so many of its physical features, set no name upon this peninsula, until I read his own narrativu nad: learned that he knew nothing of the itlet and supp * the peninsula to be the mainland. It was Beechey ii Blossom, ten years later, who detected and naL the inlet and delineated the peninsula, and he did no, discover the rivers that the inlet receives because neither the hip nor her barge found water enough to enter it. though he heard of them and spoke confidently of their existence. Unless a river discharged into easily navi gabie water it was likely to be missed in those days, as Cook, and later Vancouver, missed the Columbia, the Fraser and the Yukon. But it is perhaps just as well 76 A WINTER CIRCUIT that "the flrat whc, over bur^t" into leai and soundi, left lometbing undiscovered for their succcssori. Bcechey'g voyage always bad great interest for me because it was part, and an entirely successful part, of what came near being the most successful project of Arctic exploration ever thought out and set on foot. Franklin was to advance from the Mackenzie river in boats to the most western part of the uorth coast, and Beechey, having como around the Horn, was to go up or send up to the most northern point on the west coast to meet him. Franklin fell short by about 150 miles of his goal, and that was all that prevented the complete determination of the northern limits of the continent in 1826. Moreover, Beechey 's narrative is a model of what such writings should be, carefully accurate, full yet ooncifc>, vivacious yet restrained, with nothing highly- wrought and exclamatory, none of that weary striving after word-painting which began to come in, I think, with Osborne's account of McClure's voyage a quarter of a century later, when the daily newspapers were inter- ested owing to the excitement of the Franklin search. Beeohey's chapter on the Eskimos is annotated in manu- script in my copy by the man who, whatever one may think of some of his views, undoubtedly knows more about the western Eskimos at first hand than any other living man— V. Stefansson— and it is surprising how little he finds to correct. Again and again the voyages of the earlier navigators — and Vancouver is a conspicuous ex- ample — show how little technical literary training has to do with the production of good literature; the style is the man. No guide was necessary, we had been assured, from Whiskey Jack's cabin to Eotzebue, since the trail all along the inlet had been staked on the ice by the mail carrier and there was no danger of losing the way. But in the darkness of the early morning, soon after we started, and before we were extricated from the delta, we took by mistake an Eskimo trapping trail instead of the !|i^ FROM FORT YUKON TO KOTZEnUE SOIND 77 tr«il to Kotzebno, and were led for miles right back into that very maze of watorwoyg from which wc were Beck- ing to egcopo. At last when we hud fo. 'me time been conBcions thui n-o were wrong and yet had no taste for returning upon our tracks, the summit of a little hillock gave us the broad cxpiinse of the inlet only a few hundred yards away, and wo drove across the rough tundra straight for the ice, clearing the stunted brush with the axe. Following the edge of the tundra we came prescf My upon the mail-carrier's stakes, and th^re lay befort- us only a steady grind on the ice with a cold wind in our faces all day long to "Pipe Spit" at the narrow mouth of the inlet, and then nine miles around the point to tlio village of Kotzebuo, mostly on ice covered with wind- blown sand that made gritty going for the steel-shod sled. Hotham Inlet was named by Beeohey for Admiral Sir Henry Hotham, who was concerned with the interception of Napoleon after the battle of Waterloo ; of a family of distinguished sailors who hove served their country for generations and are still serving. Our ■ y across the inlet gave interesting yet irritating illustrb a of the dIfSculty of keeping dogs to a course. Insensiuiy the leader (to whom stakes had no signifi- cance) edged away continually from the wind. The travelling was good as far as surface was concerned and the dogs needed no urging, but the command "Hawl" proceeded incessantly from Walter's lips all those long hours. It was inmiediately obeyed and the course imme- diately rectified, only to be gradually departed from again. "Fox" was not one of those wonderful leaders endowed with almost superhuman intelligence of which the traveller may hear tales wherever he goes in the north ; he had a will of his own that, however often and however unceremoniously it might be subdued, reasserted itself all the winter long, and he was linvited with every canine limitation; an ungenial brute who growls not only whenever his harness is pui on but also whenever it r 78 A WINTER CIRCUIT P. ii: t:ii is taken off, though his growling means nothing. Again and again eager Eskimo hands, unhitching the team for us, would leave Fox in his harness, and several times we were asked ""What the matter? That dog want fightl" Yet he is really quite harmless and has it to his credit that he led our teams all round the Arctic coast and stood the winter as well as the hest. He is one of the few dogs that I have never been able to make a pet of and my sense of obligation to him makes me sorry that our relations are not more affectionate. There may be something in his early history to account for his mo- roseness, or he may simply be "built that way" as some dogs and some people seem to be. It fell entirely dark soon after we left Pipe Spit, where an Eskimo family resided, fishing very successfully through the ice, and we were already in difficulty about the way when the kindly native, on his customary week- end visit to Kotzebne, overtook us with his wife and chil- dren in his sled and naught else, and hitching a rope to our tow-line gave our jaded dogs such assistance that we went flying over the last few miles; a great red planet twinkling on the horizon directly ahead so that we thought it was a light burning in the distant village until it sank out of sight just before the actual lights of the place appeared. So we came to the Arctic Ocean on the 15th December, thirty-eight days out of Fort Yukon, of which twenty- seven had been actually spent in travel; having come nearly 800 miles at an average of close to thirty miles a travelling day. Counting delays and days of rest and all, I had figured beforehand that twenty miles a day was all we could reasonably expect to make, and it worked out at just about that. Even so, I had "gambled on the season" as it would be expressed here, taking chances that the early snow would be light and the river travel correspondingly good, and it was so. Since I had once before described a journey from Fort Yukon to Kotzebne Sound, I was at first minded to start FROM FOET YUKON TO KOTZEBUE SOUND 79 the present narrative at salt water, and what has been written must be regarded as preliminary to the main design of the book. If I must confess with Wordsworth in "Peter Bell": "I've played and danced with my narration, I lingered long 'ere I began," I would also make his plea that my readers should "Pour out indulgence still in measure As liberal as ye can," m ]t I n KOTZEBUE SOUND TO POINT HOPE KOTZEBCB SOUND TO POTNT HOPE Sunday was a glad day of rest after a week's uninter- rupted travel in which we had made close to 250 miles, and the village of Kotzebue was all too full of interest for so brief a stay. A visit on Saturday night to the postmaster, who is also the missionary, brought me word from Point Barrow and Point Hope that at both places we were expected, and brought me also to an interesting gathering in which I was very glad to see that translation of devotional exercises into the Eskimo language was in progress. Whenever an earnest man labours amongst these people, whether it be a Jesuit priest at St. Michael, a "Friend" at Kotzebue Sound, a Presbyterian at Point Barrow or a Church-of-England missionary at Herschel Island, he finds himself presently not content with the parrot-like singing or saying of devotions in a strange language, Latin or English, and goes to work as best he may to turn them into the mother tongue. My observa- tion the next morning at the public service confirmed me in the impression that any translation into the native tongue, however faulty it may be, is preferable to Eng- lish hymns got by rote and sung, it was impossible to believe otherwise, with litt" -^r no sense of the meaning of most of the words. 1 or three, here and there, of the better taught amongst the large congregation had doubtless more understanding, but for the majority I am sure that my old schoolboy rounds, "Glorious Apollo," or "Pray, Sir, be so good," would have been as effective mediums of praise and edification — besides being better English and better music; for the hymns most used by these congregations are distinctly of the baser sort. Every lover of English hymnody must deplore the vogue I I i M A WINTEB CIRCUIT II ol' the modern trash and its penetration to the ends of the earth, but the trash, I have reason to think, loses much of its trashiness while undergoing the vicissitudes of translation ; indeed in most cases nothing more than the metre and the main thought can be retained. We were lodged by the trader of the place with whom we outfitted for our journey to Point Hope. There is no roadhouse at Kotzebue (its native name "Kikitaruk" seems to have disappeared p-nce I was here last) and the two or three stores are in the habit of putting up their infrequent out-of-tjwn customers. Walter and I slept upon the floor, managing to find some reindeer hides and gnnny sacks to put underneath us. and we ate with the trader. There was much to do and not much time to do it in. The first thing was to secure a guide. It sounds perfectly simple to follow the coast all the way, and it would seem that "the wayfaring man, though a fool, could not err therein," but, on the contrary, the way- faring man would be a fool indeed if he attempted it in the dead of winter without some knowledge of the coun- try, or the company of one who had it. There is no trail ; we were come to the land of ice and wind-hardened snow, and the nights' stopping places sometimes not easy to find unless one knew just up what creek mouth they lay. Moreover, the weather is the all-important thing as re- gards coast -travel, and only the coast residents know the coast weather. I daresay we might have muddled through by ourselves, but we were anxious to reach Point Hope and we were taking no unnecessary chances. Some said it was 160 and some said 170 miles away, butallwere agreed that upon the fortune of the weather we encountered at Cape Thomson would depend the success or failure of onr attempt to get there before Christmas. So we en- gaged "Little Pete" and his team to lead the way— an Eskimo whose chief characteristic seemed his perpetual good humour. Then we bought furs : a heavy parkee or artigi of what I think is a species of marmot, called He-sik-puk by the natives and much esteemed by them, KOTZEBUE SOUND TO POINT HOPE 85 for myself, two pairs of heavy fur mitts with ganntlets and two pairs of heavy fur boots. Walter, wedded to his beaded caribou coat, which never failed to arouse admira- tion and was indeed a handsome garment, setting off his broad shoulders with its epanlette-like adornments, would have no parkee bought for him and demurred a little at first at the boots. But we were come to the country and the travel in which furs are indispensable. The provisioning I had always left to Walter of late journeys j he knew my tastes as well as his own and had carte blanche to provide for both, though indeed little besides staple food supplies was procurable. When we awoke at five on Monday morning a high wind was blowing from the northeast and our host thought there was little chance of our lea^nng for two or three days. But presently the wind veered, and at eight Little Pete arrived and said it was turning into a fair quarter for travelling and that he was ready to start ; but it was 9.30 before the elaborate business of getting our stuff together from the warehouse and the store and loading and hitching was done, and we were started upon our long journey around the Arctic coast of Alaska. Our course lay straight across the salt-water ice of the bay for Cape Erusenstem (Eil-li-a-nuk), named by Kotzebue after the first Russian circumnavigator (him- self being the second), '' ose voyage of 1803-04 was, in its day, of considerable ni :. Behind us stretched the long line of the peninsula coast from Pipe Spit to Cape Blos- som; ahead the cape loomed dimly. I took out my camera, opened its lens wide, and attempted a snapshot of the village and its setting, but although I made the exposure I realized then, as I did on many subsequent occasions, that there was not much likelihood of a picture resulting; there was nothing olean-cut and sparkling about the scene, it was gvy and hazy and ill-defined. I wish I conld convc to the reader some suggestion of the elation of spirit ■ Ath which I found myself actually started upon this Ai .-tic adventure. So far the route we :i\ 86 A WINTER CIRCUIT '!i ' i had traversed was more or less familiar. Twelve years before, I had reached Kotezebue Sound in an attempt to visit Pomt Hope, but the delays of weather and accident which had attended the journey made my arrival at salt water so late that it became necessary to turn south instead of north and get back as fast as possible to the interior by way of Nome and the Yukon. Ever since that time the desire of completing the journey had lin- gered, and now there was fair prospect not only of Point Hope but of the more ambitious and most interesting circuit of the entire coast. There is always something fascinating about the un- known; surely only a dog approaches new country with- out new emotion. And it was new countiy which had been of special interest to me all my life. My father had a cousin in the merchant marine, dead before my recollection, who had sailed into both the arctic and trop'o waters, until, sailing out of Sydney in New South Wales, he and his ship were never seen or heard of again. There remained at home a cross-grained green parrot as a memento of his southern voyages, and a collec- tion of books of Arctic exploration as memento of the northern. Those fine old quartos, with their delicate and spirited engravings of ships beset by fantastic icebergs, their coloured plates of auroras and parhelia, of Eskimos and their igloos and dog-teams, are amongst the most vivid recollections of my childhood. The first and second of Sir John Boss, the first and second of Sir Edward Parry, the first and second of Sir John Franklin, a num- ber of the Franklin Search books (in which enterprise I think their owner had seen his Arctic service in some capacity or other). Sir John Richardson's books— these were my companions and delights as a boy; and an illus- trated volume that I know not the name of but that I should rejoice to discover again, describing the work of the Moravian missionaries in Greenland with much inter- esting detail, was, in particular, a sort of oasis in a desert of forgotten religious books to which, in the main, it was \ t " \ KOTZEBUE SOUND TO POINT HOPE 87 80ught to confine my reading with notable unsuccess. Adding Sir Robert McClurc, Sir Leopold McCUntock, and remembering that Oeorgo III bad intended to knight James Cook had he returned from his third voyage, but by all that is modest and capable and kindly in the others leaving out Sir Edward Belcher, I think these Arctic knights constitute as fine a body of real chivalry as Chris- tendom has ever known, and their humility of mind, even their frank ignorance, their deep reverence and religious feeling, seem to bring them as much closer to us as the cold self-sufficiency and egotism of some of our modem agnostic explorers seem to detach them. It may be wisest and best to abolish all titles and distinctions of rank and every outward sign that can set one man above another; I do not know. There are some matters like the best ultimate basis of human society, and the question of the gold standard of money, that simply bewilder me. When I am told that the chief cause of the present ruinous high prices is the over-production of gold, and in the same breath it is proposed to put a premium upon the further production of gold, I am simply bewildered; and it is much the same when I see that the abolition of titular distinctions for achievement only emphasizes the dis- tinction of wealth, which is the least honourable of all. At any rate, if knighthood will soon be obsolete, I am a glad that these Arctic champions, in their day, earned a place beside Sir William Wallace and Sir Philip Sidney, and that their names will go down with the same hono- rific prefix. Not even the Bolsheviki can abolish the past. With not more, I think, than two or three exceptions, the names of the natural features along this entire west coast from Kotzebue Sound to Point Barrow were given by Beechey upon the service referred to in the years 1826-27. What parts the Blossom did not reach, her "barge" did, and together they made as thorough an examination as Vancouver made of the much more ex- tensive coast from Puget Sound to the Lynn Canal, forty years before. His lieutenants and other officers, Belcher, I ( I' 'II .'ii 88 A WINTER CIRCUIT !■■ Peard, Wainwriglit, EUon, Coilie, Smyth and Mar»h, are all oommemoratcd, and I know of no names that can mor jn»tly be placed on unnamed coasts than those of the men who first examined them and laid them down. But the native names, when there are such, and they can be discovered and pronounced, should have pre- cedence even of these. Belcher, to whom I referred disparagingly, opened his naval career by losing the Blossom's barge, and the lives of two men and a boy, off the Choris peninsula in these waters; fortunately in the second year of the c^r^edition when th<5 work of the barge was done; and t.i^scd it twenty-eight years later, in the seas north of the conti- nent, by abandoning a squadron of four well-fouad ves- sels of the British navy, one of which floated out into Baffin's Bay and was recovered unharmed by American whalers. Sometimes names describe their possessors with an appropriateness the more striking because acci- dental. So the apoplectic irascibility, the overbearance, the strut, of that most impertinently-named book. The Last of the Arctic Voyages, especially when one reads between the lines with other knowledge of the persons and events, seem not inappropriate to its author's patro- nymio. At the close of the court-martial he demanded, his sword was returned to him— in silence. Yet I find that he has half a column in the latest Britannica, while CoUinson is entirely omitted; a circumstance that weighs more with me than all W. H. Wright's shrill, far-fetched criticism in that ill-tempered book Misinforming a Na- tion. But I daresay Wright knows no more of my Arctic knights than I do of his minor Russian or German nov- elists. It needs omniscience adequately to construct, or criticize, an encyclopedia of all ♦he arts and sciences and literatures. The salt efflorescence that overspreads the ice from water oozing up through the tide cracks, made our vehicles drag, especially the toboggan, which grew in- creasingly unsuitable to our travel. The toboggan is a KOTZEBUE SOUND TO POINT HOPE 89 ioft-snow and rough-country vehicle, and its ntefnineti WB* past, but wo had decided not to attempt a iubititu- tion until we had leieuro at Point Hone. Already tho maiu diiTcrtnce between winter travel in the interior and on the coast b^Rnn to appear. Much of the way down tho Kobuk nr.d nil the way across liotham Inlet wo had indeed been nbk to ride, owing to the light snow of tho exceptional season, but henceforth until we reached the interior again riding would be the normal thing with us. This, together with the incomparably fiircer winds of the coast, involves the difference in the cus'omary dress between the two regions. When I began my Journeys in tho interior of Alaska I carried a fur parkee, and though I found little use for it, I kept it with me for several years. Occasionally, when making camp in cold weather, for instance, it is a cmfortable thing to have, but in sled- travel, after awhile one rejects all but the indispensables, and the fur parkee was definitely abandoned in favour of the cotton parkee. "When one sits or. a sled, however, instead of '-alking or trotting besidu it, much warmer dothing is required, and on this our first day of coast travel I was clothed in the heavy artigi iind the thick fur boots all day though the temperature was not low nor the wind immoderately high. The hills that rose behind us and had been vagnelv in view all day were the Mulgrave Hills of Capt. Cook, named in 1778, and it was only after much digging that I discovered the interesting fact that the Lord Mulgrave for whom they were undoubtedly named (though I cannot find that Cook says so) was none other thr.n the Capt. Constantine Phipps who made a noted voyage towards the north pole in 1772 and reached a latitude of 80° 48' off the coast of Spitzbergon— the "farthest north" record for thirty years or so— on which voyage Horatio Nelson went as midshipman and had the adventure with a polar bear that Southey tells of. All next day our course lay over the bare ice of the lagoons that skirt the coast line, a dull grey expanse II 90 A WINTER CIRCUIT ■tretohing widely and miHtily on the left hand, fhc bar* rocki and hilla riging on the right. Againi! a wind charged aometimeR with flurries of driving »now we •truggled for seven hours, ami then found our night refuge in a little native cal)in at a place called Kil-iok- raaok. All night the wind blew and I was sorry for the poor dogs exposed to its blast, for it was keen. They wero beginning their experience of the complete exposure to the weather which is the unavoidable fortune of Eskimo dogs; there was nothing to make a windbreak of; there was nothing but the hardened snow to lie upon. Sleeping out at all temperatures, almost all Alaskan dogs are used to, but the trees of the interior that give some shelter and afford a few handfuls of brush for a bed, were gone, and with them even these slight miti- gations. The hut at Kil-ick-mack was our first experience of what was to be a chief discomfort on this west coast, the overcrowding of our night quarters. The scarcity of driftwood for building l. lerial and fuel compels the construction of as small a dwelling as will serve the needs of the family; when into its narrow limits three strangers with their bedding, their grub box and cooking vessels and other baggage are introduced, there is no room for turning around; cooking and eating must be done in relays, and the arrangements for sleeping tax the ingenuity of the entire company. Although we arose at six, the operations of breakfast were so impeded by this cause that it was half-past eight before we started, and the longest day of our coast travel, so far, lay before us. The wind had lulled and a little snow fell at intervals, and the day was so dull that there was no clear vision even at noon. Most ol our way lay just on the shore side of ice, heaped in jagged masses about the tide crack; indecil most of the smooth travelling all along this coast is found in the narrow stretch between this wall of ice blo<*s and the beach. Sometimes i. Is wet from over- KOTZEBUE SOl'XD TO POINT HOPE 91 fli)w and pninogc must l)o sought inshore upon tho puorly- coviToil gruvi'l and sond, or else the ice-wall must bo srosHcd to smoother oxpansps l)oyond. The same low- lying coast fringed with lakes and lagoons, with high ground rising to hills l)oyond, was visible when anything was visible at all. (.'apes marked on the map did not appear as capes at all, and this is true of many such promontories along the whole coast, for the charting was done from di'cks of vessels at safe hailing distance, tho low coast foreshortening itself against the bills until tho hills seemed at the water's edge instead of several miles inland. Beccbey sailed closer than Cook and changed the chart in places, but the observation holds good. For nine hours we pursued our monotonous way, the wind rising as tho darkness came, until when the faint welcome lights of the village of Kivalina appeared, it had been blowing with much force for jome time and wag become piercingly cold. Tho schoolhouse and teacher's residence combined was at the southern point of the vil- lage, looming large over all the little dwellings, and hero we were expected and awaited, but we did not know it and pushed on to the extreme north end of the village where the trader with whom we had proposed to stay live'!, having much diflSculty in forcing our jaded dogs past habitation after habitation. We were received by Jim Mien with the thoroughgoing hospitality of the .arctic, nothing loath to eat the meal speedily pre- p".red for us by his native wife, and to seek early repose. Kivalina was our first thoroughly Eskimo settlement ; Kotzebue with its prominent church and stores and ware- houses, and its large use of lumber, seemed only partly 80, though I have no doubt that those familiar with the untouched Eskimos of Coronation Gulf would consider Kivalina highly sophisticat 1. It takes one some time to become accustomed to tl • utter nakedness of such a village site, to what seems its preposterous ineligibility. It takes, I think, some acquaintance to realize that there H f 92 A WINTER CIRCUIT i are choice and degree amidst the nakedness and ineli- gibihty of the whole coast and that the site of every settlement is determined by some natural advantage. When the next morning Little Pete said "No go " be- cause the wind was foul for the passage of Cape Thomson and it were better to await a change here than in the hut near the foot of the cape, which would be our night's stop I walked the length of the village to pay my respects to the schoolmaster and ask permission to attend his school with this strong feeling : a feeling of wonder that any people should have built their homes in such bleak, for- bidding place. It is not easy to describe emptiness and nakedness, and I suppose such terms of vacancy as the language contains will be hard-worked in the pages that follow, for this is the deep and abiding impression which the country makes upon the mind, and though modified as one learns more and more of its resources and of the occupations of its inhabitants, it remains predominant The irregular, hillock-shaped igloos amidst which I walked through the driving snow seemed like natural irregularities and protuberances of the ground rather than constructions of human art— doubtless every stranger's first impression of igloos, not worth re.jordinK for those read in Arctic travels. I was glad of the daylight of noon for a look at Kiva- Lna; when one reaches a place after dark and leaves it before daylight one does not really see it at all. But I shall not detain the reader at this village because we shiU visit it again. Let me say only that the name of the place, which sounds strangely musical for an Eskimo name— more Mediterranean than Arctic— has had a final "k" elided by the white men and map-makers— a process which is in operation elsewhere on the coast. We learned during the day that the ice was out around Cape Thomson, driven off the coast by late prevailing wmda, and that it would be necessary to pass the cape by a rough inland circumvention used under these condi- tions. Little Pete professed himself unacquainted with KOTZEBUE SOUND TO POINT HOPE 93 this route, and, nothing loath, I thought, to return to Kotzebue for Christmas, relinquished his commission and the half of his recompense to a youth of the place named Chester, who had many times ' .'avellcd the coast, sometimes around, and sometimes over, the cape. On the next morning, Friday 21st December, the wind was fair from the south, dead behind us, and we were off and away by seven o'clock. For fifteen miles our way lay over the smooth ice of lagoons, and with the aid of the wind we travelled rapidly. Ten miles of beach travel followed with diminished speed, and we stopped at a trapping cabin, occupied by a mulatto married to an Es- kimo woman, for lunch. Thenceforward the beach ice was more and more encrusted with pebbles and shale, and our progress still more retarded; the iron runners of the sled are very refractory in passing over gravel and the toboggar had rather the better of it; but by three o'clock we were at the cabin we had intended to occupy, only to find it already occupied by a party of reindeer folk come in from their herd, including a woman and child. We decided, therefore, to push on to another cabin, about eight miles further, and were no more than unpacked and settled to the business of supper than the folk we had left behind, because we would not disturb or incommode them, arrived to spend the night also, and wo were miserably and unwholesomely overcrowded after all. Yet I was struck by the magnanimous hospitality of one of the men, who left us and went cheerfully to spend the night in an empty, cold, tumble-down hovel an hundred yards away, when I learned at Point Hope that the cabin we were occupying actually belonged to him. Not only were we wretchedly overcrowded, but we were unhappy that night. The wind suddenly changed to the northeast again, barring any passage of the cape, over or around, and we knew that such a wind frequently per- sists for a week at a time and commonly for three days. It looked as if the whole company would be detained in this grimy little hovel, for our reindeer-herding compan- (■< f I :ir1 94 A WINTER CIRCUIT ions were also bound for Point Hope, and the prospect of such detention, with the likelihood of not reaching the mission for Christmas after all ■which it involved, cast our spirits down. But Walter and I were soon deep in Romeo and Juliet and the strife of Montague and Cap- ulet and the plight of the luckless lovers, "The consuming love of the children arising from out of the veiy midst of the deadly enmity of the parents," drew our minds away from our own troubles; the scented gardens of Verona vocal with the nightingale slipped into the place of the Arctic waste and its icy winds. We had heard much about Cape Thomson even before we reached the coast. A trader at Kyana had given us a graphic description of the wind blowing atones from its summit a mile out on the ice, and I knew a man, a per- fectly sober missionary, whose loaded sled was blown over and over and himself literally sv/ept away from it by the force of the hurricane-like '■ -ooUies" that rush down the steep gullies. I think we had met half a dozen people who had thrilling experiences to relate about this dreaded promontory. It is one of Beechey's capes, named for a Mr. Deas Thomson, one of the commissioners of the British navy, but while Beechey wrote it thus in his narrative, on his accompanying map it appears as "Thompson," and since an hundred navigators use his map to one who reads his narrative, the intrusive "p" has become permanent. I was interested to learn at Point Hope that the revenue cutter Bear still employs Beechey's chart in its navigation of these waters. I wish someone would write a history of the British Hydrographical OflBce, which for more than a century has been the chief source and supply of information for the whole maritime world; it would abound in the ro- mance of the sea and be full of fascinating detail of operations in the remotest comers of the earth. What gulf or bay is there into which its surveyors have not penetrated? what coast line they have not laid down? what straits and channels they have not sounded t KOTZEBUE SOUND TO POINT HOPE 93 "Never was isle so little, Never was sea so lone, But over the sand and the palm tree* An English flag has flown." Great Britain has many claims to greatness, many- boasts of beneficent protection and service to mankind, but I Icnow not if tliere be anything finer in her history than the work of her public and private hydrographers. Spain in her heyday kept the secrets of her discoveries so closely that some of them were forgotten by herself until the British re-discovered them, but anyone who has had a sixpence to spend could always obtain a copy of any chart in the British hydrographical archives, though it may have cost thousands of pounds to procure, and it is not possible to plan a course in any waters of the wide world where British charts would not give guidance. The coast of Alaska was wholly delineated by British hydrog- raphers (though of course therf> had been some previous Russian work) — Cook and Vancouver and Beechey and Franklin and Dease and Simpson — the latest of them up- wards of eighty and the earliest of them nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Vancouver is said to have added ten thousand miles of coast line to the world's maps, a title to greatness, to my mind, more valid than that of Alexander or Napoleon. But I must not get on the subject of Vancouver. It is always the unexpected that happens. When we aroia next morning there was a dead calm and we hurried away to take advantage of it, a moon at the end of her first quarter giving us good light. We were soon upon the rough sea-ice, which had only the past day or two been driven back upon the coast; plainly it was possible to double the cape, and we rejoiced that we were not com- pelled to the laborious alternative. I should not have minded climbing the cliff could I have hoped for the view from the top that Beechey had, the "low land jetting out from the coast to the w.n.w. as far as the eye could reach" i' 11 96 A WINTER CIRCUIT I I I ill i ; I 'I i- which "as the point had never been placed on our charts" he set down on liis map and named Point Hope for Sir William Johnston Hope, of a well-known house long connected with the sea. But at this time of the year that was out of the question and I understand that the only practicable sled route over the cape lies back so far as to yield no comprehensive view. Cape Thomson is a succession of bold, ragged, rocky bluffs, 700 or 800 feet high, rising one beyond the other for seven miles, with steep gullies between, and descend- ing sheer into deep water with no beach at all. The rock is weathered into fantastic shapes, and there are several natural arches at the water level, through one of which the teams passed. The going was exceedingly rough and the sleds were knocked about a good deal. At one point where the ice was especially lumpy and jagged we went quite a distance out to sea to reach a tempting level stretch, and I thought a little nervously of the advice we had received not on ^uy account to go far from the coast lest a wind should suddenly spring up and take ice and all out, but Chester knew his business and we came safely round the cape, which drops as abruptly to a level at its northern point as it risea from it at its southern. Near the beginning of this picturesque promontory there are several groups of rocks, the profiles of which bear some grotesque human resemblance. Pointing to one of them Chester laughed and said "Old Man Thomson," and that is as near the commissioner of the navy as I could find that anyone on the coast cami> to any of the Arctic eponyms — a word that I have wished more than once had an English equivalent ; and I do not know why we should not reverse "namesake" into "sake-name." How exceedingly fortunate we had been in the weather, and how very local the weather is in the neighbourhood of the cape, we realized an hour later when, on looking back, we could see the wind driving a cloud of snow rght over the cape far out to sea, although it was calm /here we were. It is such winds, coming with hurricane force from KOTZEBUE SOUND TO POINT HOPE 97 the interior platean and dropping suddenly down the steep gullies, that cause the "woollies" so much dreaded both in winter and summer. Only the previous summer a whale boat with a white man and several natives had been lost in this neighbourhood. I have read that th:ii N I V I it came in sacks from somewhere on the Pacific coast, and the sacks in which it was shipped were so rotten (due perhaps to war-time scarcity of jute, or else to the mere common rascality of dealers with which the helpless cus- tomers of the north are so familiar, for which the war merely serves as an unusually good excuse) that fully a third of it had been lost in landing. Since no more could be procured until the next summer, and the supply had been rather closely calculated, it was necessary to exercise a rigid economy. The children sat at their desks in their reindeer parkees and boots; even at the begin- ning of the day in their fur mitts as well; their breath rose in clouds of steam and I bad to let them come in groups of three or four to warm themselves from time to time. Lessons that involved writing were impossible for the first hour or two; the blackboards would be so greasy with rime from the condensation of breath as to be unusable could numbed fingers have held the chalk; so that reading lessons always occupied the first period. Children more docile or more eager to learn I never knew, and some of them were qnite as intelligent as any children of their ages I have ever taught. But the diffi- culties of giving instruction in an unknown tongue, often with regard to entirely unknown and unimagined things, are very great. The best plan for such a school is to have a native assistant for the younger children who can translate into their own language the names of things, and I did constantly so employ one or other of the elder pupils, which was not entirely fair to them. I am amused when I read in an Arctic school report that the native assistant having fallen sick or died or gone off to get married, or in some way become unavail- able, the teacher thinks that the speaking of English is "really advanced by his absence." It doubtless is, but the understanding of English is quite another matter. The ordinary primers and readers, dealing as they do with scenes and objects utterly foreign, have been super- seded, in part, in the government schools, by a series M Ij f POINT HOPE 117 written especially for Eskimos, but not, I thought, spe- dalljr well done. In one of them the children were in- structed about seals, for instance, by a writer who knew much less of those interesting mammals than the chil- dren themselves. Yet for beginners I should deem them preferable to the ordinary "outside" books we used at Point Hope. Here was a lesson on "A Day in the Woods," and here were children who never saw a tree growing in their lives and who made no mental connec- tion whatever between the bleached dead trunks washed up at times on their shore and the green umbrageousness of the pictures. Most of these children, I am sure, thought of driftwood as a marine product like seaweed. It was, of course, eminei,tly desirable that they should be set right, but hardly that such correction should attend their first steps in English. The distinction between "b's" and "p's" was an al- most insurmountable difficulty, lingering even with the oldest scholars. One bright little chap, struggling with such exotic matter as I have referred to, and striving for utterance in phrases instead of disconnected single words, after long cogitation delivered himself thus: "They— got— the water: from— the bump." Poor little chap! "Bump" and "pump" were all the same to him; they got their water by melting the ice of a lake five miles from the village. In the spring and early summer the pinnacles of the jagged sea-ice on the shore grow fresh enough for use, the salt draining out to the lower layers, but all the winter through they must take the dogs and go five miles for water. Bound a provident igloo you will see the fresh-water ice stacked up for future use like stove-wood round a cabin in the interior. The "p" and "b" difficulty is just as great with the natives of the interior. Shortly before I left Fort Yu- kon I had a letter from the chief of the Ketchumstocks, a remote band between Eagle and the Tanana Crossing which I had visited the previous winter, written by the hand of a youth who had had some schooling at the m 118 A WINTEB CI'ICUIT h m m 'A 1 M former place, and it ran, in part, thus: "Archdeacon, please bray for me; me no good bray; all the time plenty like speak but no sabe; you all the time strong bray; please bray for me" — and I present it with my compli- ments to some who may not be displeased with this view of the "archdiaconal functions." Simple, kindly, tract- able folk, whether of the interior or of the coast, groping in dim half-light that shall brighten more and more unto the perfect day, my heart long ago went out to them, and I am sorry for anyone who can find nothing to touch him in the chief's letter but the blunder of his amanuensis. With the older scholars, most of whom were of the church choir and sang with enthusiashi a goodly collec- tion of chants and hymns, I found what e-perience had led me to expect : that readiness in the reading and pro- nouncing of English was no index to the understanding of the same. Here was a boy of sixteen, reading in an American history of the old prejudiced sort that we have lately grown somewhat ashamed of, but that served him quite as well as the most impartial chronicle could have done ; reading as /;libly as you please, so that I was grati- fied at his apparent attainments. When the first day I taught him he read that "the flag was raised to the ac- companiment of thunders of artillery and the strains of martial mu •■j" I stopped him more from force of habit I think, than from any real doubt that he understood, and asked what "artillery" meant? He did not know; nor did he know what "martial music" meant; and the thing that made me sorry and distrustful was that he did not seem to care much whether he knew or not, though proud of his ability to read so well. Then presently he went on, "King George threatened to hang our parrots" (for patriots) without flinching at the blunder, and I re- flected that in any hanging of parrots Point Hope could not be overlooked. As soon as iie wrote anything at all of his own composition, the poverty of his English ap- peared. It is the same old story: the facility with which a cer- POINT HOPE 110 tain even accurate reading of a language may be ac- quired compared with the difficulty of a real knowledge and understanding of it; the story of John Milton grow- ing blind teaching his daughters to read Greek and Latin aloud to him without knowing what they read. If there were this contented failure to grasp the meaning of sim- ple narrative prose, what about the somewhat involved meaning, and what it is the fashion to call "archaic" diction, of verse? And if these best-instructed youths failed in appreciation of what they sang, what about the rest of the congregation! The inevitable answers to these questions— and I would, with all respect, press them upon such as are concerned with them — did but fortify exceedingly my conviction that the mother tongue is the only adequate vehicle for worship, and I am en- couraged to believe that the clergyman in charge at this place, of sufficient linguistic training and scholastic habit, now that he is relieved of the school by an assist- ant, will set about gaining such a knowledge of the Es- kimo language as shall enable him to translate the liturgy and hymnody of the Church into it, if not the Scriptures themselves. He would raise hunself a monument more durable than brass thereby. There must be extensive Greenland translations that would be of great assistance, and I know that there are fragments of the Scriptures on this coast and at Herschel Island. Let me say emphatically that in all this criticism of the attainments of the children is intended no slightest reflection upon those who have taught them. For much the most of the ten years past, and for all of the eighteen years before that, we have had one lone man here. Did I feel that despite this disclaimer there could linger in any reasonable mind a thought that my remarks involve disparagement of men whose labours I honour, I would strike out all this section about the school entirely, though indeed my chief purpose is to illustrate the need of a teacher who shall be exclusively a teacher. On the 7th January the storm abated after a solid ,1 120 A WINTER CIRCUIT It week of the most continuous bitter weather I ever experi- enced in my life, and that day at noon the children joy- fully cried out, "The sunt the sunt" Looking out of the window, there he was, a ruddy globe on the horizon, very pleasant to see after a month's absence. By the local calendar he should have returnt J on the 4tb, but the air had been too full of driving snow to see him until today. When I had become well acquainted with the children and the weather had moderated, I used to take walks down to the village and round about it with some of the boys, who gave me the name of the occupant of each habi- tation and strove very hard to impart general informa- tion, so that I was soon able to "mark well her bulwarks and tell all the towers thereof." We strolled through the long-abandoned, ruined part, and the boys said, pointing to the old mounds, "No flour, no sugar, no tea; just only seal-meat and fish," in commiseration of the hard case of their ancestors. Out upon the ice we went and there sat a man jigging for tpsucod through a hole, with a considerable pile of the little fellows frozen be- side him. "My father," said one of the boys, and then added with pride, "councilman," and I was glad for this evidence of civic spirit. Before we had left there came an Eskimo hauling a dead seal behind him, the little three- legged stool on which he had sat, maybe for hours, be- side its blow-hole, strapped to his back, together with his gun and gafl and other implements, a common enough sight in these parts ; and the boys began eagerly to tell me which of themselves had killed seals. When we were at the extreme end of the spit I noted that it was the most westerly longitude that I had ever reached, or on this journey should reach, within a degree and a half of the most westerly point of America, and within thirteen de- grees of the meridian at which west longitude changes to east longitude on our maps ; in latitude we were well past the 68th parallel ; so that I was at once further west and further north than I had ever been before. On another occasion I had with me Kerawak, my pet I'OIXT riOPK- ri(;c;IN<; HIR TOMCOI), Til. little- ml „i, a r„l,. i. „„,j ,„ i„,p ,|„. |„,|„ (,„ ,„, Ill ')!f 'I! -ii [ m POINT HOPE in malamnte, and as I saw him dig in the beach and carry Bomething from the place in his mouth, I called him to find what it wag. I know not when I have been more sur- prised than to find it was a stgMsh. The last star-flsh I had seen was on the shore of the Oulf of Mexico, and I had always associated them with tropical, or at least, temperate, waters and knew not t they inhabited the Arctic Ocean also. Most people ink of the Arctic Ocean as remote and different from me other waters of the world, so different in all respects as to set it in a class by itself, and I had shared this impression in large degree. Yet here was this little dead creature proclaim- ing the contrary, proclaiming the same waters and the same inhabitants as all the other oceans and seas. Each of its radiating arms seemed to claim connection and kinship with some great body of water and the life that swarmed in it : this with the Atlantic, this with the Pacific this with the Indian Ocean, this with the Antarctic, and once again I was struck with the fundamental unity of things underlying all superficial diversity. While thus ruminating, intending to carry the little dried specimen home as a memento, Kerawak grabbed it from my hand and ate it up. It was his, I suppose, since he found it, and there is not much in the animal world inedible to a mala- mnte dog— he needed no lesson to teach him that view of the essential unity of things. A little later I was sur- prised to find crabs so common as to be a regular article of diet. I knfeWTFat the survivors of Greely's expedi- tion lived on shrimps, hut I did not know that crabs crawled in these waters. I have mentioned the well-selected mission library. It was a pleasure to find so many good books on the shelves, and I am glad to vary my steady diet of Gibbon with a re-reading of much of Motley, several volumes of Piske, Justin McCarthy's History of Our Own Times and Vic- tor Hugo 's History of a Crime. I remember when I used to think Les Miserables the greatest novel ever written, but a matnrer acquaintance with Hugo finds more to repel •i r J 122 A WINTKR CIRCmX than attract. The bombaBt and egotism of the History of a Crime, the declamation, the pose, the ever-present self-conscionsnees, had the effect mainly of aronsing my sympathy for Napoleon III; had much the same sort of effect on me that the reading of John Knox's History of the Church of Scotland had on John Wesley. But the prize of the library was a volume of some considerable value, I judge, from a collector's point of view — Pierce Egan's Life in London with coloured prints by Qeorge Cruiksbank. The discovery of this book brought back my boyhood very vividly, for I once heard Qeorge Cruikshank give a temperance lecture (which I have completely forgotten) and was taken up at its close to shake hands with the veteran caricaturist and reformer, a little, wizened but most vivacious old man who danced about the platform; which I remember very well indeed. Upon our walls at home hung some of his clever prints, full of action and character, and I was keen to meet the man who had drawn them. Here in the Arctic regions it was strange to come upon his work again, and the roistering high life which Pierce Egan depicts with so much gusto, with its Corinthian Tom, its Vauxhall, its Tattersall's, struck mo chiefly, I think, from a sense of its wild incongruity with my present surroundings. Here was its fulsome dedication to "the accomplished gentle- man, the profound and elegant scholar, the liberal and en- lightened prince, George IV," then newly come to Ihe throne; God save the mark! — one grew more grateful upon reading it to Beau Brummel for the delicious impu- dence of "Who's your fat friend?" How narrowly the English crown escaped ruin from that rake's wearing! Let me write it down to his credit, however, that Beechey declares that the voyages of Parry and the first of Frank- lin owed much to his "enlightened encouragement," and take hope that this also is not mere adulation fi„m the circumstance that George IV was dead when it was written. But again it was interesting to reflect that in meeting George Cruikshank I had been in tench with a POINT HOPE 123 man who was born before Louis XVI was piUlotined- whose hfe and mine together bridged the gap between the French and the Russian rovolutiona, between the Jacobins and the Bolsheviki. I wonder how that book came to Point Hope! I should like to write an essay some day upon books I have come across in most out-of- the-way places. I find it noted on the 13th January that the sun was above the horizon for fully two hours, although he is not visible at all untU the 4th; so quickly does he climb once he reappears On that day Walter and Mr. Thomas skinned a seal. Hitherto we had bought them skinned, for the current price of a medium-sized seal, $3, is re- duced a dollar if the vendor keep the skin, and as we used only the flesh for dog-feed, and bar', no use for the skins, we had bought them ready to cut up. But it was characteristic of Walter that, thinking from the- accounts we had received of the scarcity of dog-feed to the north Jf ''kely .ve might have to go sealing ourselves by ^^l I <. **^ °""" ^°^^' ^^ ^^^""^ '° familiarize himself with the flensing, which differs from the skinning of land animals. Thomas also had bought his seals flensed, but. reody as Walter for any new experience that would im- pr« his Arctic competence, joined in the task. The skiL must be removed, if possible, before the carcass freezes, and without cutting into the thick layer of blub- ber just beneath it. The latter is no easy job, nor was It successfully performed ; and the two men, and the back kitchen where the deed was done, reeked with blood and oil. Walter had it set down in his diary that day, "Mr Thomas and I skinned a seal, the archdeacon stood arcmd and made remarks"— which I certainly did- never was kitchen in a filthier, viler mess; the stuff froze on the fioor before it could be removed and for days I slipped about on it. About the middle of January came a wandering fur- buyer, long used to traffic on this coast, gathering up skins which might escape, or for which he might outbid, J Si I - ^'1 124 A WINTER CIBCTJIT the local trader*, and intending further travel above a* far at Icy Capo or Wainwright; of iome AnBtrian ex- traction or other, I think, and though moat of bii life resident in America retaining hii original broken Eng- ^ liih despite an immense volubility. An expansive, jovial, gross sort of man, full of news and stories, carrying everything with grent heartiness and self-assurance, I can yet hear his guffaws of boisterous hilarity breaking in upon our studious seclusion and rising above the Arc- tic gale. The news which he had of the war, two weeks later than we had brought with us, wag sti^ grave and unfavourable. According to him the Germtins and Aus- trians were overrunning Italy: — "Dem Dagoes now got to eat sauerkraut instead of macaroni." In such wise came word to the Arctic coast of the invasion that fol- lowed the disaster of Caporetto. To a direct question he was loyal, but ho was not shedding any tears over the fate of "dem Dagoes." We entertained him— and he entertained us. After dinner our usual work lapsed altogether while we laughed at his anecdotes and reminiscences. One of them about a trader on the coast I thought exceedingly funny. This man, an Englishman from a ship, I think, was entirely illiterate when he started in business, though, to his great credit, he afterwards tanght himself to read and write and keep books. But at first he used a system of signs and hieroglyphics for the articles he dealt in that no one but himself could understand, and himself some- times mistook. He had charged a customer for a cheese and the customer denied the charge. "But it's down 'ere," said the trader, pointing to a circle or a section of cylinder by which it was symbolized. "1 don't care," said the customer, "I ain't had no cheese and I ain't going to pay for none!" "Well, what did you get any- way!" "I got a grindstone you ain't charged me for." "Oh sure, that's it; it's a grindstone; I forgot to put in the 'ole!" Pursuing his quest further north, intending to reach THK THRKK AT THt: POIM' HUPK MISSION'. {Ffi.iu a (■liMt..Krapli mjji- jt Dawi^.n a irar ariJ a half l>eUf.) I i ft' ■isi. POINT HOPE 125 Icy Cape or Wainwright Inlet, our visitor departed and we were left to the even tenor of our tasks till the mail arrived on the 19th from Point Barrow. Three times in the winter a mail leaves Point Barrow for Kotzebue by dog-team and returns to Point Barrow, taking about a month each way, a very welcome break in the monotony of that long season. Since the only regular mail of the summer above Kotzebue is that carried by the revenue cutter, the dwellers on the coast are really better off as to communication with the world in the winter than in the summer. The maU brought word of bad travelling and great scarcity of dog-feed. I had been casting about for guidance to Point Barrow ever since we arrived, but without much success. Not only was there no one anjdous to go, but the expense of procuring a man and a team (he would need a team for the return) would be very considerable, and there was the scarcity of dog-feed to consider. It was suggested that we follow the mail, which in two or three weeks would return from Kotzebue on its way north, and con- tinue our journey with it, thus dispensing with a special guide, and this seemed the most likely plan. Mr. Thomas talked of accompanying us as far as Icy Cape, which is more than halfway. The fine new sled was made, some of the elder school- boys having helped for the instruction in carpentering. It was built along coast lines, the runners extending well to the rear that the driver may stand upon them, and a vertical bow or hoop, which the hands may conveniently grasp while so standing, replacing the handlebars. Such a model is of little use in the deep snow of the interior, where the leverage of the handlebars is necessary for swinging the sled from side to side continually, with which operation, moreover, the extended runners would greatly interfere; it is a model that has grown out of the coast conditions and needs, and is admirably suited to them. There was a convenient toolshop and workshop at the mission— which, like aU the rest of the estabUsh- ]26 A ■WINTER CIBCUIT I) i'i ment, would be much more useful to the natives were it nearer their abodes— and this served for everything but the steaming of the bent portions of the woodwork, an operation which must be conducted where continuous heat was available, and when this stage of construction was reached the kitchen was continually invaded by in- genious contrivances for the application of steam, and the whole house hung with pieces of wood constrained by ligatures to the retention of the curve which had thus been given them. Walter's desire for a polar bear was almost matched by Mr. Thomas's, and on several occasions they snatched some hours to wander on the sea-ice. I took it upon my- self to prohibit such excursions except under Eskimo guidance, which may have been an excess of caution, but I esteemed them as not without danger in the darkness, the almost constant wind, the total absence of landmarks. "With the rapid shifting of the wind that we had several times ob^ierved, it was not necessary to recall the cases we had neard of in which men had been carried out to sea with the pack, to realize that there was risk in ex- tended wandering. One evening there came word that a polar bear had been seen crossing the sandspit, and since there was a good moon and it was comparatively calm, the two of them decided to make a night of it. An old experienced Eskimo having been secured, they sallied forth about ten o'clock, leaving me sole occupant of the house, who was under no temptation to accompany them. I have come to the conclusion that I am lacking in what seems amongst writers in "outdoor" magazines the chief claim nowadays to any distinction, the possession of "red blood." I suppose Jack London is the literary father of all such, though ii.c- vein he worked is but an off- shoot from that main modem impulse-giver. Bud- yard Kipling, the wide extent of whose influence is con- tinually appearing in unexpected quarters. I do not think Sir Walter Scott ia his generation, or Carlyle in J*' POINT HOPE 127 ho next, had as great general influence amongst his con- temporaries. By how much Kipling has sped, and by how much has merely spoken, the spirit and thought of the times, would be a valuable enquiry, and it must bo remembered that the stories that have had most effect were written thirty years, and almost the last of the vet more potent verse, full twenty years ago. While far from charging Kipling with Jack London's crudities and brutalities, I yet think the influence of the master may be sjn in his works enough to warrant the relation of dis- At any rate this "red blood" distinction has become as much an obsession as "blue blood" ever was, and, as tar as I can gather, it means simply a pleasure in shed- ding blood, pleasure at the sight of blood. Without it no effort however strenuous, no endurance, however pro- longed, TO pursuit, however resolute and single-eyed, can rescue a man from the character of effeminacy. The stockbrokers' clerks, who, I am told, constitute the chief subscribers to these "red-blooded" magazines, plume themselves upon their unchallengeable manliness when they have slaughtered a deer in Maine or Vermont- their employers claim an altogether super-manliness if they fall a moose in Nova Scotia, while the Napoleons of finance themselves are as proud of a Kadiak bear as of a wrecked railroad. Since I am quite sure I have no blue blood, and these gentlemen would deny me red I suppose mine must be green, for perhaps no man ever had better opportunities of killing North American big game-moose, caribou, mountain sheep and bears-and killed none. Pleasure in watching these animals in their haunts, pleasure in their gility and strength and beauty, I have often enjoyed, bu. there is no pleasure to me in destroying all these fine qualities at a blow from a "reek- ing tube" in my hand, no pleasure in watching the con- vulsive throbs and the terror-stricken eyes of a splen-Jid beast m his death agonies, but rather strong repulsion I have no objection to eating of the spoils of the chase f I; I i 128 A WINTER CIRCUIT and have always been fortunate enough to have m my company one who was eager to provide them. There is, however, some slight element of danger in huntmg a polar bear even with modern repeating rifles which gives a zest to it that I can understand; a zest quite wantmg in the killing of moose and caribou. What I lacked in this respect Walter and Mr. Thomas quite abundantly made up, so they went off to track the polar bear and left me alone in the house. The night be- fore we had talked much of Dr. Driggs, his long work here and its miserable end. There is no doubt that his solitary residence had told upon him and that he had be- come mentally unbalanced, and little doubt that towards the last he had addicted himself to the use of drugs. 1 cannot see any good in hushing up such matters Oo acclaim a man for years a hero m the high-flown manner of missionary publications, and then suddenly drop him and mention him no more at all, is likely to rouse a suspicious bewilderment that is worse than the commiseration that would follow a knowledge of the facts. That he was mentally unbalanced his eccen- tric doings and sayings establish, and tha he fell lat- terly into a use of stimulants, I thmk very likely. Any- one who has spent eighteen years alone in the Arctic regions and has retained his full faculties and self-con- trol is entitled to throw the first stone at his memory, I think and no one else. It became necessary to remove him, there is uo question about that; and ^f e can be no question in the minds of those who know the Bishop of Alaska that it was done with all gentleness and tender- ness and consideration. I warrant he had rather have cut his hand off than do it, but, as we say in the north, "he had it to do." But Dr. Driggs took it ill; refused to accept his pas- sage out and retiring in dudgeon some twenty miles fur- ther up the coast made his residence with an Eskimo fam- ily venturing a little income of his own in a native whal- ing enterprise. It is said that whenever the weather per- POINT HOPE 129 mitted he would continually walk the beach, looking towards the sandspit which had been his home so long, muttering and gesticulating. Here, some years later, he fell very ill. Word of his plight came to his successor at Point Hope on the wings of a gale that denied return against it for some days, and when it was possible to travel he was found already dead. The change at Point Hope from the conditions de- scribed by Lieutenant Commander Stockton to those which now prevail, is largely the result of Dr. Drigg's la- bours, and if I were erecting monuments on the Arctic coast, the first would be on the summit of Cape Prince of Wales to the memory of Harrison Thornton of Virginia, martyr, and the next would be on the sandspit at Point Hope to John Driggs, M. D., of Maryland. I should like to tell something of the stories I gathered about the drunken, despotic, polygamous chief, Ah-ten-o^f-rah, who ruled this community by terror in those early days, whose hands were red with the blood of many of his people and who was at last killed as the result of a con- spiracy. It is said that the principal men of the place, to rid themselves of a ruflBan of whom they were all afraid, drew lots who should despatch him, and that the one on whom the lot fell shot at him through the seal-gut window of his igloo, knowing where the old man was wont to lie, and that one of his wives who was in the plot plunged a knife into him as soon as he had been shot. His grave stands separate from all the rest, marked by two gigantic jawbon of whales, the largest, it is said, ever killed by Point Hope people. All the above-the- ground graves have of late years been removed, the bones gathered and buried within an enclosure fenced around by the most singular fence in the world, I think— of whales' jawbones. But the bloody, defiant, old heathen's body was not admitted within the consecrated precincts, and lies outside, marked by two jawbones that tower over all the rest. It was into such scenes that Dr. Driggs entered when M ii; 130 A WINTER CIRCUIT he landed at Point Hope and started a school. How very slowly and gradually he made an impression upon the people and, little by little, won their confidence and respect; how many times his own life was in danger; how many times his hopes were dashed, his efforts seem- ingly in vain; how at length he began to prevail until he was able to lead the people whither he would; these things must be imagined by those who are not willing to dig them out of many years' brief contributions to missionary publications. I am able to put my hand upon one disinterested tribute to Dr. Driggs. The ex- plorer Mikkelsen (of whom more later) wrote in 1907: "He is beloved in the village, and the young men and women look upon him as a father who does all he can to make the people for whom he has sacrificed his life a useful and self-dependent race."* My mind was full of these things, and especially full of Dr. Driggs, his faithful labour and his miserable end, when the two young men went polar bear hunting and left me alone in the house. I read awhile in a desultory way and then went to bed. Meanwhile the wind had risen again and whistled and whined about the house, and a loose dog, I think, had crept for shelter between the floor and the ground and made strange noises. Again and again after I had put out my light I started up in bed thinking that I heard footsteps below. Most stairs creak when they are trodden upon, but some have the miserable habit of creaking without being trodden upon, and the mission house stairs were of that kind. Frequently I was sure I heard someone coming upstairs and entering the little room across the hall from mine. I listened and listened— and lay down again, already creepy and afraid. But my mind instead of composing itself to sleep brought up visions of the old doctor, in ragged and dishevelled Arctic attire, pacing the beach near Cape Lisbume, rais- ing his clenched hand against Point Hope and those who had dispossessed him. I was taken with the notion that • CoHftMrmy the Arctic Ice, p. 373. POINT HOPE in he would not lie quiet until liis bones had been translated to the place where his life work was done. Presently I dozed off and dreamed, and the same haggard figure rose before me, grew gigantic and ghastly, gnashing its teeth and slavering, and I started awake with the feeling that someone was entering my room. Looking at the door in the faint light that filtered from the moon through double sashes obscured by encrusted snow, I was certain that it was movmg, that very slowly it was opening, and then that someone, something, was in the room with me. The wailing of the wind took a tone of human despair that pierced my excited brain and for awhUe I lay in an agony of fright, utterly unncr\-ed and abject. I suppose there are others who can remember similar visitations of sense- less terror in the watches of the night, even since their childhood, but tliis was the most vivid and unnerving ex- perience of the kind I have ever had. I have not con- sciously tried to heighten it, but only to describe what it requires no effort a year after to recall. I never saw Dr Dnggs m life, but the unshaven, dishevelled, minatory figure in greasy ragged furs of my dream, is stamped in- delibly on my mind. Presently I recovered myself, but with a resolution that I would never be left alone at night in that house again. And I should really like to know that Dr. Dnggs 's body had been translated. The hunters returned in the morning empty-handed having taken refuge in a little hut built on the bank of one of the lagoons as a resort for fowling in the summer, which they happened to be near when the wind arose and where they spent a miserable night although it was provided with a stove and some fuel. They had been as sleepless as I. I have lingered at Point Hope beyond my intent, though, I am afraid, not beyond my habit. So many in- teresting things crowd to my mind from the suggestions m my diary that I could fill this book without leaving l-oint Hope, granted a reasonable discursiveness- and it IS hard to realize that things that appear so interesting .1 132 A WINTER CIRCUIT to me may not have the same appeal to a reader. There is one other incident I should like to record before the gonmey is resumed — one that unfortunately did not in- terest me enough. An excellent little monthly publica- tion of the Bureau of Education at Nome, called The Eskimo, had offered prizes, or was understood to have offered prizes, for English transcriptions of native leg- ends by native hands; and some interest had been ex- cited in the matter at Point Hope. One day while Mr. Thomas was attending to postal matters and I was sit- ting reading The Rise of the Dutch Republic beside him, there entered a young man who had been encouraged to attempt such a transcription, with a manuscript book in his hand. Mr. Thomas was all interest and attention at once and asked me to listen, and the young man began to read. Those who are familiar with Indian and Eskimo legends know their interminable length and monotony. Their chief characteristic seems to be lack of all point and purpose. They have neither beginning, middle, nor end, and, once launched, there seems no reason why they should ever stop. I had heard many similar stories from Indians ; years ago Walter had told me what he remem- bered of them. They have a certain ethnological value for comparison with similar stories from other Eskimo people, from Indians; as giving some slight evidence of common or different origin and perhaps throwing a little light on possible migrations; very slight and not to be built upon at all, I should judge— did not David Living- stone find that the stories he heard around camp fires in South Africa were wonderfully like those told him in his childhood by his Hebridean grandfather!— -yet perhaps giving a measure of corroborative force to some view otherwise sustained. It is partly upon the ground, for instance, of the frequent references to Ar-ki-li-nik in Greenland legends of widely separated tribes, as I un- derstand, that the region northwest of Hudson Bay is regarded by many as the original home of the Eskimos, and the view of a general westerly rather than easterly POINT HOPE 138 migration of these people along tbe north coast of Amer- ica, which seems to prevail in ethnological circles today, is based upon a close examination of many snch stories, and other similar philological evidence of dialects and place-names. Historical or literary interest they have none. I listened for awhile until, through the broken English which at first kept my attention in the effort to nnder- stand, I perceived that this story was of the same old kind. When the man had got up, started a fire, boiled a fish for breakfast and travelled along the coast all day a dozen times over, the thing became a burden, and rather shamefacedly I let my eyes drop to the book in my lap. Motley's heroic Dutchmen at least meaning something and attempting something. I thought I detected a turgid- ness, especially about the early part of Motley, that I had not associated with it upon a reading many years before ; some sort of echo of Carlyle, perhaps f — some influence of the dithyrambs of the French Ee volution t I won- dered if it were so, or if I were growing finical and hyper- critical. Gibbon perhaps spoiling me for any who can- not carry their learning so lightly. I suppose I had been reading half an hour, the voice still wearily droning along, the man still going to bed and arising and cooking his breakfast and his supper, meeting an occasional old woman and exchanging some cryptic remarks with a raven or a hare, rolling stones from the mountain upon the igloos of people who were unkind to him, when, happening to look up, I saw that Thomas was fast asleep in his chair. At the same moment the young man looked up and saw the same thing, and our eyes thereupon meeting, we burst into laughter which woke Thomas to join in our merriment. The good nature of the Eskimo is what struck me most forcibly. There was no chagrin at the result of his laborious literary effort, but merely amusement at Mr. Thomas's expense that it had put him to sleep. It was the same young man who had sent a letter a few days before, beginning in the most formal .1 ii I i 134 A WINTER CIRCUIT way, "Dear Reverend Friend, Sir," and thereupon plunging into the utmogt familiarity with, "Say, Thomas." „. ,. ^ ,. Mr. Thomas had planned visit to Kivalina towards the end of January, hoping then to be free to visit Icy Cape with us, and we decided to accompany him in this preliminary excursion to the south, leaving on the 23rd. It did indeed seem like tempting Providence to put our- selves deliberately south of Cape Thomson agam, but the natives went freely back and forth, taking their chances of detention and making the best of it if it came. It is not necessary to re-describe the journey, but an incident at the close of the first day's run may show the violence of the wind and the difficulties which glare ice may cause. We had reached the vicinity of the capo and were intending to spend the night at an igloo ]ust north of it. Little more thau the width of a lagoon sep- arated us from this habitation, but to cross this lagoon we had to turn ahnost squarely into the wind, which Lad swept and polished the ice so that the dogs could get no footing and therefore could exert no traction. Walter went ahead with a rope tied round his waist and to the harness of the leader. Again and again we were blown right back to the beach, despite all our efforts. Here and there across the quarter of a mile or so of ice were httle patches of hard snow that adhered to its surface. With infinite labour, blowing back two feet for every three feet advanced, we managed to reach the first of those snow- islands. It happened most inopportunely that the ice- creepers, which had not been used before this wiuter but would have been invaluable now, were left behind, and a hasty search in the hand-sack having revealed this, there was nothing for it but to repeat the process until the next patch of snow was reached. Here Walter turned loose two of the dogs which were not only not pulUng— none of them was pulling-but were actually pulling back, and it was funny to see them swept bodily away by the wind, squealing, untU they brought up at a snow patch and t'i NVn RAI. ARUI AT l \I'K THOMPSON. 1 I I, 111 ! m POINT HOPE 136 then stood and howled. While I looked back in amaie- ment and thai turned myself lidewuys to the wind, a lurge black lilk kerchief was whipped out of the pocket on the breast of my psrkee and carried oil instantly and irrecoverably. The wind was not cold, or we could not have faced it at all, but so persistently vioU>nt that it took ns two hours to cross the lagoon from snow patch to snow patch. Mr. Thomas had been unable to cross at all and was preparing to moke such camp as ho could nntil the wind moderated, when Walter, our team safely across, went back to help him while I took my dogs and sled on to the igloo ; and a long while after they reached 1 1 niNo. Had the wind been behind us we should have gone flyii ' before it, but on such glassy surface it is next to im|>ij Ible to make any progress against the wind. The 11 n t I'luming there was wind, but it was fair for doubling til)' I. ape and we passed it with ease, and bad almost the bamc> experience on our return, so that three times that winter we passed and repassed the cape without any troable at all — a piece of good fortune that we were very thankful for. The three days that wo spent at Kivalina as the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Beese, the school-teacher and his wife, were full of interest. The night of our arrival the school- house was crowded with Eskimos and we held service and spoke to the people through the excellent local inter- preter. After the service I was forced again, by the late foolish marriage law of the territorial legislature, into the position of a law-breaker. That law requires a license before any marriage may be solemnized, and a personal application to a United States commissioner before a license can be procured. I do not think the scattered natives entered into the heads of the legis- lators at Juneau when this law was devised, but it is so drawn that it applies to them without exception. Here were three conples waiting to be married ; waiting, that is, in the usual native way ; waiting for the ceremony but not waiting for the cohabitation. One of the couples, a ii 136 A WINTEB CIRCUIT fine young man and woman, had made a journey to Point Hope to get married before Christmas, knowing that there was a clergyman there. But Mr. Thomas had been informed of the new law by the judge at Nome and had been warned not to perform any marriages without a license. Now there is no commissioner at Point Hope and none at Kivalina, and that winter there was none at Kotzebue. The nearest commissioner was at Candle on the Seward peninsula, about 200 miles from Kivalina and nearly 300 from Point Hope j and these are not the native settlements in Alaska most remote from such offidals, so that it will be seen what a hardship this law imposes. Of another couple, the man was a cripple, incapable of the long journey unless he were hauled all the way in a sled, and in the third case a baby was soon expected. It is in the highest degree unwise to make the marriage of natives difficult; it will mean simply the reversion to the old state of things which the missionaries for a gen- eration have been striving to abolish. One of the reasons for my long winter journeys every year is to provide opportunity at remote mission stations where there is no resident clergyman, and amongst the scattered native oommnnities, for the Christian marriage of those who would otherwise have none. I had grave doubts as to the competency of the territorial legislature to pass such a law touching the "uncivilized tribes" of Alaska, who, by the terms of the treaty with Eussia, are the direct wards of the federal government, doubts which the dis- trict attorney whom I consulted shared, but a long and careful letter to the department of justice at Washington remained unanswered and unnoticed, and so remains to this day. I am sorry to say that it seems that the de- partment of justice is too busy with politics in Alaska to attend to little matters like that. Bishop Rowe harl offered during the previous sunomer to make a test case under this law but the district attorney in the interior had repUed that the test would have to be ■■ \ POINT HOPE 137 made in another judicial district as be should decline to prosecute unless ordered to do so from WashingtoD. And that is how the affair stood at the time of whicb I write. The matter has wider bearing than perhaps ap- pears ; it is largely bound up with our wretched system of primary justice. No one would object to the require- ment of a marriage license if the same were easily pro- curable, but under the present system in Alaska it is not possible to provide the necessary facilities. To the best of my knowledge Great Britain and Alaska are the only countries in the world whose magistrates are without stipend. Bnt in the former country is a class of local gentry glad to serve the state without pay for th« honour of the king's commission under the great seal and the authority that it brings, while in the latter the office goes begging, and is often filled by wholly unsuitable persons for lack of any other. Such emolument as attaches to the office accrues from fees, and in remote places, and particularly in native, or predominantly native, settle- ments, the fees are so inconsiderable as to be negligible and the office cannot be filled at all, or only as an ap- panage to some other calling. There is no greater need in Alaska than the abolition of the whole system of un- paid commissioners and the substitution of a body of stipendiary magistrates of churacter and education; which has been pointed out and urged by all those who have considered the matter for the last twenty-five years. Respect for the law is ingrained in me by every cir- sumstance of breeding and bent of mind, and I resent being forced into the position of a law-breaker; but I should have been false to a higher law than that of the Ala'jkan legislature had I passed by and refused the solemnization of matrimony to those anxious for it, with no impediment thereunto, and left them still in concu- binage, leaving children to bear the stigma of illegiti- macy, now just beginning to be felt by our native peo- ples. So that night I laid myself liable to cumulative i I II 138 A WINTER CIRCUIT penalties of fifteen hundred dollars in fines and three years in guol. Besides being school-teacher, Mr. Eeese was roperin- tendent of a large reindeer herd, as is usual with teacher* on the Arctic coast, and since he had held the same offices at a village on the Seward peninsula and was very intel- ligently alive to the needs of the Eskimos and had made special study of the reindeer experiment in particular, I was glad of an opportunity to pick his brains. There is no need, I think, to speak of the domestica- tion of reindeer amongst Eskimos as an experiment any longer; it has been entirely successful; and the man to whose foresight and energetic persistence the introduc- tion of these animals into Alaska is due, must always rank high amongst the practical philanthropists of the world. Dr Sheldon Jackson saw very plainly upon his first visit to the Arctic coast, in 1890 (when the three schools were established that have been referred to), that the economic condition of the Eskimo was critical. The wild caribou that had roamed the coast lands were gone, slaughtered since the introduction of firearms by the whalers ; the whales and other marine animals were rap- idly diminishing. He saw that to establish schools amongst a starving people was useless. He saw more- over that the reindeer herds amongst the nomadic tribes on the Siberian side of Bering Straits gave them an unfailing food supply, and he decided that it would be immensely to the advantage of his own Eskimo charges were they similarly provided. Now the ordinary official thus seeing and deciding would have laid the matter before Congress and would have considered his responsibility thereby ended. Year after year he would have returned to the subject and would have wasted his eloquent pleas on the desert air of reports that no one read. But Dr. Jackson was not an ordinary official. When the first application to Con- gress proved unavailing, he did not sit down and wait. POINT HOPE 139 He knew that nothing succeeds liko success, and that if he could stir public opinion by the sight of something done, on however small a scale, he 'vould have much bet- ter chance of moving Congress to do it on a larger scale. So he appealed for private subscriptions, and succeeded, with the few thousand dollars thus raised, in purchasing a herd of sixteen deer in Siberia and transporting them to Unalaska in the summer of 1891. The next year, Con- gress having again failed to appropriate any moni>y, he bought more deer in the same way and carried them across to the Seward peninsula. And when it was thus proved that live reindeer could be obtained, could be transported, and could thrive on tlic Alaskan toast. Con- gress came tardily forward and appropriated a little money. It now became possible to procure expert herders from Lapland who could impart to Eskimo apprentices the technique of deer raising and herding, and the experiment was thus started towards the success it has attained. There are now some SOfiOO deer ir. Alaska,' the greater part on the Seward peninsula, thougti thi :e are l(«rds as far north as Point Barrow and some in the interior aa far up the Yukon as Holy Cross. They have not, as yet, done as well in the in*erior as on the roast, nor does it seem likely that they will, but there is no longer any ques- tion about the great blessing th*y have brought to the Eskimos. In the last year or so the Lapps have been permitted to sell the herds they have gradually Hc