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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
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/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)
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A APPLIED IM/1GE Inc
^r 1 65 J EqsI Mom Slreel
'^ Rocftesler, New rork U609 USA
(7161 <a2 - OJOO - Phone
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[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"
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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<t
nigged eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea is subject to
just such sudden violent winds.
There followed a succession of the long lagoons that
had already become familiar to ns and that were to
become much more so; they are the chief characteristic
of the whole Arctic coast of Alaska. We passed over
them quickly and coldly, for an air began to move against
us, and were presently at the deserted whaling station
of Jahbertown, with its deserted schoolhouse, five miles
from Point Hope. Just as it grew really dark a tiny
light sprang up dead ahead, and we kept a straight course
for it over the bare level tundra until we t^me to the
mission house and the glad welcome tjiat awaited us, Sat-
urday the 22nd December. Our first objective point was
reached, the first grand stage of our journey was accom-
plished, within the allotted time.
m
POINT HOPE
m
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POINT HOPE
Pbom the point of view of cold-blooded, scientiflo
philanthropy, though of course not from any Christian
point of view, it is possible to contend that the little,
remote, heathen peoples of the world were better left en-
tirely to themselves, if such continual isolation were any
way practicable. But it is not, and those who plead for
it know perfectly well that It is not. The trader, the
beach-comber and the squaw-man have always been hard
upon the heels of the explorer. No sooner had Vitus
Bering discovered the Aleutian Islands than the Kam-
chatka "promyshlcniks" began their devastating in-
tercourse with the natives which ended in the destruc-
tion of the greater part of them and would probably have
depopulated the islands but for the vigorous efforts of
the great missionary Veniaminoff, whose impassiond
intervention on behalf of the Aleuts recalls the memory
of the heroic Las Casas and the ceaseless battle which
he waged against the oppression of the Indian three cen-
turies before.
Fourteen years after Cook discovered the Sandwich
Islands, Vancouver found them the resort of "a banditti
of renegadoes that had quitted different trading vessels
in consequence of disputes with their respective com-
manders,"* and had "forgotten the rules which hu-
manity, justice and common honesty prescribe"— Por-
tuguese, Genoese, Chinese, English and Americans. The
same commander, a magnanimous and kindly spirit,
g.-iws so indignant over "the very unjustifiable conduct
of the traders" t on the shores of the Alexander archi-
• VoncoKcCT-'. Voj/aget, Vol. 6, p. 112.
t/»M., Vol. «, p. 37. ■ e '"■■
101
in
A WINTEB ciBcurr
p«Iago that nowada^v the local newipapen would oar-
tainly denouDce snoh a writer ai "alandering the white
men of AiaRk.. "
The remotest and last diaoovered people of the earth,
the "Blonde" or Copper Eikimoi, about whom the
newspaper* grew so sensational a few year* ago, have
already suffered an invasion of the same sort, and when
I was at Herschel Island I saw a degenerate Russian
Jew serving a sentence at the Northwest Mounted Police
PMt— not because he had outraged these simple, sturdy
folk, but because he had impudently violated the Cana-
dian customs laws in doings so.
But one need not go out of these western waters for
overwhelming testimony to the havoc wrought by white
men. When John Muir made the cruise of the Corwin
In 1881 he found that the inhabitants of St. Matthew's
Island, to the number of several hundreds, had "died of
Btarvation caused by abundance of rum which rendered
them careless about the laying up of ordinary supplies
of food for the winter," • and on St. Lawrence Island
nearly a thousand people had died, we know from other
sources, of the same cause. "The scene was indescrib-
ably ghastly and desolate. The shrunken bodies with
rotting iurs on them, or white, bleaching skeletons,
picked bare by the crows, were lying mixed with kitchen-
midden rubbish where they had been cast out by surviv-
ing relatives while they had yet strength to carry
them."t
Shall the primitive peoples of the earth know nothing
of the white man save of the "banditti of renegadoes"
which quickly infests newly-discovered shores! Shall
Buoh reckless and unprincipled wastrels work their will
unhindered f Shall drunkenness and lust and fraud and
trickery and violence be the only teaching received from
the white man's "civilization"! I am content to rest
the cause of missions upon the inevasible answer to that
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POINT HOPE
108
questioii, — content, that is, for the present writing; for
anyone who is read ever so little in the history of ex-
ploration knows that word of newly-found tribes brings
a flock of predatory bipeds jnst as surely as the scent of
new carrion brings a flock of vultures.
It was a letter written in the year 1889 by Lieutenant
Commander Stockton, U. S. N., now rear-admiral on
the retired list and President of George Washington
University, who had just returned from an Arctic
cruise, which started missionary work amongst these
western Eskimos. He was touched by the degraded
condition in which he found them, and he wrote to
Dr. Sheldon Jackson, then Special Agent for Alaskan
Education, pleading that something might be done for
them.
I cannot put my hand upon a History of Whaling full
of graphic pictures and interesting details, that I picked
up at an old book store in Boston — and am so situated
that if I cannot put my hand upon a book it is not within
three hundred miles of me and probably not within a
thousand. Sydney Smith's complaint about his York-
shire residence that it was "actually twelve miles from
a lemon" loses its point up here. Some passer-by, I
think, must have been attracted by that book's graphic
pictures and interesting details also. Whaling, however,
began north of Bering's Straits well before the middle
of the last century, and, I think, very shortly after the
publication of Beechey's narrative in 1831, in which he
mentions the whales of these waters ; and just as the fur
of the sea-otter was the object of desire that brought
about the ruin of the Aleutian islanders, so whalebone
was the curse of the Arctic Eskimos. Collinson in the
Enterprise, returning from the Franklin search in 1854,
finds whaling in full swing, and writes that "ram and
brandy were the articles most coveted by the natives in
exchange for their furs and walras-teeth."
The first craise of a revenue cutter above Bering's
Straits was that of the Corwm in 1880, and it may be
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104
A WINTER CIRCUIT
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gathered that the early cruises of revenue cutters did
not bring much protection to the natives. There are
stories still to pick up along the west coast of liquor car-
ried by such craft and of eager profitable trading by
both officers and men. At any rate, for thirty or forty
years the whalers wiih crews of the sweepings of San
Francisco had unchecked, almost unnoticed, scope to
work their will along the coast. Point Hope was one of
their chief resorts, for trading, for securing native hands
to replace deserters or eke out their scanty companies,
and often, beyond question, for procuring native women
to serve the uses of officers and men ; this last sometimes
by liquor and cajolery, sometimes by simple kidnap-
ning.
Beechey was the first white man to land at Point Hope
and to come in contact with its natives. The under-
ground habitations were, however, deserted save for a
few old men and women and children, — the men gone on
their hunting excursions; "some were blind, others de-
crepit, and, dressed in greasy, worn-out clothes, they
looked perfectly wretched." He describes "the heaps
of filth and ruined habitations, filled with stinking
water." I have never seen an Eskimo village in the
summer-time, but I knew how abominable an Indian vil-
lage can become when the melting snow brings the ordure
and garbage of winter to life. If, as I suspect, though
the narrative is not clear, Beechey landed on the north
side of the point, he would pass through the abandoned
part of the village, which has been so long abandoned
that I could find no knowledge of the time when it was
occupied. It is now a quarry for Eskimo antiquities as
well as a sort of coal mine, for I often saw men digging
around it and removing the upper layers of soil, satu-
rated with immemorial blubber and seal-oil, for fuel. I
procured a number of relics of the "Ipanee Eskimo" as
they are called— Eskimo as they lived before their cus-
toms and habits had been modified in any way, but many
of these relics were so decayed as to crumble and fall to
i f
POINT HOPE
lOB
pieces before I got them home. There is a small market
for such wares in passing ships, enough to stimulate ex-
cavation.
It was not until 1890 that the first missionary estab-
lishments were set up on this coast, at Cape Prince of
Wales, at Point Hope and at Point Barrow simulta-
neously, at the joint charges of the Bureau of Educa-
tion, and the Congregational, the Episcopn! aud the Pres-
byterian churches respectively. The chief praise for
the work lies with that remarkable man Dr. Shelc ^n
Jackson, whose appointment to the educational supt
inttndency of Alaska was so wise and fit as to seem acu-
dental to our system when compared with the first ap-
pointment of other officials in this territory.
Of the two men who went to Cape Prince of Wales,
one, H. B. Thornton, was murdered by drunken natives
two years later; the other, William T. Lopp, after twenty
years' service at the place, occupies Dr. Sheldon Jack-
son's post of superintendent today with zeal and success.
To Point Hope there went a physician, John B. Driggs,
who was in residence for eighteen years.
I had ample leisure to acquaint myself with Point
Hope. The place itself, indeed, called for no very long
investigation to describe it adequately; it is perhaps as
dreary and desolate a spot as may be found on earth.
Beechey's "low land, jetting out from the coast to the
w.n.w. as far as the eye could reach" is a sandspit about
sixteen miles long, broad at its base and tapering to its
extremity, where it finally crooks itself downward to a
narrow point, something as a forefinger might be crooked
whence its native name "Ti^-a-ra," whioh, like KivaUna'
has lost a final "k."
The level sand and gravel, in places covered with
growth of moss and grass, but much of it quite bare, is
invaded by lagoons communicating with the ocean, 'so
that much of the whole area of the peninsula is gutted
out. At the mission there is a fifty or sixty-foot scaf-
folding of a tower which carries the bell and serves as
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^"^ A WINTER CIRCUIT
a post of observation.* From its summit a good part of
the pemnsula is ^^sible, but not the whole, nor do I think
there is any point nearer than Cape Thomson to the south
or Cape Lisburne to the north which would give a full
view .nd they too far off for any detail. Cape Thomson
twenty-five miles to the south, is the western termination
of the most northerly spur of the Endicotts, which are
in fact, the Rocky Mountains; the same range which lifts
Its white peaks around Coldfoot on the Koyukuk, so that
we had now flanked the western extremity of those moun-
tains. Cape Lisburne is the western tenni-.iai.ion of a
range that stretches down obliquely from the northern
coast. The country between these elevations seems to
form a natrral chute for the northeast blizzards that pre-
vail daring the winter, and Ij-ing thus at the mouth of
the chute the barren sandspit is swept by gales of a pro-
longed ferocity tlu t we who knew only the forested in-
terior of Alaska had no experience to match. From
the 1st to the 8th January, 1918, without, I think, a mo-
ment's cessation, day or night, a raging blast prevailed
from that quarter, with the thermometer at 15° to 30°
below zero F., and that was only one of many storms
during our six or seven weeks at the place. At what rate
the wind blow I could not guess. There had been several
installations of an r.nemometer at the mission, and the
interior mechanism yet remained, but the vane had been
blown off every time. If the reader will add to these
violent, persistent winds, first the driving snow and sand
with which they are charged, then the cold that accom-
paaies them, and then the darkness, at a season when
the sun does not rise above the horizon at all, he will un-
derstand that any continuous travel against them is out
of the question, and that even to be outdoors upon neces-
sary occasions while they rage is fm.aght with discom-
fort and difficulty, no* to say danger. Storms we have
m the mterur; in certain regions, and especially in cer-
Io^g''wintir* ''"""* ""* " "" "'""™ *'""' » » ""'^-^ tie M-
POINT HOPE 107
tain reaches of rivers, high winds that blow for many
hours in one direction, but nothing that I have known in
ten years of winter travel comparable to these awful
Arctic blizzards.
"Why should this sandspit, naked to the blast from
whatever quarter it blow, be the home of human beings
for generation after generation f The answer is very
simple: chiefly because it is naked to every blast, its situ-
ation offers special advantages for seal hunting. The
seal is taken at the edge of the shore-ice where the open
water begins, and aU the winter through the winds are
now driving the pack-ice in upon the shore-ice and now
driving it out again. When the pack-ice is driven away
from the shore-ice, then and then only is sealing possible
The advantage of Point Hope is that almost every wind
that blows renders sealing possible on one side of the
sandspit or the other, and to these coast Eskimos the
seal IS the staff of life. If the seal be plentiful they can
manage for food and fuel with nothing else. Moreover
in summer a vessel may usually find safe berth by shift-
ing Its anchorage from one side to the other of the spit,
so that the place has its special elegibility all the year.
This is not the place nor is it my purpose to attempt a
general correction of mistaken notions about the Arctic
regions, yet it may serve to set right one of them. I have
found that it is very commonly imagined that during the
winter the polar waters are solidly sheathed in stationary
ice. There are no polar waters of any extent so sealed
and settled for any length of time. The winds of
which I have spoken will break up any ice-sheet however
thick and solid, and in general the polar seas are in con-
stant movement under that impulse, so that the notion
of a petrified quiescence should be replaced by one of
ceaseless, violent disturbance.
A very intelligent gentleman whom I met at Kotzebue,
who for three years had been in charge of the govern-
ment school at Cape Prince of Wales, told me that during
those three winters the ice was in constant motion
106
A WINTER CIRCUIT
Sv.-»
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through Bering Straits, now drifting south and now
north, as the wind changed, and that only once in ten or
twelve years do the straits close for a few days so as to
permit passage on foot. One such occasijn occurred
during his stay, but he did not avail himself of it. I am
afraid that if the opportunity of walking from \merioa
to Asia and back had come to me, there would have been
an unauthorized holiday in that Eskimo school.
Ten or twelve degrees of latitude further to the north
Lieutenant Greely lay all the winter in his wretched
camp at Cape Sabine, his men dying one by one of starva-
tion while the ice drifted back and forth in Smith Sound
between them and a depot of provisions upon Lyttleton
Island; for letting himself get into which predicament
he has been, I think, unnecessarily, or at least, overvehe-
mently, denounced by some not acquainted with his con-
ditions — and by some who were. I am sorry to see Ad-
miral Peary returning con amove to the charge in his
latest book. The Secrets of Polar Travel. It was not
upon his first Arctic expedition that all these secrets re-
vealed themselves to the discoverer of the North Pole.
The village of Point Hope clustering as it does about
the end of the forefinger of the spit, with easy access
to both shores, one is surprised to find the church and the
mission school and the missionary's dwelling upwards
of a mile away. With the abandoned government school
five miles away at Jabbertown (where no one any longer
jabbers) and this mission plant withdrawn so far up the
sandspit, one has the impression of an infected spot,
from close contiguity with which even the agents of
amelioration discreetly shrink. The impression is, of
course, false. When the government school was built
there was a school population, the offspring of Negroes,
Portugese, Hawaiians, Germans, Irish, English and I
know not what other nationalities and Eskimo wives,
whose fathers made a living by whaling. I will not speak
of Vancouver's "renegadoes" any more, because some
of these people, I do not doubt, were very decent folk;
POINT HOP'S
109
married and settled, even "renegadoes" may make use-
ful, honest citizens; certainly, some on these coasts de-
serve no such term, and, whatever their antecedents I
found nothing but kindness from any of them. What I
have written in general condemnation, however, is of the
record, and that -ecord is so ample that I could fill the
pages of this book with it did I choose so to burden them.
While the abortive school at Jabbertown is thus easily ex-
plained, I was never able to reach any explanation of the
isolation of the mission, unless it were this : that when
Dr. Driggs first settled at this place there was a fresh-
water lake hard by the spot whore he built, which lake
was afterwards turned into a salt lagoon by an invasion
of the sea during a storm. This circumstance, and pos-
sibly a prudential consideration also, in view of the riot
and licence and even sometimes drunken homicides that
followed the visits of vessels, in view of the murder of
Mr. Thornton of Cape Prince of Wales, who was called
to the door and shot with a whale-gun by a drunken
Eskimo, may have sufficiently accounted for an original
withdrawal which now finds no excuse whatever and is
distinctly detrimental to the efficiency of the work. Un-
fortunately sites once adopted are with great difficulty
abandoned, ard every additional building or outhouse
of any kind, every improvement to the "plant" increases
the difficulty.
That was one of my first reflections ; there followed a
strong feeling that the whole plan of white man's build-
ing on the coast, government schools, churches, stores,
warehouses and residences, is fundamentally wrong and
foolish. With his usual lack of adaptability, the white
man has simply reproduced the structures he was used
to in temperate climes. The government schools here
are just like government schools anywhere else, unsightly
and incommodious. The whole establishment of St.
Thomas's mission looks for all the world from a little
distance like a Manitoba ranch, with its dwelling, its
bams and its windmill; the dwelling, in particular, is
tfi;
I'
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A WINTER CIRCOTT
ill
lifted clear off the ground and the wind has uninterrupted
sweep under it; the schoolhouse is a California bunga-
low. In the dwelling a ♦hermometer always read fifty
degrees lower when put ni/on the floor than when put up
four or five feet upon the wall, and we wore our fur boots
indoors; while in the schoolhouse — but I shall come to
the schoolhouse later.
I am convinced that the only wise architecture for the
Arctic regions is the Eskimo architecture. The dim of
the builder of any structure whatever should be to get as
much of it underground as possible. I wish I might have
had opportunity to try my hand at the adaptation of that
style to the white man's requirements, for I am sure that
with a little ingenuity it is perfectly practicable. My
dwelling house would be a aeries of communicating
apartments, each with its dome, lit by a gut skylight.
My church would be built something on the lines of
the Mormon tabernacle in Salt Lake City, though of
course in miniature, which looks like a collapsing balloon,
and I would excavate so that little would raise above the
ground but the domes and balloons, from the smooth
curved sides of which the wind would glide off instead
of smiting them squarely as it does these frame struc-
tures. The difficulty about dampness in summer could
be overcome by the use of concrete, and by proper trc ch-
ing. Indeed I think the principal material I should im-
port would be cement. The whole "plant" might look
a little as Sydney Smith said the Prince Regent's pavil-
ion at Brighton looked, as if the dome of St. Paul's had
come there and pupped, but it would not look bleak and
stark and comfortless as these frame buildings do, lift-
ing themselves gauntly from the level tundra to every
blast.
Glass was certainly a great improvement upon the in-
tegumentary fenestration of the Anglo-Saxons, but it
does not follow that it is an improvement upon the same
primitive device of the Eskimos. When the panes of
glass are plastered thick with snow by every storm, they
POINT HOPE
111
not only cense to be transparent but become actually less
translucent than seal-gut, and while the latter may be
freed from frost and snow by tapping with the hand, the
former retains its incrustation virtually all the winter,
and a skylight is far and away more copious in illumi-
nation than any window of similar size in a wall. When
first I went to Texas I used to considor barbed wire as
an invention of the devil; and since I have resided in the
Arctic regions I attribute storm-sashes to the same
agency. Of all ineffective, exasperating, domestic de-
vices, they are amongst the worst. At best they cut down
the light of the window by half; they prevent ventilation
entirely, or, if the little holes bored in them for this pur-
pose, covered with a slide, be once used, immediately the
whole window, inner and outer sashes alike, becomes im-
penetrably coated with hoar frost. Double glazing of a
single sash is very much better; if properly done there is
no condensation of moisture into hoar frost at all, and so
far as this important particular is concerned they stay
perfectly clear all the winter, and thus are a light-giving
boon to dwellers in the interior. But on the coast it is
otherwise; the snow with which the blizzards are charged
drives against the glass just as I have seen paint or
whitewash driven against a wall from a hose ; it covers
the surface almost as completely and adheres almost as
closely. Glazed sashes might be used during the summer
and replaced by gut-covered frames in the winter. These
comments carry no invidious reflection upon any par-
ticular builder, since all buildings along the coast from
Kotzebue Sound to Point Barrow, ecclesiastical, educa-
tional or mercantile, come under the same condemnation.
The longer I stayed at Point Hope, the more I con-
trasted the discomfort of the dwelling house in windy
weather, though a furnace in the cellar were doing its
best, with the cosiness of the Eskimo igloos however
fiercely the storm might be raging, though warmed by
nothing but seal-oil lamps, the more convinced I grew
that all the builders of white man's structures in these
iff,
112
A WINTER CIRCUIT
parts have erred in not takinif a lesson from the aborig-
ines. Just as I feel that log buildings are the only build-
ings for the forested interior, so I feel that the plan of
the domed sod-house, with what substitution of better
material experience may suggest and the resources of
civilization may provide, is the only plan for Arctic coast
buildings. Is there anywhere in the world that the
"frame house" is other than a cheap, inflammable abomi-
nation 1
A young clergyman, earnest and enthusiastic, the
Reverend William Archibald Thomas, was in charge of
the mission at Point Hope, having the previous summer
succeeded the Reverend A. R. Hoare, who had spent ten
devoted and laborious years here in succession to Dr.
Driggs — such are the short and simple annals of the
place in this respect. When Walter and I returned to
Alaska in 1916 Mr. Thomas had accompanied us, and we
had broken our journey across the continent to spend
ten delightful days walking through the Yellowstone
Park with knapsacks on our backs ; and were not only ac-
quainted but attached. Mr. Thomas, quite unassisted,
was clergyman, physician, school-teacher, postmaster
and general vicegerent of Providence in local affairs,
besides bein;; his own cook and housekeeper; an alto-
gether impossible piling of duties on any one man.
The Christmas season must not detain us, Interesting
and enjoyable as it was. The Christmas-tree was not
without a certain pathos; it consisted of a number of
branches of stunted willows tied together, and a man had
gone twenty-five miles inland to gather even this poor
semblance of a tree, so naked is this coast. The hearty
feast that followed the hearty church service (where
seventy natives made their Christmas communion) was
spread with fried lynx, boiled seal meat, "ice cream" of
whipped seal-oil and berries (made in much the same
general way as the Indian "ice cream" ^.f moose-fat and
berries) and plenty of tea and hardtack.
The dancing that followed was very interesting, the
iJ-il^
POINT HOPE
113
most expert native dancing that I hare ever leenj two
men, tlien three men, and lust and finest exliibWon of all,
four men, moving in the most complicated pre-arranged
senes of poses and gesticulations and -n the most per-
fect nnison, to the accompaniment of drums and general
ohantmg. The elaborate involved attitudes, changed with
great rapidity and instant accord, the vivacity and spar-
kle and evident thorough enjoyment, were very pleasing,
and to save my life I cannot understand why all the other
missions and all the government schools should make
such a dead set against this harmless amusement. There
is no more offence in it than in an exhibition of Indian
club swinging. Call a thing "barbaric," however, in
your supercilious way, and suppress it, seems the rule.
One remembers Macanlay's saying that the Puritans
suppressed bear-baiting, not because it hurt the bear but
because it gave pleasure to the people, and one suspects
a Ungenng of the old superstition that there is something
essentially wicked in merry enjoyment, which I take to
be just as far from the truth as any sorcery of medicine
men can be. I am glad that this Eskimo dancing is not
only tolerated but, at duo season, encouraged at Point
Hope.
So soon as normal conditions were resumed after the
holidays I relieved Mr. Thomas of most of the school-
teaching, and Walter and I together relieved him of all
of the housework; in return for which he gave Walter
an hour a day in mathematics and another in Latin; the
literature and history instruction continuing as before
supplemented by the writing of a daily set theme, so that
the three of us were quite fully occupied. There was
moreover, for Walter, the care of the dogs, including the
mission team, the purchasing and cutting up of seals and
the cooking of the flesh with rice or meal for them, and
presently the beginning of the building of a fine new
sled with which to replace our toboggan.
The first of January was Walter's twenty-fifth birth-
day and we made a feast, a ptarmigan apiece, stuffed
<Ml
114
A WINTER CIHCLIT
u ♦
fii
m
and roasted, roast potatoes and green peas, with a
"sbortoako" of canned strawbcrriis to follow, and Mr.
Thomas set the table with twenty-flvc little rod Christ-
mas candles in h'. honour. Thomas gave him a hand-
some pair of native reindeer-skin boots for n birthday
present. That night we finished reading Romeo and
JtUitt and begun The Merchant of Venice, and I rend
aloud for an hour a number of pieces from different poets
in the well-selected mission library. A very happy day,
it is noted in my diary, and a day that I shall always
remember. Not only had Walter entirely recovered from
his sickness but he began to look more stalwart even than
before, ond while there is sometimes truth in the saying
that "two is company, three is none" it was not so with
the trio at the mission.
It was very hard for me to think of Walter as a grown
man, though so far as treating him as such is concerned
he had the entire management of all our travelling
affairs, which during the last two winters I had relin-
quished to him with much comfort and relief, but he
had so long been my boy as well as my pupil that he
was always such in my mind. Indeed there were few
finer specimens of manhood to be found anywhere, in
statnre or in general physique, and he not only attracted
all whom ho met, whites and natives alike, by his prepos-
sessing appearance, but won them by his amiable, gra-
cious disposition. I think Thomas had become almost
as fond of him as I was.
I have it noted in my diary from this birthday-night
reading that I never realized before how very uncertain
and corrupt the text of some of Shakespeare's plays is.
Hitherto the possession of only one book had made it
necessary for me to look over Walter's shoulder as he
read ; now at the mission there were two other copies of
Shakespeare, and I could follow in one while Walter read
in another. But in Romeo and Juliet and in The Mer-
chant of Venice I found myself continually checking him
for mistakes that were not mistakes but variant readings ;
POINT nOPE
115
aometimeg whole Udpr would bo difforont; sometimes the
Bcngo oonsidorably altered. So I «ot down the book I wag
uginfT and took the second mission copy— and lo 1 still a
third text, differing differently but almost as widely, and
I was compelled at last to look over his shoulder n/^ain.
Of course all this ig well known to Shakespeare students,
but I think that the average render, who conflneg his
reading to one edition, would never suspect the extent
to which the text varies in others, nor would discover
it unless two or three editions were in rending at once.
Throughout Chriatmns week the finest, calmest wonther
prevailed, and (he old natives said, as usual, that they
could not remember so long a spell without any wind.
When we sent up some flre-balloons on Christmas n ght,
they rose almost straight up to a considerable height,
and drifted so slowly inland amidst the stars that they
looked like yellow stars themselves.
But on New Year's Day came the wind, which gradu-
ally rose to the eight days' blizzard I have already spoken
of, and never again during our stay at Point Hope was
there entirely calm weather. On the 2nd January school
resumed, and for three weeks together, and then, after
an interval, for another week, I made the close acquaint-
ance of the children and, through them, with many of
the parents. School and the storm coming together, I
was at once impressed with the hardship imposed upon
the children by the distance they had to walk. A mile
and a quarter or so is no great matter for children at-
tending a country school, but when every step of that dis-
tance must be fon^lit for against a blizzard, it is a dif-
ferent thing. The smaller children, of course, stayed at
home, but I thought the fifteen who came regularly all
that week were the bravest children I ever knew.
The California bungalow of a sehoolhonse was not im-
pervious to the gale, and every morning the fine snow
that had sifted in had to be brushed out; the little stove
was inadequate to its ofBce under such conditions, and,
worst of all, the coal supply was short. Every pound of
Jl
116
A WINTER CIRCUIT
>: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
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-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<iuired (about
18,000 head) and a company of white men at Nome has
purchased them, hoping to establish an export trade in
refrigerated meat, and, a* any rate, sure of the market
which Nome and its mining district afford. The difficul-
ties in the way of the export trade are considerable : for
economical handling the deer should be concentrated at
one point of easy acce.ss to ships, and butchered there,
but this is not practicable because all the moss in the
* Profaftblj when this ia read, aearcr 160,000.
mA
140
A WINTER CIRCUIT
neighbourhood would soon be eaten off; while if driven
from a distance the deer would be poor. But we need
not worry about the difficulties of the export trade; they
do not trouble the Eskimos.
The same circumstance, however, that the food of the
reindeei' is confined to a single species of moss, is
fraught with many difficulties to the whole business of
reindeer herding. The pasturage in any locality is
partly exhausted in one year's grazing, and wholly in
two, and, unlike grass, it takes four or five years to
recover and renew itself. It is not only necessary to
change the grazing grounds continually, but the tendency
is for them to retreat further and further from the neigh-
bourhood of the villages and from the neighbourhood of
the coast. Between Eivalina and Kotzebue, for instance,
a distance of ninety or an hundred miles, there is no
good grazing near the coast; it has all been eaten off,
and Kivalina reindeer men having business at Kotzebue
must borrow or hire a dog-team to make the journey.
Another difficulty about using reindeer for travel is that
the creatures cannot stand up on the smooth ice of the
lagoons that skirt so much of this coast. Glare ice, as
I have shown, is sometimes very difficult even for dogs
to travel upon, but at other times it affords the most
desirable surface in the world and permits the rapid
travelling which at first astonishes the visitor from the
snow-covered interior country. But, wind or calm, the
reindeer cannot walk upon smooth ice, and whereas a
dog docs not hurt himself in the least by hundreds of
falls, one may suppose that the larger animal would be
in danger of breaking a leg or bruising himself severely
every time he came heavily down. These considerations
may explain why in our whole circuit of the Arctic coast,
although we were several times amongst the reindeer
herds and very many times amongst reindeer herders,
we saw deer hitched to a sled only once.
It is true that long journeys arc made with reindeer.
The energetic and enthusiastic superintendent of schools
i
tvwar:
\: -^
^M¥M
POINT HOPE
141
and herds in these parts, Mr. W. S. Shields,* to whose
zeal BO mnch of the progress of this industry is dne, has
travelled upwards of 11,000 miles with them in the course
of his seven or eight years' work. But I suppose he
would not deny that by far the greater part of these
journeys could have been made much more conveniently
and expeditiously with dogs. There is a certain esprit
de corps amongst those in "the service," the arousing of
which is not the least valuable or creditable part of Mr.
Shields 's work, that forbids the use of dogs to the white
men concerned with reindeer, and there is no doubt that
much inconvenience is cheerfully put up with to encour-
age the Eskimos to use their deer for draught purposes
and to abandon the dog altogether.
The tendency of deer herding to retreat from the coast
since the virgin moss grows better and better the further
the herds go back, and the benefit of allowing the ani-
mals to range freely as against the policy of close herd-
ing, alike militate against the schools, which can be
maintained nowhere save at the settlements along the
coast. Man is as naturally gregarious as reindeer, and
the village that he calls home exerts a strong attraction
upon the Eskimo. Again and again it is necessary to
"chase the herders back to their herds." "Why comest
thou down hither, and with whom hast thou left those
few deer in the wilderness!" is often asked as pointedly
of them as Eliab asked of David concerning his father's
sheep. Said Mr. Heese — from whose lips most of what
is here written about the reindeer was set down in my
diary — "The herd boys come in and are anxious to go
to school, but I know that the herds are suffering by
their absence and I have to insist upon their return. I
know, too, that the men will not be contented away from
their wives and families and it is much better that they
should be out at the herds too."
The most important article furnished by the reindeer
* I learn with much resret since writing the above that he 4ied of the
influenza in Nome in the iM of 1018.
142
A WINTER CIRCniT
i: -J
is the fur clothing made from his skin. Other sonroes of
meat there are: the whale, the seal, the walms, the
■ oognmk (or giant seal) and many varieties of fish, fur-
nish food; but there is no other source of the indispen-
sable fnrs. Reindeer hides used to be imported from
Siberia, but of late an embargo has been laid upon them,
for what reason I could not discover, and there is noth-
ing whatever that takes the place of deerskin. Now that
the wild caribou that swarmed over this coast and its
hinterland are exterminated, I do not know if the
Eskimos could survive without the reindeer; so amply
is Sheldon Jackson's foresight vindicated, so is Wisdom
justified of her children. One wishes her progeny were
more plentiful. Let me add but this : the total amount
appropriated by Congress for the introduction and care
of reindeer amounts to something over $300,000. The
estimated value of the deer in Alaska today is over
$3,000,000.
While the reindeer feed only on reindeer moss, they
often develops perverted appetites, and I was amused to
hear that they sometimes kill and eat the ptarmigan out
of snares set by the herders, and constanfly rob the
ptarmigan nests, eating up the eggs greedily. Some deer
are said to eat heartily of dried fish, but they cannot
digest it, and the animals with such appetites do not
thrive.
One of the interesting measures set on foot by Mr.
Lopp and his deputy, Mr. Shields, for the encouragement
of the industry is the institution of reindeer fairs at dif-
ferent points within the coast territory. Here prizes
arc offered for sled-deer races, for rifle-shooting, for the
best made fur garments, the best kept sled-deer, the best
sleds and hamtss, for expedition in roping and hitching,
anil for many similar superiorities that tend to stimu-
late rivalry and improve methods. Herders and their
families gather from hundreds of miles around, and the
opportunity is taken of giving instruction and training;
an excellent plan that has already secured good results,
POINT HOPE
143
perhapa as maoh in arousing a general feeling of Eskimo
racial solidarity and identity of interest, aforetime al-
most entirely lacking, as in the wide diffusion of a
knowledge of reindeer husbandry. Such a fair was to
be held in March at Noatak, on the river of that name,
and I should certainly have attended had it been possible
to do so and still carry out the main design of my
journey.
Here at Ki\'alina one was faoe to face with the other
great Eskimo problem, the problem of fuel. The depend-
ienoe here is altogether upon driftwood, which grows
increasingly scarce year by year. Mr. Reese told me
that it took the ordinary family a full day in every week
to gather fuel for the other six. In former times the
driftwood was not used for fuel and it accumulated in
seemingly inexhaustible piles. It could not be used in
the igloos until sheet-iron stoves were introduced; the
sole fuel was seal-oil burned in soapstone lamps, but with
the use of stoves came the rapid diminution of the drift-
wood, the annual renewal of which, depending on the
accident of winds, does not in any case equal the con-
sumption. There will be occasion to return to this sub-
ject, which is almoat always an anxious one in Eskimo
communities today.
Another visit to the school, fresh from my own teach-
ing experiences at Point Hope, left mo under no doubt
of the superior advancement of these children. By what
miracle could it be otherwise! Here was a trained
teacher, given wholly to teaching, with a most helpful
wife, not only to keep house for him but to aid him in
every way in his work. Yonder, all these years, had we
kept a single man, primarily a physician or a clergyman,
with no special training or aptitude for the schoolroom;
with all sorts of other duties, and with outlying places
to visit in the execution of those duties, to whom teaching
was of necessity a secondary thing. Indeed had it been
Froebel or Pestalozzi himself so situated, the school
must have suffered. It hurt my pride that this govern-
144
A WINTER CIRCUIT
Ih
yti
ment Bohool was manifestly better than our Church
■chool, coming from the interior conntry where the
reverse is usually true, but what wisdom is there in shut-
ting one's eyes to facts because they arc not pleasant t
I am thankful that wo have now a school-teacher at Point
Hope in addition to a clergyman.
Our last night at Kivalina remains vividly in my mind.
It was one of those rare and lovely Arctic nights that
seem fairy-like and unreal to a visitor from other climes,
that seem more like the result of some transformation
scene in an old-fashioned Drury Lane pantomime, if I
may revert to childish memories again. It is strange
that utterly different scenes should give rise to the same
reflection. Once when walking through the less fre-
quented parts of the Austrian Tyrol (I wonder to what
country it will belong when the Peace Congress has done
its work!) as we opened a valley sur. inded by the
most fantastic dolomite peaks, with every romantic
accessory of distant glacier and cataract, of near-by lake
and chalet, my companion stopped short and exclaimed
"My word! — it's like a d»"op scene at a theatre!" — and
though the comparison appear unworthy it was also in
Goldsmith's mind when ho wrote of "woods over woods
in gay theatric pride. ' ' It seemed too romantic, too beau-
tiful, to be real. So I think do some stories of exceptional
chaT«cters under exceptional circumstances seem unreal
to critics who would tie all literature down to the repre-
sentation of the average.
Now, in the silence and solitude of the Arctic coast I
was conscious uf the same impression. Thomas and I
walked out over the level shore-ice to the first pressure
ridge, and climbing to the sumnrit of a great egregious
block, turned ronnd and surveyed the scene. There was
not a breath of wind; the sky was as blue as the sky
of Italy, and a moon almost at the full sailed serenely
above, yet instead of extinguishing the stars allowed
them to sparkle in almost undimmed lustre and in such
countless myriads as the more humid atmosphere of
' ■!
POINT HOPS
145
milder olimei never reveali. A moit vivaoioiii green
aurora twined ita tennons streamers in and ont amongst
the constellations remote from the moon. To seaward
the ice of the suocossive ridges, heaped into jagged
monnds, tossed into pinnaclei), glittered and shimmered,
while here and there a slab of oTear ice gave back the
moonbeams like a mirror. Shoreward the white sea and
the white earth blended indistinguishable and stretched
interminably, and at the site of the village there twinkled
a few points of yellow light like incandescent topazes. A
most delicate yet brilliant blue and silver the picture was
done in, nnder the soft splendour of the ample moon,
with the sheen of moving malachite in the aurora above
and the diamond scintillation of the stars.
The scene did not fade away as one felt that a glimpse
of fairyland should fade away; the lights were not
turned down behind the transparency ; yet, what was the
same thing, we had to leave it very shortly, The cold of
a dear Arctic night does not permit the long contempla-
tion of any scene, however lovely.
The remainder of the evening was also very interest-
ing and pleasant. Jim Allen, the veteran whaler, came
over to the house and gave us a long and very interesting
account of "flaw whaling," which is quite distinct from
the whaling carried on by ships, and exhibited the shoul-
der gun and the darting gun and the other appliances of
the craft. I cannot find the word "flaw"— save in gen-
eral as a crack or fissure — applied to ice, and have been
told that the term should be "fioe," but the floe is the
floating ice of the pack, and "flaw whaling" is carried on
at the edge of the ice fixed to the shore, and not from the
floating ice; so that I think Jiai /i lien's use is correct.
Again I miss my History ■•* WhcUinif. But I shaU defer
what it is necessary to saj arjou* this na. /e iniinstry
nntil later.
Here I had our sleeping-l-uni -iiil fur brr.ehes made,
being able to procure the nentsi.Mrr Aufco-^t akins which
do not shed their hair, of which there was lack at Point
'I
146
A WINTEB CIRCUIT
Hope, 80 that we were now provided in clothes and h«d-
ding. Here also I was able to procure two hundred
pounds of dried^flshjpr dog-fccd, and thua relieve my
anxiety about tie feeding of the dogs for the earlier part
of the northern journey. So we went back to Point
Hope much heavier laden than we came, our prepara-
tions for departure well advanced. In passing Cape
TUomaon we had to give its bluffs a wide berth, for the
waters of a high tide issuing from the tide-crack had
overflowed all the ice near the shore. The wind and driv-
ing snow (fairly behind us) compl. tcly obscured the
promontory, so that when we judged we had doubled it
and turned our course towards land again, we found
that we had gone much further off shore than we had
supposed. Had the wind suddenly shifted we should
have been in no little danger, the ice around this cape
driving in and out all the winter through, sometimes with
very brief warning. Indeed we were glad to be done with
Cape Thomson ; whatever unknown perils the coast might
have in store weighing less than the known peril of this
passage.
Yet I was glad of ou. visit to Kivalina; the cordial
hospitality of Mrs. Eccse, no less than the open-minded,
instructive intercourse with her husband, remaining very
pleasantly in my memory. There was a teacher who
"waited upon" his teaching; who sought outside the
beaten track of the text-book and established methods, for
means to make his teaching effective. There I saw trans-
lation of Eskimo stories into English and then the re-
translation of them into Eskimo with much interest and
much amusement upon comparison; there I saw English
diaries faithfully kept by school children, a most useful
exercise; saw a whole tommunity of children actually
taught to speak and write English; yet with a total
absence and indeed contempt of the dragonnades against
the native tongue aired in their annual reports by teach-
ers zealous to be thought zealous. There also was a man
studious not indeed of Eskimo ethnology so much as of
POINT HOPE
147
present Eskimo economics, patiently watohfnl of re-
sources and of expedients for their ntilization, observant
of changing conditions and of tbo accommodation of his
people to them; a very valaable man, I judged, to the
Bnrean of Edaoation and certainly to the Eskimo people,
growing more valoable with every added year's experi-
ence; a man who, in the lanfifuago of one of his white
neighbours, "saws wood all the time bnt don't let off no
fireworks." I did him the justice to wish that I might
have spent a week in bis school before starting my own
teaching at Point Hope.
The largo amount of food for man and beast we had
to carry from Point Hope seemed to necessitate the pur-
chase of four more dogs, if we were to have two good
t«ams ; to which necessity I was reluctantly brought ; for
there was no disappointment that the Arctic coast bad
in store for me as great as the discovery of how poor and
mongrel was the general run of the native dogs. The
malamute has always been my favourite sled-dog, and
the Arctic coast was the home of the malamute. I had
expected that such reinforcement of our teams as might
be necessary would provide me with fine dogs of this
breed to take back to the Yukon. I found the breed
almost extinct in any pure strains, so much intermingled
with "outside" breeds that the majority of native dogs
I saw had lost all the marked malamute characteristics.
There was never in the world a domestic animal more
admirably fitted to its environment than the malamute
dog, the one objection to his use in the interior, the short-
ness of his legs in deep snow, not being valid where the
snow never lies deep. He is the hardiest, the thriftiest,
the eagerest, the most tireless, the most resolute and the
handsomest, if not of all the dogs in the world, certainly
of all dogs used for draught, and his feet never grow
sore. Certainly he is quarrelsome; indeed he is inveter-
ately pugnacious ; but a dog is a dog and not a lamb, and
there are collars and chains, are there not! and whips
and clubs. Dog driving is not a drawing-room pastime.
MtCROCOPY KSUUTON TEST CHART
(ANSI ond ISO TEST CHART No. 2)
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148
A WINTER CIRCUIT
It is a man's own fanlt if his dogs have much chance
for destructive fighting; the usual tearing of head or
ears does not matter much; it is only when the "running
gear" is injured that a dog's wound becomes a serious
thing. And the man who says the malamute is incapable
of affection has never really made his acquaintance; he
is fully as affectionate as any dog.
Whether or not it be trae that horse-racing has been
largely instrumental in improving the breeds of horses,
it is certainly true that dog-racing is chiefly responsible
for the decay of the malamute dog. This sport, insti-
tuted at Nome, to provide factitious excitement and op-
portunity of gambling for miners and lawyers during
the long, dull winter, has developed dogs of wonderful
sustained speed over long distances — at the sacrifice of
all the hardy qualities that are essential for genuine
Arctic work. The sport has a literature of its own, if
one be not too particular as to the connotation of that
term, and those who may wish to learn about it will find
it described in a book called Baldy of Nome, which
depends for any other interest it may have upon the
attribution to dogs of impossible human emotions and
perceptions in the usual "nature-faking" way, of which
I suppose Black Beauty is the classic example.
The coast was scoured for all the best malamute
bitches for crossing with bird dogs and hounds and such
exotics in the effort to secure speed, and the product of
the Nome kennels was scattered again over the coast.
For some time past malamute strains, T pm told, have
been quite abandoned, and a winning team that I met
two years ago on the trail seemed to have reverted to
something like the whippet type, as might have been ex-
pected. These dogs are pampered and coddled like race-
horses ; are housed and blanketed every winter night and
fed upon minoed chicken and beefsteak and I know not
what dainties — and sometimes win for their owners and
backers large sums of money. For any real Arctic
travelling, he who reads the pages that follow may judge
POINT HOPE 149
mat the nussionanes on the coast oh«„M • ,
«Ke , tne best that were offered for sale. A tood half nf
nver to tie Big Lake and there had been trad^H +«
Indians who had broujtht him tn Pn,7 v t I *°
had purchased him as soonTs ? faJ J °' '''''" ^
fteZ »r! ^ " '^n^'^insr passion to lay eggs- and
.s a epa^el £ the w/te?V;.?h r^eVhrS
ii
?:
l)l[
150
A WINTER CIRCUIT
I
ti'i:
of sled-dogs as driven by the whip to hard distastefal
toil could see Kerawak when a team ahead of him has
started. There is almost no holding the little beast. He
will strain at the collar and dig his claws into the snow:
he will rear up with a jerk and endeavour with all his
might to start the heavy sled all by himself, whining and
squealing at the top of his voice as who should say,
"We're going to be left behind! we're going to be left
behind! — can't you see them?— they're gone! they're
gone, I say!" And one had to keep one's foot squarely
on the brake, so that the iron teeth engaged the hard
snow, to prevent a premature start. He never got over
it ; gaunt and hungry on the north coast, the starting of
a team ahead of him would always excite him to des-
perate effort. No one could help loving a little beast like
that, still retaining many of his funny puppy ways,
muzzling against one's shoulder and nibbling gently at
one's clothes or one's ear, and so jealous of his master's
affection that he was always in danger of starting a fight
if another dog were caressed in his presence. He had
been thoroughly spoiled before we started, and had
howled his head off the first few nights on the chain until
the whip turned howls of protest into howls of pain, and
then into silence. A hard-headed, obstinate, greedy pig,
and no parlour pet by any means, but an engaging little
chap all the same, with every promise of becoming a
valuable dog.
The dean of my dogs was gentle and kindly old Argo,
a large, handsome, upstanding animal, not of the mala-
mnte breed, now in his sixth year of my service and in
the hale vigour of eight or nine well-fed, well-cared for,
years of age, the best and most unfailingly reliable of
the whole bunch, who never wasted his energies in
frenzied spurts and premature efforts but could be de-
pended upon for steady, even traction all day long. In
all his life he had never had a whip laid on his back to
make him pull. Walter and I had decided that if he
made the circuit of the coast and came back to Fort
«l
.11
Jj
' • t
r I
.Ml
\i
POINT HOPE
IJl
Yukon with us he should work no more— and ho is today
the wateh-dog and guardian of the hospital, and play-
mate and sled-dog of the convalescent children, wearing
an engraved collar setting forth his honourable record,
and provided vnth an ornamental and exclusive kennel
into which he has never so much as condescended to enter.
He is the last of the dogs that we used in the ascent of
Denali, hauling our stuflf not only to the mountain b-it
to the head of the Muldrow glacier more than halfway
up, and Walter insisted that his altitude record of 11,500
feet should be added to his distance record of 10,000
miles when the inscription was written. There are dogs
in Alaska who have gone further, but few, I think, in
America, who have gone higher, and almost certainly
not one who has drawn a sled higher, for I do not think
there is another mountain on the continent on which a
sled could be taken so high. One of his valuable quali-
ties was his amiability; we always hitched him beside the
most quarrelsome dog of the team. I have often seen
him merely stretch his head away from a snapping,
snarling companion, not to be provoked into a fight if
it were avoidable, his size and strength such tliat almost
any dog would think twice before seriously attacking
him; "too proud to fight," one might almost say.
How garrulous a man may become on the subject of
his dogs! especially if he have a turn for garrulity; here
are half a dozen waiting to be picked from, almost as
many pages back. I left it to Walter, as of cours«. he
knew I would do; he had gathered them, I think, mainly
that I might see how little choice there was. There was
not a pure malamute among them, and only one— and he
little more than a pup— that had the prick ears and the
plume tail of the breed, his black and white colouring,
however, indicating a mixture ci other strains. The
other three that we chose had "flop" ears, two good-
sized white brothers and a scrubby tawny chap, from all
of whom we got good work, but they were no credit to
the team.
1)
I
l;
ti!
152
A WINTER CIRCUIT
We now had thirteen dogs, seven for the new sled that
carried the greater load, and six for the second sled.
We planned to leave with the mail and to follow it all
the way to Point Barrow, and Mr. Thomas decided at
last not to go with us, partly because of scarcity of dog-
feed and the likelihood that we should overcrowd all
stopping places, and partly because he thought it best to
continue the school without any intermission for another
month, by which time, as he found, the people would
begin to scatter.
!«
fill
! ,1
IV
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABEOW
I
IV
POINT HOPE - t POINT BABROW
Thouoh we had linger.^ so long at Point Hope yet wo
left two days earlier tlian I had expected or desired.
The mail arriving on Saturday morning everyone had
supposed would lie here over Sunday, but the wind was
fair and the mail-man was for pushing on and would
not be persuaded, so there was nothing for it but to
assemble ou.- stuff (this long time ready) and make the
best of a hurried departure. I was annoyed to go with-
out a chance to take my leave of the people, and disposed
to resent such unceremonioub haste in the leisurely
Arctic, but if we were to follow the mail we must
Stan
So on the afternoon of Saturday, 9th February, we
left Point Hope, going east along thr ndspit and over
the lagoons towards the mouth of tht i.ukpuk river, that
debouches into Marryat Cove * where the sandspit joins
the mainland. Mr. Thomas accompanied us to spend the
night with us at the cabin at this place and return early
in the morning for his Sunday duties. Mau-yat Cove
(a name not in local use) was so named by Beechcy for
the famous sailor-novelist who delighted the youth of
most men now middle-aged and who happened to be a
kinsman of one of his officers. The mail-man had gone
on five miles further to Ah-ka-lu-ruk, and we intended by
a very early start next morning to reach him before he
left.
Our adieus to Mr. Thomas we therefore made at five
o'clock on Sunday morning. We were bo-.u greatly
mdebted to him for cordial hospitality during a happy
sojourn of six or seven weeks, and were wuch disap-
.1 ttf5s^;iin"crj^:irt\'nw:'"'''" °» "■ "»"= "»"■« *»-«-
15«
}
r
IM
A WINTER CIRCUIT
f
pointed that wo were not to have hit gentle, cheery oom-
panioDship halfway to Point Barrow ai originally
planned. I was particularly grateful for hii work with
Walter, rarely intermitted during our whole stay, by
means of which no little progresi had been made, and
I was sorry for the lonely life to which he was returning
at the mission house, now likely to be the more ketnly
felt for the visitors be had so long entertained. It is not
wholesome that any man should be so situated in the
Arctic regions, and it is satisfactory to know that his
sister, a trained teacher, is now sharing his life and his
labours. My heart warms to the thought of their un-
selfish devotion; the glamour of the Arctic adventure is
soon gone and there remains the daily grind of manifold
duties and responsibilities under hard and sordid oondi-
tiont, more keenly felt yet I think more resolutely en-
dure J, by the gently than the rudely bred.
As wo approached the igloo at Ah-ka-lu-rak between six
and seven, striking right across the inlet or cove to it,
we saw the first smoke arising from the kindling fire
inside and knew that we had anticipated the departure of
the mail, but the habitation was so wretchedly crowded
that we preferred to wait outside, cold though it was.
We learned that the mail would not double Capo Lis-
bume, which now lay dimctly ahead, owing to the many
miles of very rough ice around it, but would cut off the
oape by ascending the Ah-ka-lu-ruk river to its head,
crossing a divide, and descending the I-yag-ga-tak river
to its mouth beyond the cape; mere mountain torrents
both of them were, flowing but a very few months in the
year, yet they had washed out deeply-incised valleys in
their *'me.
I was sorry for this, for I had hoped to see at close
hand the mighty cliffs of the cape, far loftier and grander
than those of Cape Thomson; indeed those who are
familiar with these parts describe Cape Lisbnme as
much the most imposing promontory of the whole Arctic
coast — and perhaps by so much the more dangerous from
n
If
M'
ii
POINT HOPE TO POINT BARROW
157
the fierce winds that sweep down its ravines. This is one
of Capt. Cook's capes, named in 1778, just 140 years
before. I have exhausted the meagre resources of ref-
erence at my command and, since this was written,
the resources of the Boyal Geographical Society's library,
without discovering for whom this cape was named, and
should be greatly obliged to anyone who could throw
light upon it, if indeed any explanation be now possible.
There was no one of the name under Cook's command,
no one of the name amongst his friends or patrons : there
are several places of the same name in the British isles
and it may be named for one of them. Cook merely
mentions the name. The circumstance that he was ten
leagues off when he named it shows how bold and
prominent it is. It was off this cape that Mikkelsen came
near losing his life upon his return from the north coast,
in 1908. He says, "Alongside of us the mountain rose
perpendicularly almost to 700 feet. We could hear the
thundering of the wind as it came roaring over the top,
loosening large stones and hurling them out over the ice.
Then we were caught in a whirlwind. I, who was ahead
of the team, was blown over and slid along the ice for
several hundred feet until I was brought to a standstill
by a piece of ice not ten feet from an open lane (of
water). The sledge had been lifted and hurled against
a piece of ice, a runner was broken in two; again and
again the sledge was lifted up, blown along, and hnrled
against ice blocks until nothing but kindling wood was
left. Our gear was scattered all over the ice but we had
nowhere to stow it so we cut the harness of the dogs.
I shouldered my box with my papers and journals, crawl-
ing along on hands and knees, with water close on one
side and steep mountains on the other from which stones
as large as a man were hurled down as if by invisible
hands." * Bmiaed and frozen he and his companions
I'll
* CoofueriHg the Antic lee, pp. 369-70. TIIb is about the moat moTing
ineidtnt of a namtive tliat has not very much to match its promising
title.
158
A WINTER CIKCUIT
:il
n
made their way back, half crawling, half walking, to the
habitation from which they had been driven, despite
warning of the danger, by a total absence of food.
So I conld not question the wisdom of circumventing
this ferocious cape, and we fell in line behind the mail
teams and began the ascent of the valley, hoping to go
right over and reach lyaggatak that night.
The ice around Cape Lisbume had need be rough to
make worse going Than we had up the Ahkaluruk. It
was a succession of deep snowdrifts and bare sand and
gravel, with a steady ascent all told of at least 500 feet,
and I daresay much move. My 3-circle aneroid that had
travelled uninjured in the hindsack of my sled for ten
winters had at last suffered a severe fall that had ren-
dered it useless. All day there was never any good sur-
face at all, and we were very heavily laden. The mail
had two sleds and three men; the two who had come
down from Point Barrow having engaged a third at
Point Hope on their return. But their sleds were not
so heavy as ours, for they had dog-feed "cached" all
along the way, while we were hauling ours. Certainly
had I known what lay before us I would have sent one
load over the mountains to lyaggatak before we started
out, and had Mr. Thomas himself been more familiar
with the coast he would, I am sure, have advised my
ignorance to that effect. The dogs, too, were soft from
a week's rest, and here was the most laborious day of
the whole coast journey upon us at the very start.
Walter had seven dogs with about 400 pounds and I had
six dogs with about 300 pounds; not too much for level
going but distinctly overweight for mountain climbing
over sand and gravel and through snowdrifts.
A sharp gusty wind against us, with the thermometer
at —30 makes uncomfortable travelling, and I think
almost every time Walter turned around he told me that
my nose was frozen, and I was often able to reply "So
is yours I" Indeed henceforth all along the coast we
grew so accustomed to the freezing of our noses that we
POINT HOPE TO POINT BAREOW
159
ceased to pay much heed to it, and I grew unable to
tell, by the sensation, if mine were frozen or not. The
freezing was, of course, superficial — they blistered and
peeled and scabbed until we came to regard a miserably
sore nose as an unavoidable accompaniment of Arctic
travel. A scarf would have saved some of the nose
freezing, though not all, but a scarf is very much in the
way if one be walking, and added to the heavy furs about
the head and neck is sometimes stifling.
We had been gone two hours from the coast when a
sled from Point Hope overtook us to collect a bill of
three dollars for a seal. I had paid for it by an order
on the local trader, as we paid all such bills, but the
order had been laid aside and not presented and I had
squared up with the trader without including it, check-
ing over his account with the vouchers in his hand. I
had the change in my pocket and redeemed the order
and the sled turned and departed, but I was struck with
the man's willingness to make a journey to collect three
dollars that he could not have been hired to make for
twice that sum. Losing three dollars, it would seem, is
a more serious matter to the Eskimo mind than making
three.
As it grew towards dusk, and the mail-sleds out of
sight, Walter transferred 100 pounds of seal-meat to my
sled, lashing it on top of the load, but this addition made
it top-heavy and I was continually upsetting on the
uneven ground and unable to right the sled by myself.
So presently another expedient was adopted; the lesser
sled was trailed behind the greater and all the dogs put
in one team. Still our progress was very slow, and when
it grew dark and we were not yet at the end of our
ascent, we began to realize that lyaggatak would not see
us that night. It was very disappointing to find that we
could not keep up with the mail, and the prospect of a
camp up here in the naked mountains and the bitter wind
was cheerless enough. We pushed on long after dark,
flogs and men utterly weary, and when we judged from
160
A WINTER CIRCUIT
H
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the level ground that we were come to the snmmit, we
made a camp. t j v
We had no tent and did the best we could in the dark
with our two sleds and blocks of snow and the two sled-
covers, to make a shelter, but the wind whistled through
it and it was miserable enough. Twice we got the
primus stove lighted with great trouble and twice it was
blown out; there was no possibility of cooking. For the
first and only time in all my travelling the dogs lay in
their harness all night, and when we had thrown them
a fish apit je we crept into our sleeping bags just as we
stood, with a cake of chocolate apiece and went hungry
and wretched to bed. On such an occasion the invincible
good humour of Walter was a great resource. He made
light of our plight and said that for his part he was glad
the initiation into the delights of Arctic coast travel had
come so soon. "Now we know what to expect," he said,
and added later, "though I should not be surprised if
this is the worst night we shall have on the whole trip."
But there was not much conversation; we had to shout
to be heard above the whistling of the wind. Had we
not been so anxious to keep up with the mail we should
have stopped long before when there was light to choose
a camping place where good hard snow for blocks was
to be found, but we were bent on reaching the coast again
that night and knew not how arduous a journey it was.
Walter was right, as it turned out it was the most miser-
able night of the whole journey; we never went to bed
snpperless again, nor were again so entirely uncom-
fortably lodged as in our camp high up in the mountains
behind Cape Lisbume.
My thoughts during a sleepless night "ere largely con-
cerned with Point Hope and its native people. I re-
viewed the history of the place as I had gathered it, and,
the change in the temper and disposition of the people
that had been brought about; a change from a drunken,
disorderly and violent folk of ill repute all along the
coast to a decent, well-behaved, quiet, industrious com-
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABBOW
161
mtiDity. I compared it with a similar change that had
come about at Fort Yukon, where the native community
perhaps of the worst repute on the Yukon had become
one of the best villages on the river. It was worth while ;
it was most certainly worth while. Much remained to be
done, but I think the place will compare favourably in con-
duct with the average white settlement of the size— except
in one particular, the chastity of its women. There again
it was borne in on me that what is called the double stand-
ard of morals really constitutes the only advance of
civilized, Christianized people. The men of Point Hope
— ^indeed Eskimo and Indian men in general — are not
more incontinent than the average white man, I think.
The trouble is that adultery and fornication are re-
garded as just as venial in a woman as in a man, and
until the standard of female virtue is raised above that
of the man I see little prospect of further advancement
in self-respect ar ,'i self-control. I am not implying that
these sins are venial in anyone ; but I would contend that
it is a blessed thing that we have come to regard them as
more flagitious in woman than in man. It is surely a
step forward to secure the chastity of one sex and gives
vantage ground to work for the chastity of the other,
and often when I hear the "double standard" inveighed
against I am conscions that it is not a more rigid code
for men but a looser one for women that is desired. Much
of the revolutionary writing of today is saturated with
that evil desire. There is no " double standard ' ' amongst
the Eskimos, and to destroy it amongst Caucasians would
reduce them to the Eskimo level of morals. I can con-
ceive no greater blow to civilization than to break down
the distinction between a chaste woman and a lewd one,
which certain writers of today seem resolute to do, and
I hold him the enemy of human society who entertains
such purpose.
It is an extremely difficult thing to raise the general
standard of conduct in a matter that affects the general
gratification so much as the intercourse between the
I
162
A WINTER CIRCUIT
%
sexes. Yet it has been greatly raised already amongst
the Eskimos. Mr. Beese at Kivali iia told me, and I heard
the same elsewhere, that within the memory of middle-
aged men if a girl came ont of an igloo at night she was
the recognized prey of any man who chose to seize her,
and that no one would interfere. Today such a thing
would be regarded as an outrage by the Eskimos them-
selves. The interchange of wives is rare and is no longer
openly tolerated; polygamy is unknown. The promis-
cuity that attended certain festive occasions when the
lights were put out is utterly a thing of the past. I do
not make these statements of my own knowledge but as
a result of diligent enquiry. There is no question that
there has baen great advance. And I think the next step
must be a set effort to put a stigma upon women unfaith-
ful to their husbands and upon lewd women generally. I
feel that very strongly both as regards our Alaskan In-
dians and Eskimos. While not neglecting the male side,
I would stress the gravity of the offence in the female.
After all, as Dr. Johnson with his robust good sense
pointed out, there is a difference in consequences that
often makes the infidelity of the wife enormously more
important than that of the husband, though the sin be
the same. Native women are sharing in the added im-
portance that women the world over have secured for
themselves of lato years; I am anxious to make that
added importance an added strength for virtuous living,
upon which I think turns whether it will be a blessing or
a curse.
I recalled the grave deliberations of the village council,
earnestly attacking the problems of the place as they
saw them; the woman confessing adultery whom they
brought in a body to me one day in the absence of Mr.
Thomas, even as of old a similar poor creature was
brought to our Lord, but not brought to be stoned;
brought with the request that she be prayed with and
prayed for. My heart warmed as I thought of the sim-
ple piety of many of the people, the real strength and joy
t'
il
r _,
POINT HOPE TO POINT BARBOW 163
which they derived from the minigtrations of religion,
grown the more precions aa they had grown the more ao-'
onstomed. Then I thought of the eager children in the
school, fighting their way against a blizzard day after
day; always much ahead of time; their docile, plastic
minds, and the great promise which they held, given
only grace and wisdom to mould them. I ran over the
names and characteristics of the ones that had appealed
most to me: Guy and Donald, Helpn and Minnie, Abra-
ham and Herbert, Howard and Mark, Andrew and Maud
(the reader will thank me for omitting Eskimo surnames)
in whose welfare I shall always have the keenest in-
terest.
Then I made a hi nse-to-honse visitation and descended
and crept until I had entered the living chamber of each
and could stand erect again, and saw the groups squat-
ting around a meal of seal-meat or frozen flsh on the
floor, nude to the waist, men and women alike, in the
animal warmth of their narrow quarters though an arc-
tic gale raged outside; the women furtively pulling their
garments about their shoulders at my unexpected en-
trance—at which I was sorry, for I thought no harm of
their comfortable and innocent deshabille, nor am of
those who see necessary evil in bare skin. It Js surely a
highly sophisticated conventionaUty that can compla-
cently regard bare shoulders in a New York drawing
room (grown decidedly barer since I can remember) and
be shocked at them in an Eskimo igloo.
Another habitation would be full of industrious work-
ers, whittling wooden implements with their most in-
genious knives, cutting and sewing skins, chewing the
soles of waterboots to ensure that intimate union with
the uppers that shall exclude moisture, beating out and
twisting the fibres of reindeer sinew into admirable
strong thread that never gives way : men, women and chil-
dren alike busy, alike cheerful, alike smiling a friendly
welcome and moving to make a place for the visitor, who
rejoiced that he was not regarded as an intruder.
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164
A WINTEB CIRCUIT
i
ii
In taoh reminiioeiiceB and refleotioni the night paiied
and I wai aurpri«ed when a look at the luminous dial
of my watch within the doied alecping-bag showed that
it was already five o 'cloclc. We lay an hour or two longer,
for Walter was sleeping, and the weather conditions not
having changed there was as little chance of breakfast
as there had been of supper, 'jcyond another cake of
chocolate and a piece of "knac :erbrod," with which we
were provided beyond our capioity of uJlubrioated de-
glutition. It was 8.30 when wi had dug our gear out of
the drifted snow and were lashed up once more, for we
would not attempt the descent that lay before us until
daylight was at least begun.
Three or four miles further on we were deeply grati-
fied to find that the mail had camped also, for our failure
to keep up with it had been the most disconcerting fea-
ture of last night's bivouac. The route was steep and
dangerous and we were glad that we had not attempted
to push further in the dark, wide detours being necessary
to avoid "jump-offs" from one bench to another. Going
down is quick work, however, and the lydggatak was evi-
dently of less length and greater grade than the Ahka-
luruk. By half-past twelve a turn of the valley gave us
the distant coast at its mouth, and there, spread out on
the flat, was the Point Hope reindeer herd, moving to-
wards the native huts near the beach. It was pretty to
watch the animals dotted about the snow, slowly gathered
together by the herders, but it was not pretty when we
came down to them half an hour later to see the throat
of one of them out just as we passed by; the remainder of
the herd, as utterly indifferent as were the Frenchwomen
of the Terror who knitted around the guillotine. The
meat had been brought by the mail-men.
Wo had certainly hoped that we might spend the re-
mainder of the day and the night at lyaggatak, but the
mail decided otherwise, and after a good meal and a rest
of two hours we pushed on for another twenty miles.
But the going along the coast was good save for one
ft
i
V
i
'4
i
11
i
H'-i;
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABBOW
165
heavy prettnre ridge that wo had to orou in the dark.
One of the mail men wa« ahead of bit teams with a lan-
tern, pioUng ont a way throogh the rough ice, and we
were able to keep near enoagh to follow hit twinkling
light alto.
As we reached the Corwin coal minr a new misfortune
befell us. We had left the beach and wore actually
climbing the little bank to tho door of the bouse when
Walter noticed that one of bis dogs, whiob, when we
turned up from the ice bad been pulling with the rest,
was now dragged along, limp and passive, by thorn, and
■topping a moment later, be was found to be stone dead.
There was no wound, the body was in good condition,
nothing whatever had happened to account for it. It
was as mysterious a dog death as I ever knew, and the
only one of the kind that ever happened in any team of
mine. One naturally supposes that the dog must have
died from heart disease, but there had been no evidence
of any disease whatever and be had been willingly work-
ing and heartily eating ever since we left For:. Taken.
"Skookum" was not more than four years olci, I think,
a fairly large dog with a good thick coat, of a mixed
breed. Had there been chance to supply his place with
a good malamute I would not have minded so much, but
the only dog procurable at this little settlement was an
un-handsome, red-yellow mongrel chap in poor condition.
Since with our heavy loads and our recent experience
we felt that we must not diminish our dog power, I
bought him for $20 — and discovered when it grew day-
light next day that he Lad a bad wound on the top of big
head hidden by the hair. However, be throve and
worked, his head healed, and looks aside he was a useful
addition to the team, by the name or "Coal Mine," since
neither Walter nor I could rememi er the Eskimo name
his vendor had delivered with him.
Narrow veins of coal in sandstone, with "bits of petri-
fied wood and rushes," were discovered by Beeohey in
the neighbourhood of Cape Beaufort, but when he closed
i
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H
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166
A WINTER CIRCUIT
with the land with the intention of replenishing Wb fuel
supply, a veering of the wind made it a lee shore and he
had to stand off. The Corwin mine is so named because
it was "definitely located and used by Capt. Hooper of
the U. S. revenue cutter Corwin in July, 1890." * It
had often been resorted to by whalers, however, between
these two visits.
The coal is easily mined from the face of a bluff, a
good clean coal that looks like semi-anthracite and burns
readily, and would be of the very greatest value if it
were otherwise situated. But the cause which prevented
Capt. Beechey's coaling may arise at any time during
the brief open season, and there is no place along the
coast nearer than Marryat Iniet (with the storm-centre
of Cape Lisburne to pass on the way) where any sort of
shelter for a vessel may be founi^. In some seasons the
Point Hope natives and the Point Hope mission procure
a supply of coal here, filling sacks at the mine and carry-
ing them down to waiting oomiaks or whale boats, and
in others it is never safe to approach the mine at all.
This whole coast is an exceedingly dangerous one, be-
set by fog when it is calm and lashed by gales almost
whenever it is clear, the lurking ice-pack never very far
away, and its tale of wrecks is terrible in proportion to
its number of vessels. So this coal supply can never be
depended upon, and that means, so far as the mission is
concerned, that other supply must always be procured.
An attempt was made some years ago to facilitate the
getting of this coal by providing the mission with a gas-
oline boat and a barge, but in her first season the Nigalih
was blown from her anchorage in a sudden storm, car-
ried across to the coast of Siberia and cast away there.
For my part I had rather depend on driftwood and seal-
oil fuel for the rest of my natural life than attempt to
provide myself with a "sea-coal fire" at such hazard,
and I cannot bufficiently admire the courage and confi-
* olographic Dietionary of Almska.
i
II r
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABBOW
167
dence of a clergyman who will laanch craft upon the Arc-
tic Ocean on snch errand.
So the coal is of very little use, save to one or two
Eskinio families connected with the reindeer herd, who
winter at the place and trap a few foxes. It is not situ-
ated for sealing or whaling or any other marine purpose.
As one of the men said to me, "Point Hope, plenty eat,
not much warm; Coal Mine, plenty warm, not much eat,"
and so it goes on this part of the Arctic coast. The mine
was located hy an enterprising white man with an eye to
t ' future, and a patent secured, long ago, before the
Alaska coal lands were withdrawn from entry (to which,
after ten years of conservation and uselessness, they are
just now reopened as I write), but he has never reaped
any benefit from his enterprise, nor does one see much
chance that he ever will.
We were certainly glad of the coal, that night of the
11th February, of the spacious cabin that the abundance
of fuel adequately warmed, of the cook stove with ample
space for cooking, as well as the heater, of the coiofort-
able bunks which gave us a good night's sleep — the first
that I had had since we left the mission. T..o cabin was
obviously of white man's building, and doubtless repre-
sented a part of the unproductive investment of the mine
owner.
Our comfortable quarters and our want of sleep made
us all lie long, and it was 10.30 ere we were started again;
but the run was not more than eighteen or twenty miles
over a good surface and we made it in four hours, a keen
wind blowing across our course from the cliffs at the
foot of which we travelled. We passed the site of the
"Thetis" coal mine, so called because the U. S. vessel of
that name once coaled there, and we passed Cape Sabine,
so named by Beechey for his old messmate, the astrono-
mer of the Eoss and Parry expeditions, still remembered
for his researches into terrestrial magnetism and his
long, careful experiments to determine the length of the
second-pendulum, at various places, but we did not see
.41
168
A WINTER CIRCUIT
either mine or cape, and Cape Sabine, from the shore at
any rate, is another of the eape-no-oapeg of the coast.
At Pitmagillik the only inhabited igloo was too small
for the whole company, so the three mail-men were re-
oeived into it and Walter and I had to make the best of
an empty, dirty, cheerless and stoveless igloo, in bad re-
pair. The primus stove cooked our snpper, and, when-
ever there was time for the necessary two or three hours'
preparation, the dried sliced potatoes, the dried onions,
and reindeer meat, made savoury with a package of dried
soup and as many capsules of beef extract as the salt
they contained permitted us to use, gave us a thoroughly
good meal, supplemented by knackerbrod, batter and
jam, and washed down with rnlimited tea. We had to
wear our furs all the time, and it amused us to be cook-
ing and washing dishes in heavy mittens, though later
we grew used to that. After supper, while Walter was
feeding the dogs, I walked across to the other igloo, but
it was literally too full to enter, and while the owners
were pleased to see me, the head mail-man evidently was
not, being perhaps afraid I might seek to wedge myself
in for the night, than which nothing was further from
my thoughts; so I contented myself with greeting the
residents from the inner threshold, and withdrew.
The long evening gave us plenty of time for study,
despite the cold. We lay half in and half out of our
sleeping-bags, and Walter had to take off his fur mitt
every time he turned a page. We were now reading The
Merchant of Venice, and we got through several acts and
discussed them, this being the second reading. But his
mind was always much more interested in concrete physi-
cal things than in literature, and it was hard, when the
reading was done, to keep our conversation on the educa-
tional lines that I desired.
Amongst the supplies sent to Point Hope were a nnm-
ber of little cans of "solidified alcohol," and we had
found it much more convenient for starting the primns
stove than the fluid alcohol with which we were also snp-
POINT HOPE TO POINT BARROW 169
plied. The solid ignites more readily than the liquid at
low temperatures because it is easier for the flame to
play upon the projecting points of a solid than upon the
flat surface of a liquid, and it is also much more con-
vement for transportation. Of course it has its draw-
backs; all improvements have drawbacks; and the draw-
back of the solidified alcohol is the dirty residuum that
It leaves behind from the incombustible ingredients ob-
viously employed to bring about the solidification, which
must be scraped out after each burning. Walter was
keenly interested in the new preparation and wanted to
knDw how it was made. He was always asking me things
hke that which I was unable to tell him. I knew that
solidified alcohol was not a new thing; like many other
mventions it lay unused for a number of years. When
first I came to Alaska the men of the Signal Corps en-
gaged in the care of the telegraph lines in winter were
supphed with an almost identical preparation for the
quick starting of fires, but when, a year later, I endeav-
oured to procure some for myself, I was told that it had
not been commercially successful and had been with-
drawn from the market. Ten years later some ingenious
adapter of other people's inventions bethought him of
oomestio uses for it and put it up in ten-cent cans, de-
\ising a folding stand and a little pot, and now it has
great vogue for heating shaving water and making a
qmck cup of tea-but it is useless in the least wind
What It was that was added to the alcohol to soUdify it
I had not the least notion of. Then he wanted to know
the difference between alcohol used for fuel and alcohol
that rendered Ik -lors intoxicating, having been much im-
pressed some tiue ago by the sudden death of two wood
choppers at Tanana, who, when their whiskey was ex-
hausted, were drawn by their unsatisfied craving to the
consumption of wood alcohol. Why should one alcohol
make a man only drank and another suddenly kill him»
wny should the same name be given to such very different
liquids J That also I could not tell him, having no clear
170
A WINTER CIRCUIT
I : !
vii
notion of the difference between the ethyl and the methyl
alcohols myself. All I could tell him was that they dif-
fered in that obscure but "very fiery particle" called a
"hypothetical radical," and that the whole subject of
the alcohols was not simple by any means but very highly
complex. Then he wanted to know what the name "alco-
hol" really meant, and that I could answer, but how much
further does the knowledge that it means 'Herally "the
powder" take usT It is interesting because it carries
with it the history of the Moorish chemists of Spain and
the discoveries of aqua fortis and aqua regia, and the
whole subject of the contribution to human knowledge
made by the Arabs, but it shows chiefly what a long way
the word has travelled in meaning since it was first em-
ployed. But I could not get him off on the subject of
alchemy, fascinating as it is, and I could not help him on
the subject of chemistry because the little chemistry I
learned at school is long since utterly obsolete and aban-
doned; and the discussion ended as many a similar one
did, "My boy, when you begin your study of medicine
you will be crammed full of this sort of stuff and nothing
else. Now what I am anxious for is that your mind
should be stored with literature and history before the
time of professional and technical study comes. Science
is constantly and necessarily changing; what was knowl-
edge yesterday is ignorance today. But the time will
never come when Hamlet and The Merclumt of Venice
will be other than masterpieces of literature. Tuo value
of the great artistic efforts of the human mind is that
they are permanent, so far as human things may be per-
manent. I took you to see great pictures in New York,
and I hope to take you to see great pictures abroad. I
took you to hear greet music, because I want your whole
nature developed, because I want you to have a share in
the general human inheritance." But he persisted (and
I was glad of a new development and eagerness of his
dialectic), "Isn't chemistry a part of that inheritance
too, and are you not yourself anxious to know something
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABBOW 171
of itiv "Yes, I should like to know all about chemistry
and aU about every other science, but when a man comes
to my age, if he have learned a ything at all he has
learned that it is utterN impossible to learn ever/thing,
and that, given a sor; of general foundation to build
upon. It 18 better to try to know a good deal about a few
things rather than a little about them all. I am content
to leave omniscience to God, with the firm belief that all
through eternity I shall progress towards His Knowl-
edge. All knowledge is one, as I am never tired of tell-
ing you; It has its unity in the mind of God, but it can
never find its unity in any human mind. The earth is
one, but no man can ever know the whole earth. You
and I know a little about the Arctic regions and by and by
may know a little more, but a man may study the Arctic
regions all his life and not exhaust them-and what about
the temperate zones and the tropics? I am interested
in the chemistry of alcohol, but (taking up my little red
vo ume) I am more interested in the history of Armenia
with which Gibbon IS now dealing. If , man should take
a portion of the earth for his study instead of a period
of time (as Freeman did Sicily) I think there could be
tew more attractive regions than Armenia. It was con-
cerned in the earliest as it is in the latest of the great
wars. It IS the highway between the historic east and
the historic west. It was the first Christian country, and
today the Turks are doing their best to exterminate its
Christian population. I doubt if there is in the whole
history of the human race a more terrible story than the
story of what the Turks arc doing in Armenia. Yet I
hope to see it an independent Christian country again
when the day of reckoning comes." Presently Walter
went to sleep and I went-to Armenia, for sleep I could
not. I read till the little acetylene lamp was exhausted
and then I got up and started the primus stove and
melted some ice to recharge it, and crawling back into
my sleeping-bag, read till it was exhausted again.
I have not forgotten that I promised not to trouble the
,*ll
ITS
A WINTEB CIRCUIT
■1
i i!
reader with Mr. Barlow any more, but there are many
yonths who have had much greater advantages and op-
portunities than Walter, who are more eager even than
he was to address themselves prematurely to the prepa-
ration for their scientific csareer. The colleges of the
Pacific coast states are swollen with post-graduate stu-
dents who have never been undergraduates or who cer-
tainly have never graduated from anything but a high
school; with scientific and technical students who know
nothing of literature and history — and from them come
our physicians and lawyers who go so far ii. depriving
their vocations of the right to be called learned profes-
sions. We have been specially familiar with the class
in Alaska, as is perhaps not unnatural, and I was re-
solved to have no hand in adding to it. I recall a phy-
sician in Fairbanks who, with Vandyke beard, and gold
pince-nez — "like a painless dentist" as 0. Henry says —
and a most impressive manner, talked about extracting
a "populace" from a child's nose, an astoundirir feat of
legerdemain that puts all the hat-and-rabbit tricks to
shame. Of course I knew he meant "polypus," but who
would dream of entrusting himself for any ailment what-
ever to a man like that! From my point of view he was
a quack, but he was furnished with diplomas and cer-
tificates and his "professional standing" was unex-
ceptionable. "We was" doesn't trouble me in ordinary
people, but "we was" doctors are an offence.
So also I recall a lawyer, an assistant to a district
attorney, who swore out "John Doe and Bichard Hoe"
warrants under an old United States statute against in-
oculation, for the arrest of some men who were suspected
of a design to violate a smallpox quarantine. I did not
object to his doing it, for at that time there was no other
statute under which it could be done, and if any stick be
good enough to beat a dog with any statute that will even
temporarily serve is good enough to stop the spread of
smallpox with, but I was astonished at his maintaining
that the statute actually covered the offence and that any
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABBOW
173
action that caused the spread of disease was inocula-
tion. "Is there then no dictionary in your office f" I
asked. ' ' Dictionary t " said he with a fine scorn ;" we 've
got no time in our office to fool with school books. We
leave the dictionary to the stenographers." How can a
man know law if he know nothing else f And while I sup-
pose a man may be a clever surgeon who knows nothing
but surgery, I do not believe that a man can ever be a
competent physician who knows nothing but medicine.
At any rate I was long resolved that if Walter were to
be a physician, which was my ambition for him as well
as his ambition for himself, he should not be a little nar-
row one— his mental life an island detached from the
great body of human culture, and completely surrounded
with tinctures and lotions and liniments, even though his
practice were devoted, as he designed, to the Yukon
Indians from whom he was sprung, but rather that it
should be a peninsula, jutting out as far as he pleased
into such sea, but firmly fixed and broadly based upon the
mainland of general knowledge.
During the night the weather changed and grew much
warmer and a furious gale from the south arose. The
next morning we had an illustration of the power of the
wind. The sleds were left standing as we had arrived,
the hindsacks at the rear of them facing a little east of
our north course, and my hindsack, a capacious sack of
moose hide with a richly-beaded flap that fell the whole
length of it, was secured by a string tied tightly around
it as well as by the toggles that held the flap closed. Yet
next ro-rning that hindsack was filled in every interstice
of its contents with firmly-packed snow, driven before
the wind. There seems no limit to the penetrating power
of that finely-divided fiercely-sped snow. It is more like
a sand-blast than anything else I know. The sleds were
full of it— fine as flour,— although the sled-covers had
been replaced and relashed when we had taken what we
needed into the igloo, but I was most astonished at the
inside of the hindsack, which was filled with snow from
''I
If
174
A WINTER CIRCUIT
I
top to bottom as though the articles contained had been
packed in anow as grapes are packed in sawdust.
Loading and lashing the sleds, and hitching the dogs
in the howling gale that continued, was very difiBcult and
disagreeoble work, but when we were once started we
went along at a fine clip, and had we possessed any moans
of rigging a sail would not have needed dog-traction at
all that day. All day long the wind drove us before it
ond kept us covered with the flying snow, most of the
time on the beach but part of it amongst rough sea-ice,
and sometimes sleds and dogs were blown broadcast
across the smooth ice of lagoons ; at others the sled first
and all the dogs dragged sprawling behind, do what one
would to keep ' ' head-on. ' ' Vision was very limited ; there
were distant glimpses of hills on one hand and the fa-
miliar grey obscurity of sea-ice on the other. On such a
day one sees very little indeed. As we approached the
last hill I knew that we were at Capo Beaufort, named by
Beeohey for the hydrographer to the British admiralty,
who is the same Captain (afterwards Admiral Sir
Francis) Beaufort for whom Franklin named a bay, and
is chiefly remembered for his scale of wind velocities
known as the "Beaufort scale." I have been interested
to see the "Beaufort scale" quoted in recent gun-firing
tests and also in certain calculations about aeroplanes.
Cape Beaufort would have been a good place for his
experiments.
We all stayed together that night in an empty, stove-
less igloo at a place called Mut-tak-took, and the business
of getting unloaded and settled was especially tedious.
It is always a task to convey one's belongings into
these habitations. First one takes a sleeping-bag and,
pushing it before or dragging it behind, crawls through
the dark, narrow passages, opening the little cubby-hole
doors um.i the inner chamber is reached, and there de-
posits it. Then one crawls out again and another trip
is made for the grub box or some other piece of our bag-
gage; then another and another. It reminds me of the
11
) POINT HOPE TO POINT RARBOW 178
laborions methodi of an inieot, dragging lome treainre
; trove to ill burrow. Tho longer and narrower the pas-
sages the more disagreeable the task. The process of
ooonpying this burrow was especially irksome because
the innermost door proved too small to permit the pas-
sage of tho grob box, and when it had been dragged to
the end of the labyrinth it had to be dragged out again
I and the articles needed removed from it. So have I seen
an ant drag the leg of a beetle halfway into its abode
only to be compelled to eject it again. Once established
within, however, in such a gale us wag still blowing, one
! appreciates the entire seclusion from the wind which
these tortuous, conatricted entrances secure, and a jour-
ney on the Arctic coast is necessary to make any man
realize the blessing and comfort of mere shelter.
The bill of fare of our mail-men did not vary much
They boiled seal-meat and ate it with the fingers, dipping
each morsel in a tin of seal-oil, and their only other food
consisted of a sort of doughnut fried in seal-oil. They
cooked with b primus stove, tho use of whieb is universal
in these parts, and they took liberties (rith it and showed
a skill in Its manipulation, bom of long familiarity. The
instructions that come with the stove expressly forbid
the use of gasoline in it, yet I have seen them nse it.
i-ike a good many other inadvisable things, it may be
done if one be careful. The chief danger in the use of
gasohne comes, I think, at the moment of extinction of
the stove. The primus stove is extinguished by opening
a cock which permits the escape of the compressed air
Now air that has been in contact with coal oil is not in-
flammable, but air that has been in contact with gasoline
under pressure is not only inflammable but explosive
and the escape of this air while the stove is still alight
or glowing red-hot will almost certainly be attended by
disaster. So when burning gasoline in it it is necessary
to blow out the stove by a mighty blast from the lungs
or to smother it in some way, and then when it is ex-
tingnished the air may safely be released. But the va-
. ,li
176 A WINTER CIRCUIT
pourized gasoline that escapes from the stove, even for
the moment between extinguishing the flame and releas-
ing the air, is exceedingly irritating to the eyes and
throat. I have used primus stoves for a number of years
and have never had an accident or seen an accident with
them; employing coal oil for fuel they are perfectly safe;
and I am convinced that the explosion of one of these
stoves and the severe burning of one of his men which
Amundsen describes in his Northwest Passage, must
have been occasioned by the use of gasoline.
Here Walter and I had our first taste of seal-meat, the
Eskimos, whose table was continually supplemented from
our grub box, offering us some of it. We had been sol-
emnly warned against it by a white resident of the coast
whom we had met earlier— one of those of whom it may
be said that "should the haughty stranger" of Eliza
Cook's song "seek to know. The place of his home and
birth" he would only have to listen for a moment.
"H'I've h'et h'owls and h'I've h'et h'otters," he said,
"h'I've h'et most everythink that's got fur or feathers,
but excuse me from seal-meat! A man ain't a w'ite
man that'll h'eat it." The owls and the otters "was
chicken to it." But we did not find it so bad. I ate very
little of it, meat forming a small part of my diet when
iny other food is obtainable, but Walter ate it on several
occasions, if not with relish at least to the satisfaction of
his constant craving for flesh. It had a lingering taste
as though it had been boiled in a fish kettle that had not
been previously cleaned. A hungry man would soon be-
come accustomed to its taste and would not mind it, I
think, and it is undoubtedly strong, sustaining food. In
the modem school of Arctic exploration ability to live
upon seal-meat seems the first requisite.
Another convenience with which the Eskimos are weU
supplied is the thermos bottle, and never was there a
more beneficent invention for the Arctic regions. I
think that every travelling Eskimo we met was pro-
vided with it. Where there is no possibility of lopping
POINT HOPE TO POINT BARROW
177
and building a fire to cook with, these heat-retaining bot-
tles become indispensable to comfortable travel. They
furnish a good illustration of the way in which needs are
created by the invention of something which supplies
them. For unto! " ;,?norations men travelled these win-
ter coasts wi 'lout auy su'h means of carrying hot re-
freshment; n vv Di.Tt sufih means has been devised it is
immediately j Cf-nrded us i necessity — and quite rightly
80 regarded. "Wiuil vin't be cured must be endured,"
but when a cure has been found endurance becomes a
mere surplusage of hardihood.
The situation of the Eskimos along the sea coast has
always been favoui'able to the introduction of new things.
Of old they had the earliest intercourse with the whites,
and, before any direct intercourse, were mediately in
touch with the white man's goods through the Siberian
tribes. They had iron tools and firearms — and mm —
before these things reached the Indians of the interior;
and while I can see that there was some opportunity for
Eskimo development even had these coasts remained un-
discovered, I am convinced that the culture of the In-
dians of the interior had become stationary. Shut out
from a!' accep.s to the sea by the hostile Eskimos, there
is no telling for how many ages they had remained at
the stage of development they had reached, nor for how
many ages more they would have so continued had not
the white man penetrated into their country.
Still another resource of civilization we found com-
mon amongst these folks — the telescope. We had now
reached, and for hundreds of mules should traverse, a
perfectly flat coast. The "last mountain," "A-mabk-
too-sook," rose beside us at this encampment, and there-
after the hills receded so rapidly that they were soon out
of sight. We saw no more elevations of the land until
we had crossed Harrison Bay on the north coast six
weeks later and distant faint outlines of the Franklin
mountains gladdened our eyes. So a telescope becomes
a necessity also, to sweep the level horizon for some sign
' I
:1
178 A WINTER CIRCUIT
of human habitation, some little landmark of driftwood
or cut bank of shingle, some hint that to a man familiar
with this coast should suffice to indicate his whereabouts.
It was common from this time forward to see a man
clamber to the top of an ice hummock and scan the dis-
tance with his telescope. , ■ , j
For all these conveniences the Eskimos are indebted
to the whalers, and for the plentifulness of them to the
large moneys which they themselves made in whaling so
long as the price of whalebone remained high. It is in r .y
mind that as they are broken or lost they will not be so
readily replaced now.
Of the three Eskimos, the responsible mail earner,
Andy, was an interesting study. His Point Barrow com-
panion was a stolid, unintelligent chap with very little
English; his Point Hope recruit a lively, good-natured
but none too industrious youth named Tom Goose. Our
relations with Andy were uncertain. At times he would
apparently desire to be helpful and even cordial; at
others he would be as churlish as Nabal— "such a son
of Belial that a man may not speak to him" as the serv-
ant described his master with almost modem emphasis
of dislike. His chief characteristic was his self-import-
ance. Not only was he in charge of the United States
mail, but he was a man of substance and consequence at
Point Barrow; the owner of a reindeer herd, a "fellow
that hath had losses," even though he could not boast of
"two gowns and everything handsome about him," and
an office-holder of some sort in the mission church. I
think that perhaps he viewed me with some suspicion at
first as an emissary of the aUen church at Point Hope,
where they tolerated such abominations as dancing, much
in the way that one of John Knox's preachers may have
viewed a prelatist of his day— I am not sure.
He had learned my surname and my title but used the
former only, without prefix, which was his habit with all
white men. It did not trouble me in the least, but it an-
noyed Walter. But it did annoy me to hear him con-
POINT HOPE TO POINT BARROW
179
tinnally refer to the missionary physician at Point Bar-
row as "Spence." Our talk, of course, was mainly of
that place, and everything connected with it was of in-
terest. With Dr. Spence I had had some correspondence,
and 1 1 ad heard of him in the highest terms all along the
coast ; indeed Andy sang his praises also. So I took oc-
casion to ask him very gently whether when he spoke of
"Spence" he referred to the doctor at Point Barrow,
and when he said that he did I said, with decidadly more
severity of manner, "Then when you speak to me of him
you will say 'Doctor Spence,' " and thereafter whenever
he mentioned the name I insisted on the prefix.
His immediate employer and "boss," who, besides
being postmaster and United States commissioner, was
reindeer superintendent and schoolmaster (or at least
the husband of the schoolmistress), and an ordained min-
ister of reli^on of one of the Protestant Churches
(though not officially functioning in this last capacity at
Point Barrow), Andy always referred to as "Cram." I
did not concern myself in his behalf, feeling that a man
with so many rods of authority in his hands should be
quite able to look after his own dignity. If "Cram" he
were content to be, "Cram" he might remain, so far as
I was concerned. But it was otherwise with Dr. Spence,
whom I knew of as an elderly gentleman of most devoted
and kindly character, and I spent some time in explain-
ing to Andy that if he really respected him he should not
speak of him with no more respect than of a dog.
It is hard to understand why our own people of the
Western States, the "average man" who looms so large
in the talk of statesmen just now, should have so totally
rejected all terms and customs of respect, unless it be
from some preposterous, perverse notion that to be cour-
teous is to be servile. The French are supposed to be
fully as enamoured of equality as we are, but no French-
man, no gamin of the Paris streets, would answer a
stranger with an abrupt "Yes"' or " No," he would as-
suredly append the "Monsieur" or "Madame." The
180
A WINTER CIRCUIT
' In
French equality seems an equality of respect ; ours seems
an equality of disrespect. It sometimes seems almost as
important to make our democracy palatable and accept-
able to the world as to make the world safe for our de-
mocracy. The western practice being what it is, it is not
surprising, though it is still more striking, that che Es-
kimos and Indians who have learned white men's ways
from the only white men they have met should be rude
and Hisoourteons of English speech. But it is uufortu-
nate (and this is whpt I have been coming to) that the
government schools shouiJ be content to leave it oo,
should be content to make no effort themselves to incul-
cate politeness. My first criticism of these government
schools is that the children are well taught in the com-
mon school subjects, quite remarkably well taught when
the circumstances are taken into consideration; my sec-
ond is that there is very little attempt to teach politeness
at all. A teacher who invited and received this com-
ment replied with some feeling, "Last Christmas when
they received their presents, every child said 'Thank
you.' " It comes down to the teachers. Here was this
man Andy, with fairly good English, himself bred f.t the
Point Barrow school which his children are now aitend-
ing, devoid of the first rudiments of politeness or respect
for others, though he may have an annual Christmas
"Thank you." He had evidently never been taught the
first thing that he should have learned.
Andy's speech was only a symptom; urbanity has not
characterized our people in the past, from the highest
to the lowest. It is said that when the brother of the
King of Italy, the Duke of the Abruzzi, who besides be-
ing a traveller and an explorer of world-wide reno^vn is
regarded as one of the most accomplished gentlemen of
Europe, was returning from his ascent of Mt. St. Elias,
he paid a visit of courtesy to the governor of Alaska, and
that the governor met him with th" question, " Wbjii you
climbba de mountain, you freeza de nose, eh?" explain-
ing afterwards that all dagoes looked alike to him. I
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABROW 181
oaimot vouch for the story, but I think it not improb-
dav",n!^t ' r^u^ '^^'"'''^ '" «°^-"°°" ^in^* that
day, and as much urbanity will be found at the executive
mansion at Juneau nowadays as anywhere in the world-
sr i:iit '-'—' -- ^^'-^^ ^^
For a long time that night the Eskimos fried dough-
nuts m seal-oil for their next day's and night's repasts
and m/ eyes smarted so with the acrid fumes that there
was no readmg, no study, but we crawled into our sleep-
ng-oags and Kept our heads as near the ground as pos-
sible. It was another uncomfortable lodging. If there
were means of making oneself reasonably comfortable at
night, travelhng on this coast would not be excessively
arduous, but these "cold lairs" give one small chance of
recuperation from the fatigues of the day
By SIX the nest morning, the 14th February, we were
packed up and gone. The southerly gale on the wing
hlT^^?. ^^ tad advanced all day yesterday had blown
Itself out and we had crawled out of the igloo into a per-
fect calm. There was a fair trail along the beach, and
the last mountain" was soon behind us. Shortly after
sunr.se Andy saw a seal hole in the ice and squatted be-
side It with his rifle for a full hour, while the' leds went
on a mUe or two and there waited for him. But the sea
had e^adently made other respiratory arrangements tha
day, and when we were begimiing to grow cold, though
the thermometer stood no lower than 5= below zero, he
rejoined us and our march was resumed. Sometime after
midday we reached an em:.ty igloo, and entered it for
lunch, and it seemed there was need for further frying
of doughnu s, which operation I disliked so much foTuf
Sm'°l ''f *'"; ' "*°* °'>'«'<^« »d walked up
Soceed^. ""^ '""^ "''^'^ "** '''' -^°«« -hile it
Long after dark we left the beach trail and entered
hundred mJes or .0, receiving all the streams of the
182
A WINTER CIBCUIT
I
I
li
coast, the rare habitations being at the mouths of them.
Had we been unaccompanied by one with a thorough
knowledge of these parts, we should have been compelled
to trace the whole mainland shore, but Andy was so
familiar with the locality that he was able to strike
across at such angle as would bring him to the dwelling
at the mouth of the Ku-p6u-ruk river, our destination for
the night. The lagoon was rough with hummocks and
windrows, and presently Tom Qoose was sent ahead with
a lantern, as much, I think, that the folks at the igloo
might sen our approach across the broad lagoon and set
out a light to guide us as for our own avoidance of
obstacles. The dancing light of Tom Goose's lantern
far ahead, and, after a long while, the tiny answering
point that pierced the darkness on the opposite beach,
remain fixed in my memory, for I was tired that night
and the prospect of a warm, inhabited stopping-place
was grateful.
Nor were we disappointed; the house at Sing-i-too-rok
was clean and comfortable and we were received with
evident gratification, the people being accustomed to visit
Point Hope and attached to that mission. But it was
small, and already had six oooapants, so that with our
party it sheltered eleven that night. We had to eat
in relays, and the wisdom of Andy's midday cooking
was evident. It was when we had said our prayers and
begun to make disposition for the night, however, that
the narrowness of our quarters appeared in its full in-
convenience. The apartment was rectangular, with its
door in the middle. At either end were the bunks of the
family, and the remaining fioor space, broken by a cook-
ing stove and a heater, was at our service for repose,
but by no ingenuity whatever could we so arrange our-
selves that our sleeping-bags did not overlap.
Underneath one of the bunks was the lair of an ancient
woman of such a strikingly wild appearance that when
I first saw her I thought she might have been one of
Macbeth 's witches. Her long grey matted hair was
I
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABROW 183
tousled about her shoulders and a ragged fur garment
half revealed and half concealed her withered breasts.
But she proved of such volubility and animation, scold-
ing and laughter following so closely upon one another,
that the witch-like impression soon passed. All around
her were her little personal possessions, and she had a
seal-oil lamp at which she did her own cooking. She was
incessantly working and chattering; never was such an
industrious and garrulous old lady, her flow of talk
interrupted only when she put fibres of reindeer sinew
in her mouth to moisten them before rolling them into
thread with her hands. She was evidently a woman of
character and will, and from her Jen under the bunk she
seemed to rule the household.
The family had made progress in the arts of civiliza-
tion, for the cabin was neat and clean and provided with
many conveniences, but evidently the old woman was
wholly unreconstructed; she would have none of them;
and I realized once more that woman is the true con-
servative element in human society— a consideration
which the defeated opponents of female suffrage may
take comfort in. She was the most entirely unsophisti-
cated woman I ever saw, and, as I thought, somewhat
defiantly retentive of primitive custom. The natural
operations of her body were no more cause of shame to
her than the ebb and flow of the tide or the falling of
the snow; she made no pretence to hide them but talked
and laughed meanwhile, and I fancied that she was say-
ing in Eskimo that there was no false modesty about
her. We felt fortunate in that we had already supped.
Every now and then would come some vivacious sally
from her comer that provoked general laughter in which
she heartily joined.
When we began our preparations for sleep she set up
some sort of framework that .supported a curtain about
her, more to mark out the inviolable limits of her
demesne, I think, than from a desire of privacy. In his
efforts to wedge himself within the exiguous space left
i I !
184 A WINTER CIRCUIT
to him, Walter managed to knock down this framework
with the toe of his bag, whereupon the old woman sot
up a screech and volleyed out a thunderous tirade, end-
ing with loud laughter, while Walter hastened to replace
the screen. But Walter was six feet tall, and he had
no more than composed himself to sleep than an incau-
tious stretching of his legs brought the end of his bag
in contact with her precarious partition and down it
came again. This time she was not content with hfting
up her voice; she grabbed a stick that lay beside her
and poked the boy in the ribs through his bag until he
crawled out and readjusted the thing, scolding him all
the time most vehemently but ending by joining in the
laughter with which we were convulsed. I wish with all
my heart that I knew what she was saying, and would
have liked to spend the next day here, digging into her
mind with the aid of a good interpreter. She must have
been a perfect mine of ancient lore. But Walter, though
not insensible to the humorous side of her character,
said to me when we were loading up in the morning,
"That's the most awful old woman I ever saw in my
life!" She was indeed— flabbergasting; I can think of
no other word to describe her, but her strength of char-
acter evidently commanded the respect of all the others,
and I think there was no malice or even real anger in
her most violent objurgations. Andy evidently held her
in some awe; he said, half apologetically, "Ipanee
Eskimo; very old woman, very wise woman; maybe go
to heaven, maybe go to hell; no sabe," with the air that
if he had the disposal of her eternal destiny he would
hardly know what to do and might even have to ask
advice, which was quite an admission for Andy.
We all enjoyed our sleep so much, and it took so long
next morning to cook and eat in relays, that it was
eleven o'clock when we pulled out. All day long our
course lay on the surface of the lagoon. Hydro-
graphically this coast reminded me of the southwest
coast of Texas, with the Laguna Madre stretching from
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABROW
185
Corpus Cbristi Bay to the mouth of the Bio Qrande,
though the narrow gandspit that divides this lagoon
from the Arctic Ocean matches Padre Island only in
length; and I daresay, judging from the map, that the
coast of the Qulf of Danzig would afford a better parallel
than the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. But nowhere save
in the Arctic regions could there be such scene of complete
desolation. A clf>ar bright day, growing steadily colder
and clearer, gave unwonted scope of viyion, but as
Walter said, 'Most of the time you can't see anything,
and when it clears up there's nothing to seel" The
lagoon was so broad that the mainland was just a distant
brown line rising a little above the level of the ice, while
the sandspit on the other hand was indistinguishable.
The surface began to be abominably rough, with hard,
frequent windrows called by the antarctic explorers
"sastrugi," and since there is need for a distinctive word
for the formation, I do not see why this Bussian word
should not be used (Sir Douglas Mawson says it is Bus-
sian; I cannot find it in the dictionaries). While they
have a regular general direction due to the wind that
carved them out of the snow, they often curl into very
fantastic shapes, and they now became very troublesome,
the sleds bumping over them so violently that the old
one began to be pretty badly knocked about, and some
of the uprights already strained and sprung, to show
signs of giving way. This sled had been used all the
previous winter, and this winter had been roughly
handled on the portages before we reached the Arctic
coast, and Walter took a sudden notion to abandon it.
So we stopped; and Tom Goose, whom we had fed lately
and who had a hankering after our grub box, so that
he began to travel as much with us as with Andy, helped
us to transfer all the load to the new sled and hitch all
the dogs to it. We left the sled standing in the middle
of the lagoon, telling Tom that he might have it if he
wanted it, and he declared his purpose of picking it up
on his return. I was struck with the considerable dis-
186
A WINTER CIRCUIT
r I
.; ■■
tanoe from which we could still see that sled, standing all
alont or the ice, after we resumed our march. Thirteen
dogs at the one sled moved it smartly along; but with
the constantly increasing cold the iron runners clave to
the rough granular snow, and with its top-heavy load it
was in constant danger of upsetting among the sastrugi.
At noon the thermometer had fallen to — 31°.
All the afternoon the monotonoua travel continued
with little chance of riding, so rough was the going, and
it was just six o'clock, and long since dark, when wc
reached Point Lay. George I. Lay was the naturalist of
Beechey's expedition, but beyond bis name amongst the
ship's company, and a reference to his preparation of
specimens in the preface, I find only a single mention of
him in the whole of Beechey's narrative. That one,
however, is of much interest to me. While wintering
between her lirst and second visits to the Arctic, the
Blossom touched at the Loo-Choo islands between For-
mosa and Joia.'), then little known, and Beechey records
that both he and Mr. Lay succeeded in distributing
some little books in Chinese given them by the famous
Dr. Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China,
whose Chinese dictionary, published in six volumes by
the East India Company at a cost of $60,000, brought
him the coveted distinction of election to the Eoyal
Society. Dr. Morrison is also remembered as having
established the first medical mission. Beechey seems to
have been a devout man, and Lay, from this single inci-
dent, I judge to have been like-minded. It is curious
that the Russians, who had coniderable trouble with
the names given by the English navigators, trans-
literated this name on their charts as though it were
descriptive of layers, just as they misconstrued Point
Hope as honouring a cardinal virtue instead of a lord
of the admiralty. I have been told that on German maps
Point Hope is still "Hoffnung."
There were two inhabited cabins at Point Lay, perched
above one of the few entrances to the lagoon, or
POINT HOPE TO POINT BAKHOW 187
"p«iic.'' us th..y would bo called on the Texas coast
on a height of sandbank, and Walter and Tom Oooso and
T were received into one, and Andy and his remaining
companion into the other. It was a clean and comfort
able dwelling and not so crowded as last night's lodging
for there was but u man and his wife and a child or two.
I found them devout, simple people, with enough Eng-
ish to enable rae to make myself understood, and I
aboured before wo went to bed to give them some fur-
ther instruction.
Just before turning in I walked to the edge of the
sandbank. It was another wonderful Arctic night. Again
the stars twinkled in countless myriads, again a sportive
aurora flitted hither and thither across the sky. But the
hermometer stood at -40°, and a keen air moved from
the north that cut like n knife. The night was as cruel
as It was beautiful, and I was glad to get within doors
again and to sleep.
The next morning after breakfast we were busied in
going oyer our stuff to see what we had that was super-
fluous that we might lighten our top-heavy load by
abandomng ,t here, when Andy came in and very
solemnly said, "The people in the other house want ^
hear yon tell them the gospel of Jesus Christ." I think
ho had decided to put me to a test, himself as the inter-
preter, and I gladly went over with him and spoke to
the eight or ten attentive and interested people by his
month. I am glad to know that Mr. Thomas visited them
later and made some stay with them
Walter was thus left to his own judgment as to what
should bo discarded of our load, and he cut it djwn
beyond what I should have agreed to, dowering our
hostess with grub and with plates and cups and pots and
pans that were m excess of the minimum he judged neces-
sary for our cookmg and eating. I like to have a spare
plate and vessel or two when I am cooking and frequently
found myself inconvenienced thereafter, actually having
to buy things at Point Barrow to replaco some of those
IBS
A WINTER CIRCUIT
! {
V.
discarded here; but a considerable reduction in bulk and
weight was effected, and since all was loaded and lashed
when I returned there was no more to be said. I recall
Point Lay as the pleasantest place of sojourn since we
left Point Hope.
The next day was a repetition of the preceding one,
the second full day upon the lagoon, a long weary grind
of nine hours. But it was made distinctly more uncom-
fortable by the keen air from the north, moving at a
temperature that did not rise above —35° all day. My
nose was frozen again and again. The mail-dogs were
grown so weary with this continuous travel that they
lagged behind, and my team took the lead, Walter run-
ning ahead of them for hours to set a pace. Nothing
could be more desolately monotonous than the whole
day's journey on the wide lagoon, with not a single land-
mark of any kind from morning to night. I had pro-
posed to Andy that we give the dogs a day's rest at
Point Lay, but he had brushed aside the suggestion.
That night we lay in a wretched uninhabited igloo at
Uf-oo-kok, at the mouth of the stream of that name,
almost exactly upon the 70th parallel of latitude, and for
hours the Eskimos tried out whale blubber over the
primus stove and then fried doughnuts in it, our eyes
inflamed by the vapour to such an extent that reading
was impossible; yet the quarters were so narrow that we
could not go to bed until they were ready for bed also.
There was nothing for it but the patient endurance of a
misery we could not alleviate.
I do not know what Andy would have done had we not
been with him. I had given him a gallon can of alcohol
when we decided to depend upon the solidified prepara-
tion, glad to get rid of it, and for days he had had noth-
ing else to start his stove with. And now he came to us
like the foolish virgins in the parable with "Give us of
your oil, for our lamps are gone out," and we shared
our kerosene with him. Tom Goose had by this attached
himself almost exclusively to our menage, supplementing
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABEOW
189
it by chunks of boiled seal-meat from the mail cui-
sine when our bill of fare was not as largely carniv-
orous as he desired. I suppose Andy would have been
more careful of his oil had he not counted on falling
back upon our supply, and there would have been less
frying of doughnuts and more chewing of frozen fish and
seal-meat. It did not lessen the intolerable irritation of
his frying to know that we had furnished him with the
fuel for it.
We were no more than established in our miserable
domicile than the weather changed, the chill north wind
ceased, the temperature rose, snow began to faU and a
gale started from the south which lasted three days.
When we left next morning it was so warm that furs
were soon doffed, and by noon the thermometer was
standing at 20° above zero instead of 25° below. At
half-past one we reached a halfway igloo at a place
called Kun-fiey-ook, where we were hospitably received
in quarters so warm from overcrowding that most of
the company sat stripped to the waist. Here we lay two
hours while Andy and his companions ate a heavy meal
that the women cooked, Walter and I content with our
thermos lunch. These Eskimos have an astonishing
capacity for food when it is obtainable, proportionate, I
suppose, to their capacity for doing without it when
it is not to be had. I had baked several pans full of
sausage rolls at Point Hope, and one of them served
both of us for lunch each day with the addition of the
hot cocoa.
Snow was falling heavily when we resumed our march,
and it soon grew dark under the overcast skies. A little
later we left the lagoon for the beach and kept it until
we reached Icy Cape at about 7 o'clock.
For nearly fifty years this was the most northerly
known point of the mamland of America, Captain Cook
having named it in 1778 from the ice which encumbered
it. Hearne, indeed, had asserted a higher latitude tor
the mouth of the Coppermine river in 1771, but the claim,
190
A WINTER CIECtJIT
alwaya disputed, had in Beeohey's time already been dis-
proved by Franklin. The pack ice commonly has its
sonthem limit in this neighbourhood, and prevented
Cook's advance, as it did Beechey's, the further explorar
tions to the north of the letter's expedition being carried
out by Elson and Smyth in the Blossom's barge, though
Beeohey says that had further exploration depended upon
the Blossom alone it is probable he would have endeav-
oured to proceed at all hazards notwithstanding that his
orders were positive to avoid being beset in the ship.
From this place to Point Barrow all the place-names that
are not Eskimo are Beechey's names. The settlement,
which has a disused government schoolhouse and a large
store building besides about a score of igloos, occupied
or unoccupied, lies on the mainland opposite a consider-
able break or "pass" in the sandbank that forms the
great lagoon, and it is the point of this sandbank that is
actually Ici ^ape. The coast takes a further abrupt
turn to the eastward from this point, which would render
it notable from the sea; otherwise it is low and in-
conspicuous.
"We were lodged in the store building, a large thrift-
less house with all sorts of coal-oil stoves and lamps —
but no oil. There seemed no stock of goods nor any busi-
ness conducted; the man was absent, as were most of the
men of the place, and our hostess was a brisk, intelligent
but quite untrained girl who seemed to have the makings
of a housekeeper, were there someone who would take
the pains to teach her. She had a driftwood fire quickly
going in the coal stove, and a kettle boiling, by which my
cooking operations were greatly expedited, and I spared
enough oil from our rapidly diminishing store to supply
one of the numerous empty lamps ; a hideous thing with
twisted brass ornaments and dangling prisms and the
crudest of red roses painted upon its opal shade, evi-
dently the pride of someone's heart. I daresay a pass-
ing ship gathered quite a bunch of skins or many pounds
of whalebone for that gewgaw.
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABEOW 191
We had now travelled nine continuous days, including
two Sundays, and I was determined to attempt to secure
a day of rest for ourselves and our dogs, but when I
went over to Andy's lodging and broached the matter to
him, he gave a curt refusal. His own dogs were much
more tired than ours, and he had ten days within which
to finish his journey, which he estimated would take no
more than five. Thinking that dog-feed might be in
question I offared to buy all the food they could eat
while they lay over, for I had discovered that there
was walrus meat to be had here, though at a high price
But he simply said, "You want to stay, all right- I
go."— '
So I sought for someone to con.-^uct us to the village
of Wainwright, said to be two days' journey, but could
find no one. The men and the dog-teams were all away
and we were reluctantly compelled to pursue our jour-
ney. It was very annoying, and I resented Andy's
obstinacy, but there seemed nothing for it but to go on
with him. So I made such hurried visits to the igloos
of the place as the time permitted while Walter was
loading and hitching, and we started along the beach
amidst evident signs of a gathering storm, about 9
o clock. By noon the high south wind had shifted to
southeast, the advancing mass of clouds had completely
obscured the sun, and it began to snow. Very shortly we
were m the midst of the heaviest driving snowstorm of
the winter. Just before the snow began to fall Andy left
his sleds and took rapidly across the lagoon on foot
towards a reindeer camp with which he had some busi-
ness and when we went on hour after hour amidst the
Winding snowstorm and saw nothing more of him I began
to be seriously uneasy, though his assistants were not
perturbed It was 8 o'clock at night, as we approached
a low mudbank, when he appeared ahead, waiting for
ns, and I thought it a very remarkable exhibition of
famiharity with that trackless tundra country. He was
not unconscious of his tour de force, for he waited till
il
m
192
A WINTER CIRCUIT
my Bled came up and said, "You think mail-man get
lostt This mail-man never get lost."
We dragged along a couple of hours more through
deepening snow until, very weary, we reached the end of
the long lagoon at last at a place named Me-lik-tahk-vik,
and squeezed ourselves into a crowded igloo. We were
surprised and disgusted that the mail-dogs were left un-
hitched and unfed all that night. Freed of bis harness
a dog can make the best of the wretched conditions of
his bivouac in the wind and the snow, curling up into a
ball and turning his back to the wind, but confined and
constrained by his gear and still attached *o the sled he
is deprived of even that poor comfort. There was no
excuse for it ; there were but two of us and three of them,
yet we got all our dogs chained up and fed, or, I am
I nre, we should not have been able to eat and sleep our-
'.elves. Walter was especially indignant at this viola-
tion of the code of the dog man, and his feeling towards
Andy thereafter was like the feeling of the seamen
towards the officers who abandoned the ship full of pil-
grims that had sprung a leak in Conrad's Lord Jim — ^he
had done something that dog men don't do. Waltei
declared he would certainly tell the postmaster at Point
Barrow of the way the mail-dogs are treated. And he
did; the only time I ever knew him to "make trt ble,"
as the natives say, for anyone. This was their tenth
day of continuous hard travel, and here they were utterly
neglected and left hungry, with three men to look after
them. Andy had expected to make the remaining win-
ter trip with the mail, but another man was sent; though
whether Walter's representations had anything to do
with that, I know not; I think probably not.
The next day there was almost a repetition of the
weather happenings. We started about nine along the
mainland beach, the lagoon ended, in clear sunshine and
a south wind; presently a cloud rose rapidly from the
south and overspread the sky, and by noon it was heavily
snowing again with even greater force of driving wind.
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABSOW 193
It was remarked in one of the reviews of my previous
volume of winter travel, that it was "crowded with
assorted weather." The weather is always of prime
importance to a traveller, but a man must travel the
Arctic coast to realize how completely weather con-
siderations dominate all other circumstances of travel
At 25 below zero, with a keen wind against one, all the
furs, the inner and the outer, are required. Perhaps
withm a few hours, when the wind has lulled and the
skies become overcast, the temperature rises so rapidly
that furs become intolerable. A driving snowstorm de-
mands that the inner furs be covered with the cotton
arh;). or parkee; if it blow behind, one is carried along
with muA increased speed, but if it be ahead, it is
perhaps impossible to make progress against it at all
(hi a walking trip over the fine highways of the Alps
the weather in summer may play havoc with one's
itinerary. I shall never forget a wretched experience in
crossmg the Albula P^ss when heavy snow on the sum-
mit turned to pouring rain, and when we were drenched
to the skin, turned again to freezing, so that our sodden
clothes were grown stiff with frost ere we reached our
inn. But such vicissitudes are trivial in comparison with
the paramount influence which weather exercises upon
Tenter travel in the Arctic regions. A narrative of such
travel must be "crowded with assorted weather" if it
be any true picture. One is simply the sport of the
changing weather, and the whole art of travel is the art
of rapid adjustment to it.
Our host of last night accompanied us with his wife
and child and a dog-team, bound for Wainwright, and
when we reached the inlet of that name he went ahead
with a pole sounding the ice, for the incessant south
wind had driven water through the tidal cracks, and
there was doubt if we might cross to the peninsula upon
which the village is situated, or would be compelled to
the long circuit of the inlet. For a few score yards the
condition of the ice was somewhat precarious but we
M
194
A WINTER CIRCUIT
went qniokly over it to firmer, older ice, and were soon
npon a sandbar that mns north and south in the midst
of the inlet, after traversing which for some miles we
crossed the inlet ice to the peninsula, climbed a steep
bank and passed along the high sandbank to the village,
the whole population turning out to meet us and great
excitement prevailing.
Mr. and Mrs. Forrest, the teachers of the government
school, both in the complete Eskimo costume that the
weather demanded, Mrs. Forrest with her baby on her
back in the sensible native style, came out most cordially
to insist upon our staying with them, and indeed we were
only too rejoiced to accept their kind hospitality. It
was a keen pleasure to enter upon civilized domestic
life again, and we resolved that here we would stay for
several days' rest, let Andy do what he would.
Wainwright Inlet was named for Beechey's lieutenant,
John Wainwright, the two points of sandbank that form
the opening being named Point Collie and Point Marsh,
for his surgeon, Alexander Collie, and his purser,
George Marsh. The village at this place appears to be
one of the most favourably situated on the coast. There
are good coal seams within six nules inland, on the banks
of a creek, and coal costs but fifty cents per sack of 100
pounds, which is $10 a ton, the cost being, of course,
only that of digging and transporting; the lagoon behind
the village affords excellent fishing under the ice all
the winter; the sea-ice gives gooff "sealing and walrus
hunting. During the previous smnmer 150 walruses
were obtained by these people. The situation is not so
good for the brief season of flaw whaling, and at this
time many of the inhabitants go to Point Barrow, though
some whaling is carried on from here.
Including the outlying points, the total native popu-
lation is counted at 190, 187 persons having been present
at the last Christmas festivities. The school had an
enrollment of fifty-eight children with an average attend-
ance of thirty. Some 2,300 reindeer are attached to this
-{
. i
J
%
f
*
*
mmm..
li!
Ill'
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABBOW
195
village, divided into throe herds, which have, altogether,
twenty-six herders and apprentices, and these men, with
their wives and children, withdraw no small part of the
population from the village. The ownership of the deer
is even more widely distributed, almost every family in
the place owning at least a few, one dollar per deer per
annum being paid to the herders by owners who take no
share in hording, an arrangement usual elsewhere also.
Mr. and Mrs. Forrest were a young east Oregonian
couple who seemed to me excellently well adapted to the
work. It takes no little courage to bring a bride to such
a lonely place, with no white woman nearer than Point
Barrow, three days' journey to the north. Dr. Spcnce
had come down from that place when Mrs. Forrest's
baby was bom, and I heard again of his kindness and
gentleness. Mr. Forrest's life on a ranch was of value
to him here, his knowledge of cattle a help in the man-
agement of the reindeer herd under his charge, and the
general handiness and capability which a country
breeding brings, found many opportunities of exer-
cise in the devising and constructing of domestic con-
veniences.
There was no mission at the place, nor ever had been,
and the school-teacher was looked to for religious teach-
ing and the regular conduct of divine service. A co-
operative store was also attached to the school, in charge
of the teacher, and made no small demand upon his
time, so that what with the school, the reindeer herds,
the general care of the native affairs, the guidance of
the village council, the settlement of disputes, the con-
stant readiness to give patient hearing and advice, Mr.
Forrest was a very busy man and seemed to handle his
manifold duties with zeal and success. There had been
only one other white resident during the Forrests' term
of service, a trader competing with the co-operative store,
and his activities had brought him into a conflict with
the school management which was perhaps inevitable,
but which his conduct and character had deepened into
196
A WINTER CmcUIT
■m\'
antagonism. He had "(old ont" shortly before onr
arrival and had withdrawn to the northeast, where we
shall oome in contact with him onraelves by and by. His
snooessor, we learned, was a more desirable neighbonr.
What a very important, and in many cases what a very
disturbing and ignoble part the little local white traders
play in native affairs! Bnt for the missions and the
schools the natives would be wholly and helplessly in the
hands of these men.
Ozenstiern's oft-quoted observation to his son abont
the little wisdom with which the world is governed, fre-
qnently finds fresh illustration in Alaskan affairs. Here
on the one hand was a government school in connection
with which had been established by the Bureau of Edu-
cation a co-operative store, thus also a government enter-
prise. Here, on the other hand, was a government mail
service making three round trips during the winter. On
the north-bound trip the burden of the mail-sacks, be-
sides letters, is chiefly newspapers and magazines, but on
the south-bound trip that burden, besides letters, is
wholly furs going outside by parcel post to catch the
spring auction sales at which commonly the best prices
are secured. Now by a regulation of the post-office, if
the full contracted "limit" of weight be ready for
despatch at the office from which the mail starts, it must
be taken and no more can be picked up at any office
served. Point Barrow, as it was once the chief depdt of
the whaling industry, is now, since the decay of that
business, the chief depot of a fur-gathering industry in
the hands of the representative of one of the largest
American furriers Each time that the mail leaves Point
Barrow it carries its limit of weight in furs shipped to
the San Francisco house, and the co-operative store at
Wainwright is deprived of all opportunity of marketing
its skins save by the conveyance of the one ship that
comes in the summer. It is thus also deprived of the
diance to "turn over" its invested capital, of the
ohanoe to accumulate funds "outside" upon which it
POINT HOPE TO POINT BARBOW
197
oonld draw for the pnrcbase of its annnal stock. With
one hand beneficent, the government establishes a co-
operative store by which the natives may be protected
from the extortions of local traders, and with the other
hand, maleficent, it paralyzes the activities of that store
and to a large extent nentralizes its benefit. Indeed the
local trader at the time of our visit was but an agent of
the merchant at Point Barrow and sent up to him the
furs secured, who incorporated them with his mail ship-
ments, and thus under the very nose of the teacher
secured the benefit of prompt despatch to market which
was denied the co-operative store. One does not blame
the Point Barrow merchant, he is warranted in making
the best of his business opportunities, but that this regu-
lation was unfair to all the other traders between Point
Barrow and Kotzebne Sound had been repeatedly
pointed out to the post-office authorities, and I was told
that the Bureau of Education had made vigorous rep-
resentation touching the discrimination against its co-
operative store, without any avail. A regulation was a
regulation, just as in Russia a ukase was a ukase — and
if the one be as arbitrary and unreasonable as '^'i» other,
what advantageth it that an irresponsible dej .*tment
made it instead of an irresponsible autocrat? An auto-
crat sometimes hat' bowels and brains, but a department
has never any of the former rad usually very little of
the latter.
A young college professor of my acquaintance main-
tained that the chief need of American universities is
a chair for the co-ordination of chairs; a school that
should teach to each of the various schools > f science
the advances that had been made in the others, so that
in one classroc a things should not still be maintained
that had been superseded in others; that biology might
be informed of what had been newly done in chemistry,
and astronomy of the advances in mathematics, etc. I
am not academician enough to judge of the need of such
a corps de liaison, as our soldiers in France would call it,
IM
A WINTER CIBCUIT
!'
tmt I am rare enough that the United States governnent
ii ladly in need of a Bureau to Co-ordinate Bureaus, to
prevent one of them from actually working against an-
other. It would need largo powers, however, to handle
the post-ofBco department — so far as Alaska is concerned
the most arbitrary, capricious, inefficient and unintel-
ligent of government departments, and the one that, with
all these engaging qualities, comes most closely into touch
with the life of the ordinary citizen.
Due to its parsimonious policy of letting a mail con-
tract to the lowest white bidder, who in turn (in fact
if not in form) lets it to a lower native bidder, until the
remuneration for the actual, and very arduous, work is
cut down to a point where no more than the barest of
livings is obtainable — due to this policy is the sight of
half-starved, overworked, ill-appointed mail-teams on
the Arctic coast such as we had been travelling with, the
dogs mere bunches of bone and fur, the mail carriers
compelled to unreasonable haste lest upon their arrival
they find their expenses have exceeded their emolument.
I was told that on this coast it was as true as I knew it
to be on the Yukon, that at the end of the winter season
the mail carrier usually found himself in debt. Yet I
have described the conditions of Alaskan winter travel
on river surface or coast ice in vain unless the reader
has been able to see for himself that the men who face
all weathers and oil temperatures with the United States
mail are as deserving of profit from their labours as
those who serve the government anywhere.
Our two days' rest passed all too rapidly. I spent
several hours in the schoolroom each day and was
pleased with what I heard and saw. Each night there
was service, though the interpretation was indifferent,
and I baptized half-a-dozen babies, for there had been
no visit from a clergyman for some time. We slept
and ate, and it was certainly a delight to get within sheets
again and to sit down to a board spread with Mrs. For-
rest's good things.
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABSOW
190
Mr. Porreit having told me of a panic recently oaaied
bjr an old woman who reported that ihe had leen the
tracks of a number of itrangeri in the country behind the
inlet and railed the cry "the Indians are coming," I
was glad to speak to tbo congregation about the folW ■"
such alarms. I told them that the nearest IndiaL lo
them were on the Koyukuk river, nearly 300 miles away
in a straight line, with the uninhabited wilderness be-
tween, or inhabited only by roving bands of their own
people; that I knew these Koyukuk Indians well, every
one of them; that I had lived amongst them and built a
mission for them, years ago; that they were kindly
Christian people just like themselves, worshipping the
same Ood, singing the same hymns ; that there would bo
as much sense in being afraid that the walruses would
waddle out of the water and come into their houses and
cat up their children, as in being afraid of these few
harmless Indians, hundreds of miles away.
Oddly enough it is only a few years ago that amongst
these very Koyukuk Indians a similar panic ensued upon
a rumour that the Huskies (Eskimos) were coming, and
one family fled in haste to the Yukon and stayed there a
couple of years before returning, as I have told else-
where. One would like to recover the lingering local
legends of raids and ambuscades, of the cutting off and
slaughtering of venturesome outlying hunting parties
long ago, of which this surviving fear is the evidence.
Heame's graphic account of the massacre of sleeping
Eskimos by Chipewyan Indians at the Bloody Falls of
the Coppermine river, of which ho was witness, throws a
flood of light upon the old relations between the Indians
and the Eskimos — now bartering ond now butchering.
In reflecting however upon the mutual fears that perturb
the races today, one cannot but recall that several times
during the eighteenth century, when the English were
quite unnecessarily dreading invasion by the French, the
French were equally excited over unfounded apprehen-
sions of invasion by the English, and that Dr. Johnson
!
200
A WINTER CIRCUIT
commented upon the situation to the effect that nothing
but mntnal cowardice preserved the peace.
One of the things which interested me very much was
the communal reindeer-meat cellar, reminding me in a
small way of the catacombs of St. Calixtns, though this
storehouse was, much of it, excavated out of the solid
ice which underlies the sand and gravel on which the
village is built. Passing into a little frame house, and
opening a trap-door in the midst, we descended by a
ladder some fifteen or eighteen feet, through two more
trap-doors into a large vaulted chamber with many
radiating alcoves and cubicles. The lanterns gleamed
upon smooth surfaces of ice and upon lace-like incrusta-
tions of frost from the condensation of the moisture of
the meat.
Our plan had been to lie here over Wednesday and
Thursday and then, with invigorated teams and an early
start, seek to reach Point Barrow in two days, which
we were told could be done under favourable conditions.
A guide had opportunely shown himself in the person
of one of the two young gold-mining Eskimos I spoke
about early in this narrative as crossing from the Chan-
delar to the Arctic coast by way of a branch of the Col-
ville river. They had reached Point Barrow about the
beginning of January, and one of them. Bob, had come
down to Wainwright on a matrimonial quest, to "catch
me a lady" as he put it, but his quest was unsuccessful
and he was returning to his companion at Point Barrow
empty-sledded and somewhat disconsolate.
But Thursday set in with a resumption of the violent
gale from the south of which only Wednesday had en-
joyed an intermission, and it blew without weakening all
day long. Bob was not willing to start in the storm;
he had passed over our course only once in his life—
on his way hither— and there was a bay to cross and an
igloo to stop at that he doubted if he could find in such
weather; so that it was Saturday morning ere we left
the most hospitable school residence, no longer oontem-
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABROW 201
plating the effort to reach Point Barrow in two days
?2J T^" now impoBsible to get there for SundJ.'
had Bob consented; though Mr. Forrest, anxious to keen
us longer, yet agreed that it was the pirtTmVdom to
take advantage of the favourable wea?her northat tho
gale had blown itself out. "®
Loaded with all sorts of cooked provisions by Mrs
Forrest's insistent kindness, we left WainXhTaSni
waTa.o°nftt 1 \"^*'l^'' •"°"'-^' -^-ade o^J
^L, ? ^'^^ "• ''"«''* «™8»»«>e for twenty-five
miles to a place called Ah-ten-muk, which must hp vp^
close to the Point Belcher of the maps jfr^m the sh^^
quite indistinguishable as a point, though doubtless suf
ficiently visible from the sea to w^rranf namLf ^d "o
I am not .rry that this officer's service with Beechey is
not more notably marked; he has a channel far to the
eastward, north of Balhnrst Island, where his later and
The igloo, like most at which we stayed, was uncom
s Jstn^crf 1h'°* " ^"^^ "^ opportuU," tt~
nSs h„fh "^^''''""^ "t ^--ne length a number o?
natives, both evemng and morning. Bob's English
fluent enough m a broken way, was mining and tS
StEr "^''T' ""? """^ •""« acqulintancelSh
«nli»n 5 t. *^ phraseology of religion, so that I was
compelled to be very practical indeed, which is notT
parlance alone that one's interpreter understandsT-
tnere is scope for insisting upon honesty, upon the fair
representation of articles to be bartered^' upon the c^
scientious payment of debts, upon doin^ ^thout what
one cannot afford. And the relations between the si™
are sure to be within the competence of anytote^X
taough one sometimes has to be outrageously Ste
be comprehended by one's intermedial^
11
r!i
ao3
A WINTER CIRCUIT
u
>> '
I left with regret ncit morning, but the bay to be
orosaed lay now before us with calm weather for the
crossing, so onee more I swallowed my distaste for Sun-
day travel and we proceeded. This made the third con-
secutive Sunday that we had been on the trail— the most
heathen travelling that I ever did in my life. Now and
again in my winter joumeyings I have been compelled
— or though' myself compelled— to Sunday travel ; some-
times travelling on Sunday was necessary to reach an
appointed place for the next Sunday, because trail itin-
eraries are very easily overthrown by untoward circum-
stances. But I had never travelled on three Sundays
running before.
Peard Bay, named for Beeohey's first lieutenant
George Peard, has suffered a sea-change into Pearl Bay
in the speech of the coast. Indeed an old whaler at
Point Barrow insisted most positively that "Pearl" was
its name, and produced a chart in evidence. I was able
to convince him with a lens that the belly of the "d"
becoming mixed with one of the Sea-Horse Islands that
lie in the bay, gave the letter the appearance of an
"1," but on another chart, evidently copied from the
first, the name stands "Pearl." So much may a care-
less engraver be responsible for. I was prepared to
find that all the cheap, commercial maps had fallen
into the error, but rather disgusted that the map of
Alaska in the Encyclopedia Britamtica was of the same
company. The maps, I think, are the poorest fea-
ture of that indispensable work of reference. The
article on Alaska is admirable; the map is contempt-
ible.
We saw little of the bay and nothing of the Sea-Horse
Islands. It must be due to the proverbial nnfamiliarity
of seafaring men with horses that the walrus was ever so
known. One feels that the surprise of the child in Oliver
Herford's delightful Primer of Natural History at the
application of the name "horse" to the hippopotamus
would be qnite as much jostified by its application to the
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABEOW
a03
walrus . "Why they call that thing a horse, that's what
is Qreek to met"
These low islands, mere dislocated pieces of sandbar,
were the resort of herds of walrus in Beechey 's time and
are the resort of walrus yet — though the numbers are
greatly diminished by the reckless commercial slaughter
of them from schooners. It will be quite in line with our
usual policy to take some measure for the protection of
the walrus when it is on the point of extermination; to
lock the stable door when the sea-horse is stolen, so to
speak.
A rapid fall of the temperature to 30° below zero had
brought the usual accompaniment of fog. Tlie moisture
with which the air had been loaded in the late snowstorm
and comparative high temperature, was now condensing
and would presently be deposited as hoar frost; then the
air would clear. Meanwhile we took a course by compass
across the bay, hoping to strike the shore near ■ .le spot
where the igloo lay. A keen light air that sprang up from
the east helped to keep our course, and to inflame our sore
noses that had begun to heal at Wainwright. For seven
hours or so we travelled across the snow-covered ice of
♦he bay, seeing nothing but our immediate surroundings,
and all that time I was anxious lest we make a bad land-
fall and mias our one possible lodging, but shortly before
it grew dark the fog lifted — or more properly fell — and
we spied a distant wisp of smoke and knew that we were
safe. The place rejoiced in the name Dit-jin-i-shur, as
nearly as I could write the sounds, and I suppose if there
were an Eskimo house agent he might describe it as a
pleasant detached villa residence, with sandy soil, a
marine aspect and bracing air. Suth as it was we were
exceedingly glad to reach it, and to know that with good
fortune one more long day's run would take us to Point
Barrow. There were some unusually attractive children
at this igloo, and the five-pound sack of toffee I had
brought from Point Hope just lasted to give them a piece
all round. There is nothing that so quickly establishes
I ',
I
204 A WINTER CIBCUIT
friendly relations as to fiU the mouths of these shy, pretty
Snwithsweetstnff. It is a treat to them the more
appreciated on account of its rarity, and to the pver
riount of its appreciation. I had rath« be M
almost anything else on my travels than candy for the
■^Jljad the men up early next morning and we were
started by 6.30 in the clear weather I had confidently
Z^el Onr way lay wholly along the. b_each-tb
Sh mud cliffs rising sometimes to ^^or n^tyteet
all the way, broken here and there by galhes and ckf ts
making this stretch of coast very distmctive after the
^e Ire we had so long traversed. The surface was
not good, being mainly new ice encrusted ^t^ salt-frost,
diffi^t to walk upon and ruinous to one 's deerskin ^ts
and making much friction for our sled-runners. After
seven hours of it we reached an igloo at a Povnt some-
what higher than the general line of bluffs, cabled ''SkuU
aiff''_I heard why but made no note of it and have
f orltten-and here we were glad to stop and eat imd get
wa£ f oT^e had .11 suffered with cold hands despite
;-rwoollen gloves and heavy fur -**«. Ihave ^ver
been able to tell why hands are so much harder to keep
wa^on some daysVn on others of ^i"^" ^'^P^;
tare An hour here and we went some eight or nme
Ses fu^her to another igloo, reached in both cases by
^nd" g a gully to the tableland of the bluff, «id again
we^e Z tfget warm and consume tea aud bis^ii^.
ulXthis dwelling at 4.30, we ran for «<>« 1«'"«.^*-
o^tXp having sometimes to go out on the sea-ice to
avoid water S^m the tidal cracks, and at 8.30 we reached
Ca^eS^he, where the village of Barrow is situate
some tenses south of the most northerly point of the
ooast. which is the actual Point Barrow.
AQ day we had been following the course of the Blos-
W. baLrwhich, under her master, Thomas Elson, and
hT.'aSrW m^te," WUliam S«ythe>s<.vered -^
mapped this coast from the point of Peard Bay ^romv
POINT HOPE TO POINT BABBOW 206
PraiAliii) to Point Barrow. Smythe I found shortened
mto Smith, and Elson dean forgotten. Bnt both deserve
honourable remembrance, for it was a dangerous service
creditably performed, and to Smythe are due the excel-
lent sketches and line drawings that embeUish Beechey's
Dark as it was, the whole population turned out to
escort us the length of the village and beyond, to Mr
Charles Bro-er's establishment-the "Cape Smythe
Whaling and Trading Company"-and here we were
most cordially received. Had I been alone I should
have taken up my abode at the mission, to which I had
been most cordially invited, but I knew that accommoda-
tions there were limited and I wished neither to be sepa-
rated from Walter nor to inconvenience hospitable peo-
ple, while at Mr. Brewer's spacious quarters there was
plenty of room for both of us.
So here on the 25th February we had safely finished
the second grand stage of our long journey, at the north-
erly extreme of Alaska, and here we sat down for two
weeks' rest and refreshment and acquaintance.
.'»i
POINT BAEBOW
M
I
POINT BARROW
Thb native settlement at this place consists of two vil-
lagres, a large one, Utkiavik, at Cape Smythe where the
post-office of "Barrow" is sitnated, and a smaller one ten
miles away at the actual Point Barrow, called Nuwnk.
Both villages were in existence when Elson, the first
white man in these parts, made his visit, but the Cape
Smythe village grew much the larger by the centering of
the whaling enterprise, and the establishment of the
school and mission in 1890, and so continues.
By the school statistics the artificial settlement at
Noorvik on the Kobuk river has a population of 403
against 354 at Barrow, but with the addition of the people
at Nuwnk the Point Barrow Eskimos are more numerous
than at any other place on the Alaskan coast, or, indeed,
on the American continent. The white men at Point
Barrow make claim that it is the most northerly point
of the continent, and the largest Eskimo village with the
most northerly school and post-office in the world. It is
indeed the most northerly inhabited point of the
continent, but not the most northeriy point, since the
Murchison promontory of the peninsula of Boothia Felix,
1,500 miles to the eastward, touches the 72nd parallel,
whereas the latitude of Point Barrow is generally given
at 71° 25', some forty miles further south. And I am
afraid it must yield the distinction of the largest
Eskimo viUage with the most northeriy school and post-
office to Upemavik in Greenland, which is more than a
degree of latitude further north and is credited with a
population exceeding 900, with church and school, and,
surely, post-office. It must have a post-office, since 0.
Henry in one of his stories says he knows an Eskimo at
Upemavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties
h
II
A WINTER CIECUIT
Eskimo popnlRtion, <>»J^« J^"" ., permanent residence,
enongh north for any 7»"'« ^fji 'Z two fnU months-
The sun is absent « *" .^S^'aS; Tannary, which ol
from the 21st «»'*'"'»«' J^alJi^t ". totally absent, a.
months more. latitndes I think the per-
To most residents m *ew latm. ^^^„, for
petnal sunshine is more trying ^^"^^ '"^ y ^ on the
?here are always three o'/°« ''^^ the glare of the
darkest day. but there is "° "J^^^f h„„, of repose. I
.„n. no kindly decentjloomjo' the hon ^^^^ ^^
find my "e^^ .8«"'^« he sSner solstice, and I pray
lower latitudes;
V, ^A A^rTaan come and bring thy b«ln>
..Come, W^wadsrta-., CO ^„
For eye» grown weary oi «» b
in the Village of B-^ ^^ 'irse^^:: 7^^-
BpiououB bml«3i»B. '^t^;** °ie and his wife, and the
sLage, occupied by ^r^Spen^^ J^^^^,^ ^ ,^,
Bohoolhouse with Its «°3omea ^^ ^^^^ ^ u-
next. Scattered i"«8ula'^ ^J"^ ^ ^^^, ^reastuig
ings, most of them of *V..27^' frame" construction
the north and then, orestmg a nse,
POINT BARROW
211
warehoniei and itore bnilding* of Mr. Brower'g estab-
litbment, with some more native iglooi dotted about.
In the palmy dayi of whaling these great warehoaies
were crammed with merchandise, and it was boasted that
one could buy here ahnost anything that one could ask
for, at prices no higher than in San Francisco. The whal-
ing ships coming up empty to return heavily laden, as
they hoped and as commonly happened — exactly revers-
ing the condition of shipping at the mouth of the Yukon
— could bring merchandise at small cost, and the whale-
bone market gave such a rich margin of profit that sup-
plies sent up for native assistants scarcely out any
figure.
All that is past; for the last few years there has
scarce been any market for "bone" at all, and the ware
houses at New Bedford, in Massachusetts, the head-
quarters of whaling, are said to be stored with hundreds
of tons for which there is no sale. The last French cor-
set house that used whalebone has adopted one of the
substitutes, and horsewhips have become obsolete with
horse carriages. Many people have hoped that in the
development of the aeroplane some use for this material,
which combines elasticity, lightness and strength in a
unique degree, would arise, but it has not yet appeared,
and at the present day, as in the earliest days of the
industry, oil is a more profitable product of whale-fishery
than bone. But whereas in those early days it was the
world's major illuminant, it is now only a minor lubri-
cant. I have heard that, taste and odour removed, it
enters into that delectable compound oleomargarine, but
I do not know.
Mr. Charles Brower is the oldest, and, oommercinlly,
the most important white resident of the Arctic coi.dt of
Alaska. For upwards of thirty years he has lived in this
region, most of the time at this place. He came originally,
I understand, in connection with an attempt to make
the Cape Beaufort coal seams available, but being by
calling a seafaring man he soon devoted himself to whal-
m
A WINTBE CiaCClT
iag and reapwl Urge reward during the heyday of Uie
bTnineas. He had reared and eent to the Statei for edn-
oation one family of four chUdren, and was pron of
a ion in the army, another in the navy, and a danguter
a Bed Croei nnrte. About him now were half-a-doaen
by a eeoond wife, eturdy, wholeeome-looking half-breeda,
the blood mantling their cheeks with roey bloom. The
bitter winds of this coast bring the colour violently to
the chUdren's faces, and some of the mixed race that I
saw had the richest complexions imaginable. Mr. Brew-
er's Bobby, about six years old, was my special pet, an
affectionate little chap with coal-black hair and eyes,
small regular features, cheeks like poppies, teeth white
and regular enough for a dentifrice advertisement-as
pretty as any picture-and with a shy manner and engag-
ing smile that took me captive at once.
Walter and I slept in the shop, he in a bunk and I on
the broad counter with a mattress to put under my
sleeping-bag, and when aU the others were retired to
their quarters we had the spacious, well-lit chamber to
ourselves with quiet and leisure for our studies; so that
I know not where else we oould have been so conveniently
'"^nnected with the estabUshment as cook was an old
shipmate of Mr. Brower's, Mr. Fred Hopson, with an-
other batch of assorted half-breed children and the two
families lived together in a sort of patriarchal plenty and
simpUcity, and with an absence of biokenng that was
verf pleasant and unusual. Fred Hopson s most promi-
nent mark was a carefully cultivated ferocity that did not
deceive anyone as to his kind and indulgent na ure
When the children came trooping m from school, their
appetites sharpened by a walk of half a mile, perhaps
against a blizzard-like wind, they would invade the
Wtchen, and the most explosive and alarming fee-frfo-
fnm threats and growls would mmiediately proceed
therefrom. "Get out of here, you young wolves, or I U
kick the left ear right off you 1" "Where's that ramrodt
I,
I
POINT BABROW m
-what the diokena did Charley do with that ramrodf "
But left ears leemed a« nnmeroui at right ones and I do
not believe that the ramrod was ever found. The ohil-
di«n, quite undismayed, issued forth munching slabs of
cake or section* of pie, or, at least, hunks of bread and
jam.
Mr. Brower was a quiet, judicious, dispassionate man.
capable and intelligent, the l> .< informed man on aU
Arctic matters that I found <ij, 1 1 ;s f oa-t mn of the very
few with any knowledge of ii. ( ..tor^ oi i.. .re than a
momentary interest ther. in. H- i-aj ru.'t ev .y man of
note, navigator, explor... .avillPr, . ;,,it«f, who had
visited these parts for more Jan ••. q.-nr* r oi a century
and, with the open-haj.-l .d hort.'.l'ty „f the Arctic, had
entertained most of them I loui rl him a mine of in-
formation, a mine that I dug in a r.ood u cl during those
two weeks and that I sit here tu\ry wiahin? I had dug in
more. He knew the inside history of tiie recent expedi-
tions-sometimee differing widely from their outside his-
tory—and whUe I found his estimates of individuals not
always in accord with the popular valuation, there was a
broad expenenced humanity about him that prevented
them from becoming uncharitable.
Long residence among the natives, employing them
trading with them, marrying amongst them, had given
his observant mind a penetrating insight into their char-
aoter, and into their manners and customs, past and
present (for they have changed much in his time), which
while lacking in the detached, scientific, note-book-and-
tape-measure minuteness of Mr. Stefansson's ethnologi-
cal studies, as, I am very sure, his acquaintance with the
Eskimo language lacked Mr. Stefansson's enthusiastic
philological exactitude, yet exceUed the attainments in
these directions of any other man I have ever met, unless
U were Bishop Stringer or Archdeacon Whittaker of the
Yukon Territory-though indeed these be matters of
Which I am capable only of a superficial judgment
amounting to little more than an opinion. He had gath-
I
214 A WINTER CIRCUIT
sympathetic During my ^tay with hwi i i
S of a daily morning .f ^^^^^l^Z the one
miles along the sandspi , ^'^^^*^;.°^*t whatever the
tend and the lagoon "^ ^^^j^^^VS'^Sty «£ uninter-
weather, and was S^f . f ^^'^^ T^eeaU one day when it
^ptedc^nversauonb^^^^^^^^^
r "ie'wi rim^st" always a keen wind, commg or
«T-Bro. er-dacon.o^^^;j-- S^^^^^^
cation over the policy of Eataino cone j-.^uy
it seems — 'tt^^^nSh"-^^^^^^^^ ^^"^'^
at this place, holding tl^a^^f;; nrosperity of the corn-
gathered '^\^riT':z^pr:z^:joi men with
mnnity, and he had outhtt^ea ^^^ ^^^ ^^
gmh that they migh t;^« J;"^^, .,hite foxes than in
where there was better prospect (^ ^^^^ ^^
the overtrapped ''<"«W.°urho°J,°;;, ^^^ .^ ^^,
coarse he was the «g«^t f " f m' ^^^ ^^,14^8
his business to secure furs hu the^e is ^^^
furs that an KsW who u^es w ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^.^^^ ^^^
procure to trade for the same «. gathering of
daily l>-^-™f i t noffTvoirahle'f or a plenti-
many people "* one place is ^^ ^^^^^ ^
M provision ».<^/°f ^«^f J^^U^nity. was rendered
a serious one in an EBk"n° ^^i^^i^^, ^^^ ^^^ .^^^^
C: JS ar/oiSr than at any other pla«e
-ySirLre was this M^on^^l^thes^
SorofTTpe^l--:-- with his Wife.
POINT BABROW
ns
did 08 the honour to call upon ns on the night of our
, arrival, and had, indeed, expected me as their guest. I
1 went down to the church two nights later and addressed
h with much interest the largest Eskimo congregation I
I had ever seen— some 300 people gathered at the mid-week
prayer meeting; and so long as I stayed at Point Bar-
row I was called upon to speak to the people on every
occasion of their assembling. An efficient interpreter
had been developed, a product of the local school, now
employed with much advantage as an assistant therein,
well grounded in all but the amenities of English — as I
have remarked of the school-training before; a young
married man, earnest and anxious, to whom I took a lik-
ing and to whose willing usefulness I was on many occa-
sions indebted.
A form of service had been translated into Eskimo
with a selection of hymns, and save for the Scripture
reading and the address, which were interpreted, the
whole exercises were in the vernacular tongue. There
was much extempore prayer, now one in the body of the
church and now one in the gallery taking up the burden
of petition, sometimes in a loud voice and sometimes
ahnost inaudible; alike unintelligible to me, of course,
but alike, I make no doubt, not only intelligible but ac-
ceptable to Him to Whom it was addressed. Unaccus-
tomed to public extemporaneous prayer, I was perhaps
the more touched by what seemed a simple spontaneous
outpouring of piety, and that first impression was deep-
ened as I grew better acquainted.
Dr. Spence had been a physician all his life and was
ordained to the Presbyterian ministry only on coming up
to take charge of this mission. In the conduct of his re-
ligious work I judged him simple and sincere; devout
without being unctuous. Unctuousness there was at
Point Barrow, even down to Aaron's beard and the skirts
of his clothing, as when I was bidden to see, in the fossil
bones of extinct monsters lately discovered, evidence of
"what a beautiful and lovely world this must have been
I;
; i
1'
216
A WINTER CIBCUIT
ere sin entered in to blast and destroy," whereas— to deal
only with that side of the remark— it is well known that
unless the paleontologists have greatly erred in their
reconstruction of these creatures, they were, on the whole,
far uglier than anything that is permitted to walk the
earth today ; more horrific of aspect if not more ferocious
of disposition. The imapnation must, I think, be unctu-
ous that can kindle at the bones of such monsters into
such fire.
But there was no unctuonsness about Dr. Spence; if I
were seeking one word to describe his quality I should
call it "lactifluousness," for I have rarely seen the milk
of human kindness flow more copiously and more gen-
erally. We are, I suppose, always disposed to like those
who are tolerant of our weaknesses, and I had no more
than settled down on my first visit to the manse ere I
was told to take out my pipe if I oared to. "We know
you smoke and we don't mind it at all." One must under-
stand the dead set against tobacco at the schoolhouses
and some of the missions of this coast, the furtive way
in which the natives indulge in it, to realize the extent
of this charitable good nature. It was almost as though
a Spanish grandee of Ferdinand and Isabella, under the
very eye of the Inquisition, had said to a visitor, "We
know you are a heretic, but go ahead and hold your own
worship; we don't mind a little thing like that!", and for
all I know Dr. Spence may have been promptly delated
to Fifth Avesoe for permitting smoking in the manse.
King James I and his famous "Counterblast" would
find themselves mneh at home at Point Barrow. Having
no piety of my own to boast about, as Bishop Wihner
used to say, I will intrench myself behind the impreg-
nable piety of William Cowper, who wrote (on the 3rd
June, 1783) that if tobacco were not known in the golden
afte, so much the worse for the golden age, and that this
age of iron or lead would be insupportable without it. A
man most be judged according to his lights, and Cowper 's
memBry should not be unduly blackened for this remark
POINT BARROW
217
M
even by the most violent anti-tobacconist. Else what will
yon do with John Wesley, who wrote of wine that it is
"one of the noblest cordials in nature"! His "journal"
has a good index and anyone who wishes can place the
reference, whereas my copy of Cowper's Letters has
none. There wa« never in the world a more pious man
than Cowper, but several new sins have been discovered
since his day. I am sorry to dig up such scandalous old
sayings, but it is really necessary to remind some people
that there were saints before Billy Sunday, however dim
their halos in our brighter light.
It was not mere tolerance or complaisance, however
that I had in mind in speaking of Dr. Spence as laotiflu-
ong, It was his unchanging attitude of sympathy and help-
fulness to all with whom he came in contact. His gentle-
ness with the natives had an almost feminine quality,
without any suggestion of effeminacy. He never spoke
loudly nor without a kindly intonation, never betrayed
the slightest impatience at the most unconscionable wast-
ing of his time, never failed in careful consideration for
their feelings, and always sought the best constrcction
of their actions. I made his round of visits with him
one morning, from igloo to igloo, where his sick lay, a
long, sad list; and everywhere his coming brought not
only tender ministrations but the light of pleasure in eyes
that otherwise showed only pain. I saw an old bedridden
woman contmually caress his hand, and kiss it when he
said good-bye. Some of the dwellings were large, some
very small, some neat and clean, some dirty, in tlie usual
way at any native village— or for that matter at any gen-
eral collection of human habitations. But how sorely
there was need of some proper place for the care of the
sick ! of nurses to supplement the physician ! In the dark
close underground dwellings the chance of recovery from
any disease is surely greatly diminished, and although
every dwelling we entered had a sheet iron stove and
most of them had been so built that only a stove would
properiy warm them, in not one of them was any heat
i':>Mi: a^iniiAiMW^m i
tu
A WINTEB CIBCUIT
R I
save from a seal-oU lamp, so entirely has the dnftwood
been consumed from off the bewjhes of this ooast.
Tuberculosis, always rife at native villages, seems
more common here than anywhere else. I have read that
a Dr H C Miohie, making the von Pigvet test (what-
ever that may be) on nearly aU the children at the Eskimo
viUajre at St. Michael, found that 61.5 were tuberralous,
and Dr. Spence told me that at Point Barrow there is
scarcely one family not affected by it in some member
and some degree. It is complicated in many cases with
syphilis: one case I saw had painful suppurating lesions
M a result of inherited syphiUs, and another, a yoMg
man, was losing his sight therefrom, and would. Dr.
Spence said, lose it entirely beyond any possibiUty of
salvation. He was patient and resigned, but it was
frightful to think of this poor boy doomed to life-long
bliidnes. through no fault of his own. What an awful
responsibility rests upon the shoulders of those whose
lawless passions introdnoed this vile disease into the
^^TLlT^er seen »y pli« where a modern, well-
equipped hospttal is more sorely needed th^ at Point
SLrrowTand immediately upon .y return to Fort Yukon
I ventured to make that very «g-t representation to
tho« having the ultimate charge of 11«! work It was
graciously received, and I am encourag^ to toP^ *^t
Sis crying need will presently be snppUed I hold it
v^ry iMoh to the credit of the Presbyten«n Church that
th^ have so long mai-tained a physician jt this pla^.
St%it is the gate and narrow is t^e way of tte medi,^
missionary in the Arctic, and few there be that find it
Before Dr. Spence was Dr. Marsh for many years, to
Jhose devotion and good sense Mr. Stefansson bears
testimony-a witness who will not be accused of undue
nartiality for any form of missionary activity.
Mv chief reflection u^^n the Eskimo situaUon along
this whole coast is that the health of th. natives is scan-
•AMriCM /».n»4 0/ the Di-^ of CWI*"., SUrtk. 1M7-
vmme- >^'xn«if> 'WBViisiiuiPVMiwBjeB^ :m.'s m, i w^-^^ f aohm ' -mv
From a fielttTapk by Fr,d llop,o
A POINT BARROW MOTHER AND CHILD.
POINT BABROW
■19
dalousiy neglected. The Danish govermnent of Green-
land has shown a far more kindly care for the Eskimo,
and IS rewarded by the knowledge that they are increas-
mg instead of diminishing as upon our coast. The
figures that have been sent me as representing the growth
of population m Damsh West Greenland,' show an in-
crease from 10,245 in 1890 to 11,790 in 1904, and every
decade preceding 1890 shows its corresponding increasT
save from 1860 to 1870 when there was doub?less7ome'
epidemic disease. The coast is divided into three medical
districts, with responsible physicians in charge and ca-
pable assistants under them, and I have been informed
though I camiot quote authority for the statement, that
every village of any size at all has medical care from
the government. On our whole Arctic coast, from Kot-
zebne Sound to Point Barrow, Dr. Spenoe was the only
physician and we found no nurse or hospital at all
It IS not pleasant to make such comparisons to the dis-
advantage of our government. I do not think I am lack-
mg in an appreciation of what has been done for our
i-skimos; I recognize the immense benefit that the intro-
duction of domesticated reindeer has brought, thoucli
to my m-nd the honour for that far-sighted beneficence
IS ahnost wholly due to the restless energy and resource-
fnhiess of one man; the government itself has no more
than the credit of the unjust judge who yielded to the
unportunate widow because of her importunities- I
recogmze the earnest and successful efforts to pro^de
elementary education-whioh also owe not only their in-
ception but, m no small degree, their abiding impulse to
tbe same large heart and enthusiastic mind; yet while
making full acknowledgment of these benefits I cannot
acquit the government of the almost total neglect and
disregard of the health of the Arctic Eskimos.
That neglect-which is not confined to the Eskimos but
applies m general to the natives of Alaska-is not so
^ am i„d*Ud to th. librari.„ of the Hoy.1 G«gr.pl,ical 8o.l.ty for
' 1
220 A WINTER CIRCUIT
mnoh the fault of individuals as it is the fault of an im-
wieidy, inelastic, unresponsive system, which, as the his-
tory of Alaska abundantly shows, is unequal to the care
of remote, unrepresented dependencies. There was no
lack of knowledge of conditions, there was no lack of
continual urging of needs; they were known and recog-
nized. I have recently read a file of nearly all the
annual reports of the governors of Alaska, and I feel as
Gibbon felt wh ' He closed the chronicles of Gregory of
Tours, "I ha' i^ lediously acquired, by a painful perusal,
the right of i < .nouncing this unfavourable sentence."
Thirty-five years ago the first governor of Alaska
wrote strongly and feelingly of the need of medical at-
tention to the natives; last year the ninth governor took
up vigorously the same refrain. Said Governor Swine-
ford in 1886, "I see them dying almost daily for the want
of medical care which, it seems to me, a humane govern-
ment ought not to hesitate to provide for them. Shall it
continue to be said that our free and enlightened gov-
ernment is less regardful of the needs of this helpless,
suffering people than was despotic Bussial" Said Gov-
ernor Strong (report of 1917), "An analysis of the situa-
tion causes one almost to agree with the pessimistic al-
ternative that Congress should either attend to the needs
of the natives in a comprehensive and sufficient manner
or else do nothing at all and allow the race to die out
as quickly as possible."
I am of opinion that so far as the producing of any
effect is concerned, these copious annual reports might
as well have been corked up in bottles and solemnly cast
into the sea. They would have had quite as much influ-
ence in the bellies of sharks and whales as in their re-
spective pigeon-holes at Washington.
All the care of the health of the natives of the interior
along 1,500 mil^s of the Yukon and along all its great
tributaries (beyond a physician and a makeshift hos-
pital at Nulato) is at the charge of the Episcopal and
Boman Catholic missions, which are forced to supply
POINT BABBOW 221
the defloiendes of the government. The only physician
on the Arctic coast is a missionary of the Presbyterian
Church. It is true that the school-teachers everywhere
are snppUed with a few drugs and bandages; it is true
that the army-post surgeons at Tanana and St. Michael
out of sheer humanity do not refuse their services to the
natives m their vicinity. But drugs in the hands of
teadiers whoUy untrained in medicine are almost as likely
to do harm as good, and the post surgeons commonly
have their hands full with their military duties.
1 have not taken credit for half of my "painful peru-
sal"; n f^le equally long of school reports and "special
apnt" reports was included, and I could quote scores
of passages similar to those I have quoted, were I indif-
ferent to the tedium of my readers. But I am glad to
have fortified myself with this disinterested lay testi-
mony, well knowing that in some unintelligent yet not
umnfluential quarters mere missionary testimony is heav-
ily discounted.
The situation at Point Barrow with regard to the coal
measures of Wainwright Inlet is much the same as that
of Point Hope to the coal measures between Cape Lis-
burne and Cape Beaufort; the coal is abundant but un-
available. Along the intervening coast is no plafe where
a boat can take shelter from the sudden storms to which
the region is subject. Peard Bay is quite open and oa-
arotected; "Befuge Inlet" is no refuge at all. The only
recourse of a vessel caught on a lee shore in these parts
IS to beat out to sea; an oomiak laden with coal is not
suited to such nautical manoeuvre and is at once in
peril; and, while some little coal is in some seasons thus
procured, the main supply for the mission and the school
and the store comes from the Pacific coast in ships.
There was almost a fuel famine at Point Barrow dur-
ing this wmter. The store, I judge, never lacks. Com-
merce IS likely to look well after its own. The school
did not seem to be inadequately provided. But the mia-
iion was very ill snppUed and the native population al^
m
m A WDrrER CIECUIT
moRt entirely without. The large, bam-like diurch wai
always wretchedly cold; from time to time during aervioe
the doors of the stoves would be opened by attendants
and lumps of seal or whale blubber thrust in to eke out
the coal, but the effect they produced was limited to
their dose vicinity. All the congregation wore their out-
door attire, but for Sunday they had the pretty hs^bit of
wearing dean, white, cotton "snowshirts" over all, the
sleeves and the bottom edged with an embroidery of
narrow braid in a native pattern. The effect was like
that of a gathering of old-fashioned En«»"^ Pf "?*'
in smook frocks. When I preached, wstead of the robes
to which I am accustomed, I was vested in fur boots and
fur artigi, with even its fur hood pulled up. I suppose,
had our Lord and His apostles lived in the Arctic regions
instead of Syria, some conventionalized form of tw gar-
ments would have descended to the historic ministry
instead of the flowing linens of the East. When the
building grew a little warmer, chiefly by the aggregated
animal heat of so many people, it began to be odoriferous
of hides and oil, and by the time the service was done
one's clothing had become burdensome and the prospect
of fresh air welcome, tiiough one's feet were always cold.
The heating of such a spacious and lofty overground
structure must always be extravagant of fuel, and once
aeain I was impressed with the ineligibility of such archi-
tecture in these parts. Why should -irecisely the same
sort of church be built in the barren regions of cold,
continually scourged by bitter winds, as would be built
amongst the palm groves of Floridat Am I unreason-
able in thinlriB;,' that a reasonable question! There is a
certain staring incongruity in obtruding Gothic stone
churches upon the distinctive architechire of China, and
I have always felt that a pagoda-like structiire sur-
mounted by the cross would appeal more, not only to
a sense of the fitness of things but also to a sense of the
universal adaptability of the Christian religion and its
destined universal dominance, than any building of ex-
MICIOCOfy HISOIUTION IBT CHAUT
(ANSI GfKl ISO TEST CHART No. J)
1.0 Jrl^ e
^ APPLIED IIVMGE In,
• York 1.609 USA
r ;
POINT BARROW 223
£ fW i),""''""^'' the Gothic is so distinctively Chris-
ten! Rf"*t" something to be said for its transplan-
tat on But there ,s nothing beautiful or characteristic
in thlT't' \T^ fr"°« ^°' evangelistic continuity
Lr rf^".' '""■°"''''" structures. What is the rea
son, then, that they are bodily transplanted to the Arctic
regionsT It docs not lie in lack of knowledge, in i^^
ItZ h! }' ''T'/°' f™ "' '""^ "'''^^"•'e build thTm ,
it can be due only to a lack of that "imaginative sense of
fact, 'spoken of by Pater the prophet, which turns
:aiowledge into power.
Once again I wished that it had fallen to my lot to
attempt the adaptation of the Eskimo style to eccles as
tical purposes. The trees borne hither on the waves a 1
the way from the Yukon river (for thence, as they told
me most of them come), with which the beaches used to
.hl\ ^°^^ have made beams for my half-underground
chamber; the massive jawbones of whales, that so long
defy decay, I thought might have made pendentives fo?
my domes. I saw lustrous mosaic skylights of deftlv-
pieced mtegument, tinted with colours from seaweed and
moss from berries and earths, cunningly blended into
Chr stian emblems, to which their soft translucence
would give themselves better than glass. I saw Tow
walls hung with a diaper of tanned skins, semed with
similar signs by Eskimo needles, the cle;erest in the
world in the working of fur, and bordered with their
own native designs, cheeky or counter-cheeky, chevrony
paly or pily, vair or counter-vair, exactly as the heralds
used, long ago, when such terms were commonplace to
all who could read. Many well-kept seal-oil lamps of
native soapstone, ranged regularly along the walls,
perhaps held in sconces of beaten copper brough
from Coronation Gulf, each with its crouching old
woman attendant, would suffice for Ught and even for
Wflnntli.
Not only would my temple be warmer and more com-
modious, more easily purged of foul air and provided
ll
;^
! ■
224 A WINTER CIRCUIT
with fresh, but, as I conceived it, would not lack elements
of modest native beauty, would not lack some little hy-
perborean glimmer from every one of the Seven Lamps
of Architecture. It would have, at any rate, the funda-
mental dignity of fitness; over it the wildest storms
wou'd pass harmlessly; from it the severest cold would
be easily repelled. That was my vision; but on the other
hand I might have spent a lot of money and made a sad
mess of it. Has the gift of the imagination been denied
to all them that occupy their business on the Arctic coast,
or has it been superabundantly indulged by one who
merely visited them? .
It was the custom to hold a weekly social gathering
of the white residents, to which I was invited. All told,
there were eight white persons living here this winter,
and Walter and I made ten; not a large assembly, yet
quite large enough for the little sitting-room, and too
large when there is no attempt to organize entertain-
ment If, like Dame Ingoldsby, "dance and song you
"consider quite wrong," "feast and revel, mere snares
of the devil," and cards be out of the question, there is
nothing left but conversation, and unless there be ^me-
one with a gift that way the thing is likely to flag. Point
Barrow is not one of those melodramatic places that
Lewis Carroll speaks of,
"Where life becomes a spasm
And history a whiz,"
and all local topics of talk are soon well worn. As to
the war we were of one mind, and the news was gloomy;
nor was there any amateur strategist amongst us. Last
year's flaw whaUng had " i bad ; we all hoped that this
year's-the season for > a approached-wonld be bet-
ter- the weather had been somewhat nnusally stormy
this winter, though perhaps not remarkably so; the rem-
deer herds had done fairly well, but the increase was
not as great as other places reported; the fox-trapping
POINT BARROW 225
had promised very well around Christmas, but now had
greatly fallen off, and the season was at hand for its
ending. The folly of closing trapping on the 15th
March, when the fnr is prime for a full month or six
weeks later, merely because the seasni, is earlier in
southern Alaska, was commented on and made an im-
pression on mo (which bore fruit in a representation to
the governor, which bore fruit in a change of the regn-
^ .LI° t^'^t trapping is legal on this coast now until
tne loth April).
These matters exhausted it was hard to revive inter-
est. I had persuaded Mr. Brower to come, who for some
time had disused these occasions, but I could not make
him talk. There was constraint and self-consciousness,
and three of those present, I know, missed their evening
pipes. They do better, I am convinced, at Fort Yukon
where, it is true, there is almost twice the white popula-
tion m some winters, and where once a week they gather
for whist. I am never there myself any great part of
the wnter, and indeed have neither leisure nor inc'ina-
tion for cards. For twenty-five years there has never
been a time when more books were not crying out to be
read than my scanty leisure could compass. Even now,
as I sat looking at the assembled company, seeking mod-
estly, as became a guest, and not very successfully, from
time to time to open some fresh conversational vista
was there not the Life of Sheldon Jaclcson that Dr.
Spence had lent me (and in my isolation in the north
1 had not so much as heard that there was a life of Shel-
don Jackson), was there not Bartlett's Last Voyage of
the Karluk that I had found at Mr. Brower's (and I on
my way, as it turned out, to meet one of the survivors
of that very disaster), -not merely crying but importn-
nately clamounng to be read while yet there was timet
But for a smpll, very mixed, gathering, without main
interests in common, I think that perhaps cards afford
whil L^ •" u? ^^'"^ *° ^""^ ^l^^t «°"«> intercourse
which IS desirable and valuable for all parties concerned
^'f:
826 A WINTER CIRCUIT
8t tlese remote outposts of civilized life. I know the
difficulty, and I know that it is more apparent than real.
The natives readily acquire card games and it is diffi-
cult to keep them from gambling; but gambling is prac-
tised in a score of ways without the aid of cards, and
it seems a mistake to transfer the odium from the prac-
tice to the pasteboard.
At last we seemed to have exhausted our resources
altogether and we sat and looked at one another. There
came into my perverse mind the recollection of a silly
suppressed stanza from "Peter Bell" (from which a
good many more might have been suppressed without
loss), "Is it a party in a parlour! All silent and
all . . . "_hut I will not finish the line, for the finish
has no more relation to the scene than the stanza to the
poem. It was, Mr. Wordsworth, for no small part of the
evening, "a party in a parlour, all silent." The refresh-
ments made a welcome diversion, though even then so
forced was the gaiety that without any reflection upon the
eatables which were abundant and excellent I could not
help recalling the occasion when a certain celebrated
character "took up that moist and genial viand a cap-
tain's biscuit and said 'Let us be merry.' " Yet with
these people, singly or in couples, I had had pleasmt un-
restrained intercourse. It was a case of the mixing of
diverse ingredients without some one reagent that would
make them combine, and cards constitute the simplest
form of that reagent that I know of. I hope I have not
seemed unappreciative or critical of very kindly and
gracious hospitality. There is nowhere in the world, I
am sure, any freer or more generous hospitality than in
the Arctic regions.
Walter was day by day busily engaged upon the build-
ing of another sled. The boy had planned a vehicle that
should carry little besides our bedding and bags, with
runners extending behind to stand upon and an arch or
hoop to grasp when so standing instead of handlebars,
a smaller reproduction of the one he had built at Point
POINT BARROW
tXI
Hope; designed mainly for my own comfortable projr-
ress in his usual kindly and thoughtful way; and having
procured some Siberian hardwood from Mr. Browor for
the runners, was sawing aud chiselling, fitting and shap-
ing steammg and bending. "A natural-bom mechanic,''
said Mr. Brower; yet not more "natural-bom" mechanic
thin woodsman, hunter, dog-driver, boatman, mountain
ohmber-natural-born to the whole range of outdoor
proficiencies so that it was not possible to say in which
of them he most greatly excelled. I could not call him
a naturalist, because his knowledge of nature, like Gil-
bert White's, was "unsystematic," but, like his, it was
extensive and minute. Mr. Brower had lately been tell-
ing us of a most remarkable migration and wholesale
self-destraction of lemmings, which took place in 1888
*?,f^ *?•! ."^"^ "^^"""^ '*"'°° (May), when miUions
of these httle creatures came out of the interior, passed
out upon the ice until the sea was reached, and then
plunged into the water, pursuing the same direction, and
were drowned in countless multitudes. For miles and
miles along the shore they floated dead in great wind-
rows cakes of ice literally covered with their bodies
drifted to and fro, and he said there were many millions
of them drowned in three days, though the w) le period
covered a couple of weeks. I was greatly interested in
this thing, not only on account of its remarkable nature
ont because I remembered to have read of similar inci-
dents m Norway and Sweden, quite as inexplicable and
on as large a scale. Then Walter spoke up and said he
had once seen hundreds of them drowned in trying to
cross the Yukon. Now I had lived thirteen or fourteen
years m the interior of Alaska with my eyes reasonably
wide open, as I thought, and I did not know that we had
snoh creatures. I had seen several varieties of shrews
and field-mice, and I had seen rats imported by steam-
Doats, at many points, but anything corresponding to
the lemming I had not seen. For aught I knew of its nat-
nral history it might make its nest under sundials and
«l|.
^^i
228
A TMNTEK CIRCUIT
Uve upon cheese, like a riithy tove. Walter, however de-
Bcribed them ub five or six inches long, with nch reddish
brown fur, round, dumpy heads, ^tle black eyes and
very short tails, and Mr. Brewer recognized the descrip-
tion I did not doubt; I never doubted anything Walter
said; but I wondered. Last summer, when we had taken
the Pelicm up to Eagle, shortly after our return from
this journey, and were on our way to visit an In^an
oamp on the international boundary line ten miles fur-
ther up, Walter gave a quick toot to the horn to attract
my attention and when I entered the engine room pointed
through the windows to the water, without attempting
to say a word amidst the noise of the engine. I/a" l^^
on the deck and saw long rows of floating dead bodies
of lemmings, red-brown fur, round dumpy head, short
teil-just as he had described them, for I fished one out
with my hand, lying on my belly on the deck. And I
still wonder how it came that I never saw a lemnung
before. His knowledge of all our birds and beasts was
similarly close and accurate and he would have made
the most valuable field-assistant to anyone engaged in
a description of Alaskan fauna; with the necessary train-
ing he could have undertaken such desonption himself
^erhans better than any other.
'^ It was here that I began to suspect that Walter was
cherishing a purpose of offering himself for the wax
when we returned, and that instead of going ont tocol-
lege he would go out to fight, were he still needed. When
the original call for the registration of men within the
miUtarf ages was made in Alaska during the previous
summer, the recording officers were directed to exclud.
"all persons of whole or mixed native Wood, Lid^an^
Eskimo or Aleut," and I know that his pride had been
hurt by the discrimination. Now that he learned that
Mr. Brower's two sons were serving, I thmk that he
resolved to enlist when he had the opportunity. He had
Ilways been intensely interested in aviation and read
eagerly all that came in his way about it, nor was he
POINT BARHOW
2S9
in the least dismayed by a very striking picture of an
aviator and his machine
"Hurled headlong, flaming, from the ethereal height,
With horrid ruin and combustion down,"
Uke Milton's Satan, which a lady to whom he confessed
his wish produced irom some back number of an il-
lustrated weekly for his benefit. Certainly he would have
been a valuable recruit amongst the bird-men Thor-
oughly familiar with the running of a gas engine, he
had already been on foot higher than, at that time any
aeroplane had soared (for I do not think the record had
then passed 20,000 feet), and had been without fear or
suggestion of giddiness upon the narrowest, most precipi-
tous snow ridges. The qualities of resourcefulness and
self-possession he had so often displayed in exigencies
on land would have had only more conspicuous display
in the air, and the instant, unwavering decision which
made him so valuable at the steering wheel or with the
paddle in swift water, his unerring judgment of distance,
his keenness of vision, his complete sang-froid, all these
would have combined, I am confident, to make an aviator
who would only need experience and opportunity to be-
come distinguished.
I had already begun to be busy with arrangements for
onr further travel and was having much diflScnlty in
procuring a guide. To begin with, those who knew the
north coast were few; there seems no travel from Point
Barrow beyond the mouth of the Colville river. I found
one stalwart, personable young man whc, though with-
out much English, knew the coast and was willing to go
and after much negotiation, covenanted with him as to
remuneration; but several days before the time set for
our departure, he reported himself unable to secure the
dogs he needed, and Mr. Brower, remarking that he evi-
dently had "cold feet," advised me to drop him. Then
another presented himself, but the report as to his ca-
'I'l^i
) flM I !
230 A WINTER CIRCUIT
pacity and reliability wus unsatisfactory and I dropped
him too. Then, jpon Mr. Browor'a rccommcudation, I
approached a half-breed named George Loavitt, sin of
a whaling captain who used these parts in the ^ my
days, and although he know the coast only as f as
Flaxman Island, and that mainly in the summer when
he had several times gone on trading cruises for Mr.
Brower, I was glad to close with him for the trip. He
was a pleasant, willing fellow, with sufficient English
for interpretation, and sufficiently familiar with travel-
ling conditions that we might safely entrust ourselves to
his judgment and care ; of such respectable chi raoter as
to be one of the elders of the local church.
From this place it would be necessary to carry al' thn
dog-feed we expected to use until wo reached Herschel
Island, four hundred odd miles away, the greatest dis-
tance I have ever had to transport dog-feed. George
would have his sled and seven dogs, which, with my thir-
teen, made twenty dogs to feed, and that meant big loads
of rice and whale blubber, the only available food. I
wished very much that in addition to sending up supplies
for ourselves, I had sent to Point Hope and Point Bar-
row 500 pounds of the best dried king salmon, and were
I contemplating the journey again, should certainly do
BO. On the west coast the supply of dog-feed is pre-
carious; on the north coast there is none, and our ex-
perience was to prove that rice and blubber make poor
food. There was much to be done in the way of working
out the minimum weight of supplies required, in the
constructing of a small tent, in overhaulin" our whole
equipment. To be prepared for all emerge»-eie8 Walter
accompanied one of the men on a seal hunt and made a
pole with a hook at the end, after the native moUel, for
pulling a seal that has been shot out of the ice-hole. I
doubt not, had we been reduced to such extremity, that
he would have been able to subsist the party after reach-
ing the ice-edge, which, however, is sometimes very far
from the land on the north coast.
POINT BAKROW 231
On the afternoon of one of the Sundays of my atay at
Point Barrow I accompanied Dr. Spoco on his weekly
W8U to the primitive villase at the land's end. ten or
twelve miles away. We had a sled and team apiece,
and, reclining in my sleeping-bag, I had the novel ox
penence of being hauled along "like a sack of flour" as
Walter expressed it, the first time that I ever so tr,
elled; and the feeling of helpless confinement was any-
thing but agreeable. Swift dogs covered the hard
surface m about pn hour and a half, and we found the
largest house in the village literally crammed with the
whole population awaiting thr usual service. I counted
them three times, each with a different result, they were
so thick-set, but there were between seventy and eighty
people in an ordinary living chamber, the air very foul
and oppressi-.e. Already several of the men were nude
to the waist and soon others divested themselves of their
reindeer snowshirts, their one upper garment, until a
considerable part of the congregation displayed only
bare flesh. When I had gradually removed all that I
could remove of my own clothing, as the heat increased
I not only envied the greater frc.dom of he natives
but recalled Sydney Smith's wish tha. he f ,d take off
his flesh and sit in his bones. One promiiu man gave
a ludicrous illustration of the combination of Ihe primi-
tive and the highly advanced : nude to the »- ..he wore
strapped to his wrist a luminous-dial watt-
sand years r.go I daresay our own ancef
themselves of all apparel when it grew incon
as little concern as the Eskimos, but ten yeai
one in the world, I suppose, possessed a ra.
watch. Let me say again that there was not to .
the slightest suggestion of immodestv about thif pos
ure of the body; there was evidently no self-ton* ,.«•«
ness about it at all. The fur shirt was removed a* .
removes an overcoat— only there happened to be not^
underneath it; and I have little sympathy with those
would blame these people for unburdening themselve.
' liou-
•^sted
at, with
ago no
m dial
miii4
pos-
sn
A WINTER ClBCtlT
I
1?!
tit <:
m
nt'i
i ^i
of apparel that wai oppressive. I do not nnderralue th«
oonvenUoM of our oivilixation, but I »ee no senae in in-
•Uting upon them a» though they were aomething more
than oonvenUona, under toUUy di«ferent eircnmitanoei.
If I used an Eakimo igloo conatantly I think I ihonld
drop into the same cnstom; if fur were my only wear
I am iure I ahould.
The simple devotion which these people exhibited
aKain impressed me. That it was genuine no one could
doubt when there was nothing to gain by aflectation.
One able to interpret whom I questioned afterward, with
reirard to the prayer of a man specially fervent in spirit,
told me that he had spoken of the comfort and happmesa
that came to him by the knowledge that his sms were
forgiven and by thinking constantly of the loving pres-
ence with him of our Heavenly Father; of the complete
assurance within his breast of that presence; and of the
change in his whole life which that assurance had
brought. As it was given to me there was nothing ex-
travagant or unctuous about it, nothing that did not nng
true as his own words, though not understood, had rung
in my ears ; nothing dissimilar to the «P«"7« f J"""*"
less thousands of all races in all ages since first the Gos-
pel was preached. So De Long felt when he sailed away
from this very coast, so he felt all through that weary
drift :n the ice; all through that terrible journey from
his foundered ship to the Lena delta, ^'^^"K "*e'8
though himself he could not save, even as his Master,
80 Sir John Franklin felt, as passages in his journal
testify; so Livingstone, making his "marvellous explora-
tions" in Africa, so Sir Isaac Newton, two centuries ago
in his study, so Louis Pasteur, yesterday in his labors-
torv And my controversy with my agnostic scientific
friends is that they most unscientifically ignore facts
of such tremendous force and universaUty, and, having
swept away the whole spiritual Ufe of man, are con-
sistently rulty of the inconsistency of speaking of a part
i^teri^ TZ whole. A tag of legend or folk-lore that
! ' I
I !: •
III-
POINT BABBOW 233
should appear identically and independently in Ceylon
in Africa, in Patagonia and in Otaheite, would stir the
ethnological world to its depths, and would be lectured
upon from Edinburgh to Melbourne, but religious phe-
nomena of not merely far greater but of universal va-
lidity, identical among all the families of men, and
of import immeasurably weightier, are contemptuouslv
Ignored. '
After the service came the "clinic," and for another
hour or more Dr. Spence was examining patients and
dispensing remedies. We then paid a hasty visit to one
or two unable to come out, and once more I was im-
pressed with the need of a hospital and nurses. The
dpy was done ere we started back and it was weU after
dark when we reached Barrow.
One morning of the few that remained was spent at
the school, hearing successive classes recite. The pri-
mary department, under the charge of the half-breed
referred to, pleased me very much, and the whole school
gave evidence, not only that it was well taught, but that
it had been well taught for a long while.
And one afternoon was spent with much interest in
Mr. Brewer's whaling storehouse, with its great array
of weapons, its shoulder guns and darting guns, both
discharging bombs that explode within the bodies of the
animals, its multitude of "spades" for cutting up the
carcasses, its harpoons and hooks ; an armory far beyond
the needs of the guerilla warfare that this conflict has
degenerated into. One feels that the whale had no chance
at all, and that if the cessation of the demand for its most
valuable product had not put a term to the wholesale
slaughter, it would soon have put a term to itself. Al-
ready the whaling ships were going far to the eastward,
to Banks Land and Victoria Island, following up the
retreating monsters.
The season for the flaw whaling now approached, and
ttat had been one of the reasons why I had had so much
difficulty in procurintr a guide. I should like to be pres-
i I
I
234 A WINTER CIBCUIT
ent at Point Barrow or Point Hope during that season,
wHch lasts for part of April and the month of May
Though I should not oare to repeat the e^™/ °;*^«
young moving-picture photographer-one of the few of
ihT!h^'s company who happened to be ashore on a
lunt ng trip w^en the KarU,k drifted away to her doom-
Iho stayed out on the ice with the whalers durmg the
whole of the seaso and never saw a whale.
F aw whaling is othing more or less than takmg up
a position on the ea , of the ice in the ^ope that a wha^e
wUl nass by The pack-ice begins to move away from the
^w?e the ice fasUo the shore, in April A road is then
made from the shore through the rough hummcK* ^e,
Tra'ght out to its edge in deep water, sometimes a mile
orTIo away, sometimes five; boats are dragged to it
on Tds or rollers, a camp is made, and a sharp lookout
" Si about this time of the year the bow^head whales
nnSe from their winter quarters in the Pacific Ocean
?^^dr summer feeding grounds in the seas north of
Alaska and this lead or channel between the pa*-ice
fid the shore-fast ice is the path that their journey must
*^Tiie whale, it is said, loves to roll under the edge of the
,oM ^^o^^i-'-:-^z'':^ r bScierrotS
Se\^L"(I amTot sure of t^e hai^a ^ W*
which its huge bulk becomes incmsted like the hull of a
S This marine toilet completed, ^f^ perhaps some
ceteiean equivalent for the Scotchman's 'God bless the
Ce of Argyle!" grunted, he wallows out into the open
wSer ofl^flead ^, and, should he happen to select
Tspot at or near which the hunters are lying in wait, fte
boa's ^re rapidly in pursuit and the bombs discharged
be^useU was suggested to me that it was a corrupU^^^^^
•'floe." But I am satisfied that it is not; flaw is flaw, the
1 1 '
POINT BABBOW 285
when I went to Point Barrow, that I nught have been
s:rti;n?hi:i.rr eitto-^btr ^r^ -^
sunpler than take h4 o;a:d7um;U'?^'if'';lSa;:
a pnmp; bnt I had only a wretched little Jpette a sort
edge drop by drop instead of in fnll stream. I did not
faiow how interesting whales are until I went to pJint
t":iTlt^ r °/ *^ "''^^^ -son, aTnow thri
Z fori h^f *" ^r '""^ * •""•""^ «««». I «"» seek-
mg for a book on whales to inform myself for T Ip<>™«^
SeJa'ftin*'''^-'^^^^-"^^'^^^^^^^^^^
th« t^i fi. ?• ^"* '" '""^ "f the life history of
the whde that is q - unknown with any oertaintyl^pt
^period „T'f «^ "'^^'^^ '""^ ''"'ii"^ fo^h e^n
me period of gestation seems unknown
is much Zf r"u^.^ ^''""^ °^ *^« ^'"^o <»««* there
B«r^rt ^t r^-l have to be included about Point
Set ri87l wT " f' '""^ •" ^''^ '°-- <" the whaTg
fleet m 1876 when a dozen vessels were crushed in the ice
C?„f th ""f * '^"^ °' «"eh occurrences wai.
that of the season of 1897, when nearly three hrl^
i'^il
136
A WINTER CIECUIT
ill'
ill
men escaped from ioe-be«et vessels to Pomt Barrow, md
the famous reindeer-relief expedition was despatcned
from Cape Prince of Wales under Lieut. Janns and
Mr W. T. Lopp early in the foUowing year. The jour-
ney of these men, with their Eskimo assistants, oyer
the ice, driving a herd of over four hundred deer ahead
of them to Point Barrow, was a very remarkable one,
and though when the relief arrived late in March it was
found that the stories of starvation were untrue (Mr.
Brower teUs me that he had warehouses fnU of frozen
caribou carcasses), and indeed the condition of the deer
was such that they would not have afforded much food
untU they could be fattened, yet the intent was praise-
worthy and the journey remains a notable and most
creditable one. This undertaking, from first to last,
cost the government, it is said, in the neighbourhood of
$100,000.
Then there is Lieut. Bay's sojourn of two years
(1881-83) in charge of one of the ciroumpolar stations
maintained in those years for scientific purposes by the
principal governments of the world, with its extensive
ethnological and meterological reports.
Indeed there is material for a volume on the histo^
of Point Barrow, were there interest enough on the part
of someone to dig into it and write it, and on the part of
the pubUo to read it. But of what place in the world may
that not be saidt I am quite sure I could write a book
as large as this on the history of Fort Yukon.
VT
THE NORTiraRN EXTREME
i'A
I:'
VI
THE NORTHERN EXTREME
Mt original itinerary made at Fort Yukon had aet the
middle of March as the date for our departure from Point
Barrow. On the 14th of that month we set out after noon,
three sleds, three men and twenty dogs strong, intending
only the upper village of Nuwuk for that day, where we
had arranged for a supply of walrus meat that should
serve for dog-feed until we reached a part of the coast
where driftwood for cooking was to be found. A pleas-
ant sunshiny day with little wind gave us a fair start,
and the whole population turned out to give us God-
speed on what was thought a venturesome journey.
"When we were come to Niiwuk and had taken up onr
quarters in the house in which Dr. Spence had held serv-
ice, I gathered up some children and they led me out to
the end of the narrow sandspit that is the geographical
Point Barrow; and when I had made a photograph or two
and had emptied my pockets of the candy they contained,
the children wandered back and left me. Kerawak also
had followed, but after nosing around awhile he began
to have apprehensions about his supper and returned
also.
Here was the most northerly point I had ever reached
in my life, or that I ever expected to reach. Of course
its mere northing was nothing. Once I met a well-known
bishop, doing the usual Alaskan tour, and he said to me
laughingly, "You Alaskan missionaries are always talk-
ing about being so far north, but I've been further north
than any of you." "Test" said I, "what latitude have
you reaohedf " "I have touched the 80th parallel," said
he. I was much impressed for a moment, then, thinking
quickly and mnning over the avenues to the polar regions,
n
U I !
[Mi I
240 A WINTER CIRCUIT
I laid "Then you most have taken a Bummer exennlon
to Snitzbcwen I should like very much to have gone
*^tK-" "Thit'. exacUy what I did.",be rephed.
r,„d^it wa. a smooth, delightful pa..age." So my
anyone who ohooscB, in a favourable BeaBon reach a point
^thin ten degrees of the north po'^ with comfort and
I^ o^ent , a pleasant escape from tht .ommon beats and
Sr he'ats'of Europe. And it may ^-t^; days are a
hand when we may sweep over the north P""' ^''/^
easily, in some aerial conveyance. But 1 think the asi
Sel on foot must always mean more to a man than
Ch h gher latitudea attained in such ways, just as I am
Tre that a 20,000-foot mountain, laboriously climbed
muBt Sways m an more than a greater altiude reached
raorrautical means. The one is like an onginal edition
of vov.^8 or travels, in several volumes with large type,
STar^" 'platcB and maps and all sorts of appen-
S The other ia Uke a cheap reprint in one volume.
SBmall poor type and all the plates and jn^P^ "-"'"f
Tr so blurred andsmudged that you wish they had been
""ihu' irregular, hummocky sandspit, awept almost
olei of snofby continual winds, rising little above the
Zm surrounds it. is the "farthest «treme'' of
Alasla-a jutting finger of a defenceleBB. wasting coast
ftat withiVthe memory of the older Eskimos has re-
treated almost a mile before the encroachmg waters
The hunlocks are caused by the gouging P«7'« °* *e
S! which digs up the sand and B^mgle and m J s J
rTady for washing away, as the teeth ^re^k off and chew
the food before it is swallowed. Every storm that urges
; Sty blocks upon the shore ploughs f-'-J V^J^^^J:
"?■
- "-r^ »
Tin. ALTLAl. I1IIM UAKHKU llll. NCIH 1 HI.HX l.MH
F.M1; ut ALAslv 1
MARCH SUN AT POINT BARROW.
4
THE NORTHERN EXTREME
241
dreamed of and so laborionily lought Malatpina
thought he had fonnd it when he turned into the opening
east of the great glacier of Mt. St. Ellas, and, beating out
again, called it DiBonchantment Buy. Cook thought for
awhile that he bad found it when be lailcd round Hincbin-
brook Island into Prince William'i Sound, and again,
with more confidence when he doubled Cape Elizabeth
into the broad inlet that now bean his name, with no
land in sight to the westward. Kotzebue's hopes were
high when he opened the spacious waters of his Sound;
and when he lande<l and climbed a hill and saw them
still stretching to the cast as far as bis eye could reach,
he "cannot describe the emotions" that possess him at
the belief that fate bos destined him to bo its discoverer.
Many an arm was a Tnmagain Arm, many a cape a
Deception Cape, many a bay a Disenchantment Bay, a
Qoodhope Bay of which the hope was to be blasted, in
the slow process of this weary search by which so much
of the world's coast line was mapped.
Here it is at last! But no pillars of Hercules dis-
tinguish its importance, no towering cliff or mountainous
headland indicates its place ; a squat barren sandspit with
the ice-pack continually fressing upon it, at once *^e
gateway of the Northern Passage and the most difficult
part of it. Perhaps for ?ix weeks in the summer the gate
may open and ships may find passage between the sand
and the ice — or they may not find it at all. Like James
Boss at the magnetic pole, one cannot help wishing
"that a place so important possessed more mark of
note."
Beechey's Bloss( » cannot even reach the gateway, one
year or another, ana it is Thomas Elson in the barge wh(i
is the first white man to see this most northern point of
the west coast of America. Twenty-four years after-
wards, on the 5th August, 1850, the Investigator, under
McClure, giving his consort the slip, rounds Point Bar-
row and proceeds to the eastward on the Franklin Search.
The gate was open. Ten days later the Enterprise, under
);!
1!
242 A WINTER CIRCUIT
CollinBon, 8 greater though less fortunate sailor, ooinee
up too late, and after cruising about the f ge <> *«
pack for the rest of the month, is compelled to go south
and wait a year. The gate was closed.
Upon Bison's return to the Blossom Beechey named
the point, not unworthily, after Sir John Barrow for
forty years one of the secretaries of the Bnt.sh ad-
miralty, the earnest advocate and promoter of a long
series of Arctic explorations, and the historian of the
;oyages-"the father of all modern Arctic enterprise
MTciintock calls him-and Beechey reflects with pleasure
St the name of his friend and patron now stands ^
both extremes of the Northern Passage ; Barrow Strait
being a continuation of that Lancaster Sound of Baffin
S;^hich alone the continent may be -^df Jrom th«
Atlantic. Yet I can wish that he had named it for Thomas
eE of the barge, whose skilful and dangerous serv^e
iB commemorated only in the bay east of Point Barrow,
and even that not locaUy known by his name^
Next after Elson in the barge comes Thomas Simpson
of the Hudson's Bay Company, advancing from the east^
ward to complete what Franklin left undone. When he
r no longer proceed with his boat, he leaves he'-
oharae of Dease, his elderly companion, and starts tor
THE NORTHERN EXTREME
243
Society voted him its Founder's Medal ; but he never had
them or knew of them, being shot and killed in some mys-
terious half-breed quarrel, the true particulars of which
were never known, while on his way to take ship for Eng-
land, in his 32nd year. A bright, clean, eager spirit, I
judge him; one of those resolute young Scotchmen who
will not be denied, to whom exploration owes so much,
and I have always lamented his untimely end. The sim-
ple and modest narrative which covers his life's work,
I would not willingly miss from my shelves.
A little while since I was erecting monuments at Cape
Prince of Wales and Point Hope, but here at Point Bar-
row I would set up a rostral column after the Roman
fashion, and from it there should project the beaks of
the boats that reached or passed through this gateway.
Elson's barge and Simpson's oomiak should have high-
est place, the one coming from the south and the other
from the east, then should come Sheddon's yacht the
Nancy Dawson, the first ship to round Point Barrow, and
there should follow the ships of the fifties, McClure's
Investigator, Collinson's Enterprise, Kellett's Herald,
and McQuire's Plover, which last passed two winters in
Elson Bay; every one of them on that same rescue service
so fertile of every sort of discovery except the one on
which they were bent; and there would be room for
Amundsen's Gjoa, the first ship to make the complete
Northern Passage (though I would rather try to take her
round Point Barrow than try to pronounce her name),
and for Bartlett's Karluk, though she did but pass the
gate to be drifted back to her doom. Yes, and there would
be room for the Thetis of Stockton — he that wrote the let-
ter about Point Hope — who had the nerve to take a gov-
ernment vessel to Herschel Island ! Upon the base of it
there would be room to cut the name of Ensign W. L.
Howard of Stoney's Kobuk party, which made the first
white man's overland journey to this place in 1887.
But Point Barrow has other interest than this wealth
of intrepid pioneers. Standing on this point today one is
Hi I
244
A WINTER CIRCUIT
m
still on the very threshold of the anknown. East of it,
south of it, west of it, is explored and mapped; one hun-
dred miles north of it is as blank today as when Simpson
set foot here. While Cape Chelyuskin, the most northerly
point of Asia, stretches much further towards the pole,
Nansen in the Fram, on that most remarkable and fortu-
nate of all Arctic voyages, drifted right across its merid-
ian, far yet to the north of it. But I think I am right
in saying that there is no record of any ship sailing
an hundred miles north of Point Barrow; the immensely
and inexplicably heavy ic Uoes have always prevented it.
CoUinson's latitude of 7o 23', seven or eight degrees to
the west of it, is still the extreme advance that I can find,
though Parry in the V. S. S. Rodgers is said to have
reached 73° 44', some ten degrees further yet to the west.
Whether vagrant whaler, caring little and even perhaps
knowing little about geographical position (for I was
astonished to learn that some of them are men of very
scant nautical knowledge, though expert ice-pilots), may
have drifted or been driven into higher latitude, no one
can say; the known waters stretch less than two degrees
beyond the point.
Is there land beyond itt Is there land north of any
part of the Alaskan coast! That still remains one of
the most interesting of the world's geographical prob-
lems. Land seems less likely now after Storker Storker-
son's sled journey (of Stefansson's expedition) which
nearly reached the 74th parallel, 150 miles to the east-
ward, and the deep soundings he found, exceeding 1,000
fathoms with no bottom— but it is by no means settled.
Lands do arise out of very deep water. Banks Land
itself does, and one thinks that the "continental shelf"
figures somewhat too weightily in the arguments of those
who make the Beaufort Sea a large part of the Arctic
Ocean. The extraordinarily heavy masses of old ice,
"paleocrystic" as they are called, which prevent the
penetration of these waters, seem confined by some land
to the north; migrating birds still fly due north from
THE NORTHERN EXTREME
245
Point Barrow. At any rate, beyond Point Barrow lies
the largest unexplored area of the northern hemisphere,
and the great irregular white patch that signifies "un-
known" on the circumpolar maps, stretches down nearer
to it than to any other point of continental America.
While to the great part of mankind all this is, I sup-
pose, matter of the utmost indifference, and one is not
unfamiliar with a certain contemptuous tone in which
"such a to-do about barren islands in the Arctic regions"
is referred to, yet to the thoughtful mind that regards
the whole earth as the domain of man and all knowledge
that it is possible to gather about it a proper sphere for
his enquiry, this jjreat irregular white patch will re-
main a challenge until it can be overlaid with the land
that it contains, or painted blue for the sea that cov-
ers it.
Such thoughts ran through my mind as I stood on the
sandspit and gazed long out into the vague, indetermi-
nable distance of ice, hazy and mysterious. How closely
Nature guards some of her secrets I With what ample
labour and suffering has knowledge of the north been
gained in the three centuries that elapsed from the time
Henry Hudson crossed the 80th parallel to the time that
Bobert Peary reached the 90th I
But darkness was at hand, and I made my way back
to the village, still contemplating and speculating. Wal-
ter, when my absence was prolonged, had begun to pre-
pare supper and it was ready when I returned, and when,
an hour or so later, I unrolled my sleeping-bag and crept
into it amongst a number of reposera on the floor, my
mind was still too active for sleep.
These igloos at Niiwuk, I reflected, were the most north-
erly fixed habitations of the continent, and these people
around me the ultimate American hyperboreans, for
Boothea Felix has only occasional visits from wandering
folk and neither Boss in 1830 nor McClintock in 1859
found any trace of natives in the northern part. My
thoughts began to revolve about the people I was
y\
246
A WINTER CIBCUIT
"it
i
M '.
amongst, for when aU is said and done the people that
inhabit any country are far and away its most interesting
feature.
I had now seen much the greater part of our Arctic
Eskimos. The sub- Arctic people of the Seward penin-
sula, of the Yukon delta, the Kuskokwim and Bristol
Bay countries, are far more numerous; but these of my
acquaintance may not unjustly be thought of as the hardi-
est and most interesting of theai all, thrust like a spear-
head farthest into the domain of darkness and cold.
Where else shall a people be found, so hardy, so indus-
trious, so k'ndly, and withal so cheerful and content,
inhabiting such utterly naked country, lashed by such
constant ferocity of weather?
The stories of the white man's first acquaintance with
them came back to my mind. However awed and be-
wildered by the apparition of beings undreamed of, how-
ever overwhelmed by the evidence of their might, they
seem never to have lost courage and self-possession, and
their attitude was very different from that of the tropical
savages who prostrated themselves before Columbus. I
saw the sixteen-year-old boy that Kotzebue tells of, who
planted himself outside his sod dwelling with drawn bow,
and withstood the approach of the commander and his
three marines until t'aey had laid their muskets and cut-
lasses on the ground. My heart goes out to that boy "of
a pleasant, lively countenance" as one's heart goes out to
all dauntless youth, and I think the more of Kotzebue and
his men that they were themselves moved to admiration
by his resolute defence of his home The whole inci-
dent is characteristic and instructive, Jie bravery of the
boy not more than the fierce cupidity of the mother,
dazed beyond the dreams of Eskimo avarice by the wealth
of great brass buttons that "swam into her ken" when
the explorers entered the hut, and resolved, come what
might, to share in it; so that when she had herself failed
in several surreptitious attempts to twist some of those
buttons off, she sent her little children to crawl round on
THE NORTHERN EXTREME 247
the other side and try to bite them off. I know they
would have adorned her son's attire rather than her own,
had she secured them, and 1 find it in my heart to wish
that she had.
Then, at a leap, my imagination crossed the continent,
and I chuckled at the sight of the redouhtable Martin
Frobishcr, on one of his voyages to his "Meta Incog-
nita,'' flying down a hill to his boat with an arrow quiv-
ering in his buttock from the bow of an Eskimo he had
vainly attempted to kidnap. They never lacked courage,
these Eskimos, wherever they were found. Had they not
learned to take the most monstrous creature in the world
— the whale f Beechey found a floating carcass with an
Eskimo harpoon in it and a drag attached made of an
inflated sealskin, by which the whale had evidently been
worried to death, and is moved to marvel that "these un-
tutored barbarians, with their slender boats and limited
means, contrive to take the largest animal of the crea-
tion."
Often indeed, when doubtful of the designs of the new-
comers, their demeanour was decidedly hostile, or when
overwhelmed by the sight of edge tools and iron in
abundance— the great riches of the world to them— their
covetousness led them to pillage and theft. But they
have very few lives of white men to their charge;
very few indeed until they had been debauched and in-
flamed by the white man's liquor.
Long before I had any personal acquaintance with
them I had felt that human nature acquires a new dignity
when we contemplate the mastery over their adverse,
intractable environment which the Eskimos achieved.
Naked, in the Arctic regions, with naught but what their
hands could fashion from what their hands could find,
they subdued the rocks and the ice, the bitter winds and
stormy seas, not merely to a provision of the necessaries
of life, but to an existence that included vivacity and
enjoyment. Poor Tom Hood wheezed from his consump-
tive conch that it was only for a livelihood that he had
1 .'
248 A WINTER CIRCUIT
ever been a lively Hood, which I thinlt is the most poign-
ant pun in literatnrej but these men have always been
lively although one would consider their occupatioUj con-
dition, and circumstances irresistibly depressing.
Upon Buckle's deadly theory that we are sokly the
product of our environment there is no explanation of
the Eskimos. Taine's view that this constraining force
is always modified by natural bent, and that every race
displays the outcome of the interplay of these two factors,
has always appealed much more to me so far as historical
philosophizing goes, which is not very far; and I should
assign as the natural bent of the Eskimos an invincible
tendency to lightness and gaiety of heart. Indeed one
may perhaps be pardoned for saying that had the Es-
kimos themselves shown any disposition to be philoso-
phers they would have found, like Dr. Johnson's old
college friend, that "cheerfulness was always breaking
in."
Hear Beeohey again, when he first landed at Point
Hope. None but old people and children were present,
the man power absent on some hunting excursion. "An
old man having started pounding on a drum-head, two in-
firm old hags threw themselves into a variety of attitudes,
snapping their fingers and smirking from behind their
seal-skin hoods," and "several chubby giris, roused by
the music, joined the performance." He reflects, "We
had the satisfaction of seeing a set of people happy
who did not appear to possess a single comfort on
earth." , ^x. • * j!=
This invincible cheerfulness is perhaps their most dis-
tinctive trait, and has pointed a moral for many a writer
since Goldsmith sang of them in that admirable poem,
"The Traveller." It could be as readily illustrated by
citations from the Atlantic coast as from the Pacific, from
Boss and Parry and all the subsequent voyagers, did one
not prefer to illustrate an Alaskan theme with Alaskan
instance. Yet I will quote Knud Rasmussen, who knows
more of The People of the Polar North than anyone else
THE NORTHERN EXTREME 249
with whom I am acquainted, and says of the Greenland
Eskimos, "Their domestic life flies past in a succession
of happy days. If you stop to listen outside a hut you
will always hear cheerful talking and laughter from
within;"' and again, "an irresponsible happiness at
merely being alive finds expression in their action and
conversation." t
With their courage and their cheer, they do not lack the
finer, more delicate qualities. The reader will perhaps
recall the young man who left his own house and spent
the night in a deserted tumble-down igloo rather than
incommode his guests who did not know they were his
guests. There is nothing in the whole journey of which I
feel so much ashamed as of the annoyance that I know
my manner must have betrayed— though I said nothing—
when this young man and his companions arrived at the
igloo which we had taken possession of for the night.
And if there be any meaning left in the word, this rein-
deer herder, smilingly picking up his sleeping-bag and
leaving his own home to spend a cheerless night amidst
the mins of an old igloo, was certainly a gentleman. It
was the magnanimity of hospitality.
In other matters they have left the old darkness be-
hind them. The exposure of the aged ceased a long time
ago. Mr. Brower told me there were only two cases within
his knowledge : one in 1887, when an old woman known
by the white men as "Granny" was walled up in a snow-
house and left to starve. Captain Herendean, who was
that year in charge of the whaling station, Mr. Brower
being "outside," went to the place, kicked down the
snow-house and brought the old woman to the station,
where she lived for several years and was useful in mak-
ing boots and skin clothes. The other was in the winter
of 1888-89, and in th.t case the old woman perished.
Next summer the Thetis came, and the commander sent
a lieutenant and boat's crew for the intimidation of those
who were concerned in the deed, who understood the
l|
♦P. 6j.
tP. lis.
250
M'f!'
j5„ A WINTER CIRCUIT
purpose and fled on the approach-one «ore mark to the
\.^A Tin fnnd resources but tne cariuuu, o^-
cf .»ili pall of »■» ton., a«a »''» ""™ i,,„„
Bured no such thing has ever o^"^ ^^ j^^eed a
The beUef in the «^'>'^;*y°JXhelieTin the infinite
Christian teaching, a corollao "^ *•>« ^^"^^^^ ^„t ^, ^ur-
value of the individual soul; "^"d/ ^^°"'^ "i ^^e sanc-
^.^-^^v;s^r«s?rii:tSSS^^^^^
tions, and all the resiraiuio, .„nrove the exposure
THE NORTHERN EXTREME
251
Oilbert Chesterton means when in his Victorian Age in
Literature he speaks of "the thing called Eugenios" as
"a crown of crime and folly."
A letter that I wrote to an influential friend soon after
my return from this journey, pleading for more kindly
consideration for our Arctic Eskimos, for a further, and
particularly medical, development of missionary work on
this coast, was met with the statement that according to
my own showing the coast was a country unfit for human
occupation and that the best thing that could be done for
its unfortunate inhabitants would bo to take them bodily
away from it. It is difficult to answer such a conclusion;
what can one say in rebuttal that shall suffice! That they
are content and happy does not matter; obviously thoy do
not know what is good for themselves; that they are
able to wring a support from their country is not to the
point when better support could be had elsewhere. How
easy it is, in theory, to depopulate the less eligible parts
of the earth's surface on economic grounds, and gather all
mankind into the amenable, fructiferous regions ! I sup-
pose some sunny spot in the South Sea Islands could be
found where our expatriated Eskimos might repose be-
neath the shade of the trees, having replaced their ragged
furs with garlands of flowers and substituted cocoanut
oil for seal oil. It is an engaging vision.
I once told an Eskimo congregation of such countries,
where one may lie under a tree and wait for one's break-
fast to drop into one's mouth; and when the sermon was
done a brisk old dame came vp and with very expressive
dnmbshow indicated her intention of immediately pro-
ceeding to that land. She made long detours and spirals
with her forefinger, ending in remote distance, . ^ then
stopped, pointed to herself, threw her head far back and
opened her mouth wide — and joined in the general merri-
ment which her pantomime provoked. Again and again
she pointed to herself and nodded her emphatic grey
head. No more jigging through the ice for tomcod at 30°
below zero for her breakfast; no more trudging weary
. -JL-Jt-B-
282 A WINTER CIRCUIT
milei through the mow to «et rabbit and ptarmigan
snares. She was bound
"Wliere the feathery palm troet rim ^^
And the date grows ripe under tunny aloee.
TfBby joked about it for a long time. Yet I remember
Mr. Dooley described these happy-island folks as starv-
ing to death for Uok of stepladders when the fruit did not
fall fast enough, and I am not sure that our Eskimos
would be improved by such translation or that their lot
would be more enviable because more sedentary, lam
sure that the world would be the poorer for the loss of its
bold and active Arctic population.
After all, can a country justly be described as unfit for
human habitation that has maintained human communi-
ties for untold generations! Naked I have called it, and
naked it is, to an eye from lower latitudes; cursed with
constant bitter winds I found it, newly come from the
forested interior. But these terms are only relative. It
is not naked nor is its weather severe in comparison with
the Antarctic continent, where nothing grows at all, and
where fierce gales blow at 70° below zero The daring
thought of Master Richard Thome, m his oxt-quoted
letter to the Archbishop of York in the time of Henry
Vin "I judge there to be no land inhabitable or sea in-
navigable," is surely a more fitting, not to say a nobler,
iud^ent about the earth, however we be forced to
qu^ify it in some particulars. Certain it is, on the one
hand, from the indisputable evidence of the remains of
habitations, that the Arctic regions were at one time much
more numerously occupied than they are today, and, on
the other, that the pressure of accumulating peoples in
the temperate and attractive climates was "ever before
80 great. Had I to make such choice myself I had far
•It !. ea.y to .« how "tabiUble" b«.me ;lnta^^^^^^
|SStf."?^."ar " /X J-hir " i't'o rA -».. two,, „ ^,y
do in tho dictionarin today.
THE NOBTHERN EXTREME
2S8
rather be a free Arotio Eikimo, hunting the whale and the
walmi in the stormy waters, following the cariboo far
inland to the foothills, than a Chinese peasant, tied down
for life to the cultivation of a tenth of an acre of patri-
monial soil, selling his children into slavery to eke out
a minimum subsistence. There are worse lots than the
Eskimo's!
It is hard for soft and sheltered people to believe that
the Eskimo can be devotedly attached to his native land;
hard to see what charm can hold him to barren rocks and
savage wildemcsg of snow. They can understand the
attraction of "my native vale" that Samuel Rogers wrote
sentimentally about in a song that used to be loved of fat
mezzo-sopranos when I was young:
"The shepherd's horn at break of day,
The ballet danced in twilight glade.
The canzonet and roundelay
That echo in the greenwood ahade—
These simple joys that never fail
Shall bind me to my native vale."
(I quote from memory.) Bnt they can see no joys, no
possibility of sentiment, in a land where life is one long
fight against a severity of nature of which they can only
shudderingly conceive. Yet it is so; as Goldsmith ex-
pressed in four unforgettable lines better than all my
pleadings can put it. But if a man will not read four
lines of poetry, he must e'en be content to read four
pages of prose.
So we will not depopulate the Arctic regions. Bather
would I see Banks Land and Victoria Island and Ellcs-
mere Land reoccupied with kindly, hospitable nomads;
and I am disposed to hope that Mr. Stefansson's plan for
the domestication of the polar or musk ox, which is no
wilder than was Sheldon Jackson's plan for domestica-
tion of the reindeer, may ultimately bring about some
such result.
Meanwhile I would not do one thing to render the
W
1
ii:
Mk
tl 'I
254 A WINTER OIBCUIT
Ertimo leit dependent npon bii environment, !*•• «??•"•
of oontinning to conquer that onviromncnt by <»ntmmng
to adapt himaelf to it; would not teach him one need that
oonld not with reasonable certainty be aupphed I would
t^e to him the ble..ing8 of Christianity, of it. reUipon
and morality; I would illuminate the dread da^""* «
hi. spirit world with the sure and certain hope of a joy-
fal resurrection; I would protect h.m again.t the white
mLi seeking whom he may devour; I would provide medi-
XXf from the disease, which, in large measure, the
„eda toi white man ha. introduced, and then I wou d
Ke Eskimo civilization develop it.elf, as it would
develop itself, narrowly confined and circumscribed of
nele sfty aloig natural Arctic lines, in accord with the
na ural bent of the race. They gave no ^considerable
"„m. for the Bed Cross last year; they contributed to the
reUef of the destitute Armenians; when I was at Point
Barrovv they were taking a collection for missions to
^ Wi'thout any desire to be ^c"*-"""^*'^;/!; ~Jt"
me long dwelling upon the Eskimos and their habitat,
Tomerggestion of a relation between their economic con-
ditTon and this dead level coast. The only complete com-
munrstB that I know of are the Eskimos he only com-
SeS equal people, with none that are richer, none that
are morTrespected than the others, none that emerge in
any degree above the others. The Alaskan Indians, who
Sroa^ch nearest to them, have chiefs with more or less
authority according to their character, but there are no
Ss amongst the Eskimos. The rhetorical boast tha^
Me used to hear in Fourth of July orations that every
TmerLan U a king, is literally true of these oldest Amen-
nans — a king without a subject.
^'r EsSmos and Indians alike are practical commu-
nist the oriy difference between them the one above
noted. Ga-e'does not belong to the ^nnter but o the
community. No one ever goes hungry if th«e be any
Lig to eat in the village. One man may have a larger
THE NORTH i:R\ EXTREME 255
faotiM than anothpr, but if »o it in either bccaugp ho has
a larger family or became he dcilirnH it for public gath-
crinifB. When a man died hi* bfIon)?inK8 are Mattered
amongrit all the relationii and friomlB, even to the com-
plete stripping of the widow and her cliildren. There
is nothing private in un fcisklmo or Indian village; in the
primitive state there is not even any privacy.
The communal system hns its advantages and attrac-
tions, and for my part, amongst tlioso with whom I dwell
or have influence, I am loatli to take measures towards
breaking it up. I am not sullicicnfly sure about the
superiority for thorn of the system of individual prop-
erty that must be substituted. Life becomes much sim-
pler, and in o certain way much more efTective, when all
one's eont^ictions are cut and dried, when the path of duty
is always seen straight ahead, but I have observed that
sometimes such confldencc is in inverse ration to intelli-
gence. I labour unde. the disadvantage of wanting to
be sure whither I om going before I go ahead.
At Woinwright I saw an Eskimo who was disliked be-
cause he was "rich" and would not share his riches, and
ho was encouraged by the school-teacher to continue his
accumulating habit as an example to the others of the
thrift that brings prosperity. I do not know that he had
worked harder than others, though that may be ; he wag
probably shrewder than others ; but the main difference
evidently was that he had held while others had dis-
tributed. I have little doubt that by and by the pressure
will become too greot for him and that his "riches" will
be scattered in lavish feasting, to the restoration of his
popularity and the general equality. Beyond any ques-
tion, hard work and shrewdness and thrift would be en-
couragfi' were the desire of owning in severalty sys-
temat.' <.ly implanted ' and fostered ;— and there would
follow, would there nott selfishness and cupidity, the
noxious roots of "man's inhumonity to man"? It could
hardly be otherwise. Already, at Wainwright, our Dives
was charged with indifference to the wants of others;
256
nil:
m
A WINTER CIRCUIT
zoo "■ , 1 il.-
already there was envy of his stores of grub and clothmg,
of guns and bla^ets. , ^^^
T tread warily because I do not see c ■ny. j
t'ilt entir'e absence of envy and covetousness.
-Though poor the peasant', hut his feast though small,
He sees his little lot the lot of all ;
tute for vegetable) meal.'
r..tP„t is the normal condition of the Eskimo the
bSf Ms ^SLtTristic lightheartedness. If happmess
THE NORTHERN EXTREME 257
were the true goal of human life, there would be much
to be said in general for the Eskimo system, yet
"Their level life ia but a smouldering fire,
Nor quenched by want nor fanned by strong desire. " •
No man who admires the triumphs of human genius,
no man who cherishes the riches of the human intellect'
can be content to see life lie permanently at that level!
It affords only the very narrowest scope for literature^
art and science. It offers no opportunity for those aspir!
ing, flaming conceptions, those strenuous, persistent ef-
forts, Tvhich separate man by such a great gulf from the
animal 'dngdom; for the manifesting of those divine,
creative qualities which are indeed his chief claim to a
divine origin.
And that brings me back to the reflection with which
this passage was opened, that there is some suggestion of
a relation between the economic condition of the Eskimos
and the dead-level coastal plain which they occupy in
northwest America. It is easy to travel over; it presents
no rough irregularities of surface; it has no distinctive
individual parts, or only such as the encroaching waters
have eaten into its border. It produces an abundance of
lowly grass, of brief, bright flowers, nipped almost as
they are blown, of shrubs that creep over tb" surface
rather than rise from it. With its surroundiia- waters
it affords a subsistence.
But how dreary and monotonous it is to an eye familiar
with other scenes 1— how empty and uninteresting 1 With
what delight does one welcome a broken diversified
•I know no way of escape from Goldsmith in a discussion of this sort,
eicept by deliberately ignoring the best that has been said: and 1 take
some comfort from a charge of excessive admiration for one who has been
«S< .1' . ;?• 'f?<'"<'™'e P«t and an obsolete philosopher " in the
S™ , ^°* *"" '"^^""'""y " "ot far off, and that I may yet see She
w °'^v'°u^°"«"'' f","" ^'^ Oood-natared Man running simultineously in
Vf7 .i, •»"!* "tt ?»""'«>'°« ""'ira" <>' his works (including eyen the
flC e^im^,."^'^?' """* to delight my youth) at the bookshop, and a
S,e hi™ lit!',, . ■""" 8«?™"y ""ved at. The IHontfc Monlhlv will
I 1 I
I:
[i 's'
\ \\
< 'I
258 A WINTER CIR' UIT
-t «,«.4nt How iubilantly the mountains soar,
CTy • S likfrlmsand th'e little hills like yoong
srep" when one returns to them after long sojourn
St these plains 1-how smilingly the valleys nestle
:S£t tern, how bravely the sturdy trees wave the>r
banners as they march up the slopes!
So I think does human society of a civihzed ^d Pre
..^L*. .. .... -J «.sr.r™~s
to destroy every vest:ge '^^'^^'^^'-J^^^^^ miti-
I am not bUnd to and would strain every nerve
THE NORTHERN EXTREME
259
gate, but with all its evils it seems to me preferable.
And if it be that, save in an Eskimo condition,
"Just experience tells, in every soil,
That those who think must govern those who toil."
I have no particular quarrel with that either. And so a
farewell to "poor Noll," which is difBoult for me without
a farewell to the subject, and to our travel - again.
m
.
'\\
VII
POINT BABEOW TO PLAXMAN ISLAND
1'
1
(
I
I'll
« :l
vn
POINT BABEOW TO FLAXMAN ISLAND
On the morning of the 15th March, when we had eaten
breakfast and packed up and Walter and George were
dickering for more dog-feed with an old woman who
sought to make the best market for her walrus meat, I
walked out again the five or six hundred yards to the end
of the spit, accompanied by my little troop of yesterday.
In the sunshine the precise most northerly point seemed
more indeterminate than on the previous evening; ice-
covered land and ice-covered water more difficult to dis-
tinguish ; and even the sunshine made the scene scarcely
less desolate and dreary.
At 8.45 we were started upon our adventure of the
north coast, and all day pursued our journey upon sand-
spits or on the snow of the lagoon (with which George
had never heard Elson's name connected). There had
been a good trail until recently, but a storm had over-
spread it with soft snow and the going was rather heavy.
After four hours we reached an inhabited igloo and had
lunch, another four hours brought us to a deserted igloo,
and there we camped for the night, without much com-
fort. This lagoon of Elson's, opening presently into the
Dease Inlet, is bordered all along its ocean side b> a chain
of sandbars and broken islands, upon which, in the main,
we travelled. Into Dease Inlet a number of rivers empty,
the two most important of which have received names,
one, the Chipp, for the lieutenant of that name who per-
ished with De Long (sc named by Stoney after Howard's
return, overlaying its Eskimo name of Ik-pik-puk, as he
vainly tried to overlay "Kobuk" with "Putnam"), and
the other the Meade, named by Bay of the circumpolar
station, presumably for an admiral of the U. S. navy
264 A WINTER CIRCUIT
who wsB engaged at one time in survey work in ionth-
west Alaska, ind in there also conunemorated. Locally
the names are not used by white men or natives; they
are map-names. i _* j
The next morning snojv was falling when we started,
with a wind from the southwest. For awhile the s^n
struggled through the snow, but was ^rcdu^jUy obscured
to complete disappearance, and we w --b enshrouded in
mist, and from that time forward we saw literally noth-
ing all day. From George's statement and from the
chart it seemed that we were at Tangent Point, on the
other side of the inlet, and here we dug out the entrance
to an old igloo and camped.
In the utter monotony of this travel I took some amuse-
ment from George and his team just ahead of me. His
dogs' harness was based upon gunny sacking, strips of
which, covered with strips from a flour sack, laade the
traces The strips from the flour sacks had been cut
so that the advertising legend of the sack ran right along
the trace; a black dog bore the label "unbleached ' and
a dirty yellow dog announced himself as of the ncli
cream colour that nature intended." Evidently the main
native consumption at Point Barrow is of a second-rate
flour which thus makes a virtue of beiiifa' off-colour. But
the rich-cream-colour-that-nature-intended dog happened
to match his placard ludicrously and seemed to acknowl-
edge the compliment. "Unbleached" I thought bore his
with more defiant air, a black dog who cared not who
knew it. , • j i.
George himself was of interest. As I have said, he was
an "elder" in the local church, yet he permitted himselt
a freedom of speech not at all in keeping with that diar-
acter. Judging that the young man had picked up certain
common white man's phrases without thmfang about
their meaning, or indeed without recognizing their mean-
ing, for his English was halting and meagre, I spoke to
him kindly about it and told him that words like "hell'
and "damn" did not come fittingly from his lips. He
POINT BABROW TO FLAXMAN ISLAND 265
leemed really obliged to me, and I am sure that it was as
I had judged, for he made every effort to cast them off.
But it is not easy to drop habits of speech all at once, and
for a day or two he was like St. Augustine after his con-
version, continually thrusting his fist in his mouth.
Sometimes his efforts to check himself were funny. I
had told him that instead of cursing his dogs and con-
denming them to eternal punishment, it would do just
as well to praise them, and on the next day when he had
occasion for objurgation he broke out with "Damn" and
changed suddenly to "Good dogsl" I thought of In-
goldsby's Prince-Bishop, who
"... muttered a curse and a prayer,
Which his double capacity hit to a nicety ;
His princely or lay part induced him to swear,
His episcopal moiety said ' Benedicite. ' ' '
(with the long i of the English ecclesiastical usage in the
last word as befits the authorship of a canon of St.
Paul's); and I was glad that the "elder" was, in
speech at least, "breaking even" with the dog-musher,
and might presently hope to supersede him alto-
gether.
The particular occasion of this incident remains in-
delibly in my memory. A poor beast of a dog, frozen to
death by what mischance I know not, but his gaunt con-
dition indicating that under-nourishment was a contribut-
ing cause, had been picked up and set on its feet in the
snow by the side of the trail — a grim Eskimo joke — and
there remained, and every dog of the three teams had to
stop and sniff at the body.
Once again I had impressed upon me the paramouncy
of the dog's sense of smell amongst all his senses. Every
dog saw this poor frozen carcass grotesquely standing up
in the snow, and eonld tell just as surely as I could—
and I could tell it as far as I could see it— that the
dog was dead. Yet every dog went up with the greatest
eagerness and excitement, straining at the harness, and
• M
HI A WINTER CIRCUIT
not until he had »topped and .niffed did his Intemt
disappear. And yet there are tho.e who confidently
maintain that dogB reason, and grow very kfOT'OB/^^
euperior when one talks about instinct. Much of my
interest in Fabre's delightful insect books arises from
his clear and demonstrative differentiation between these
faculties, and all my experience as a life-long anima
lover leads me to hold that they ore not merely different
in degree but different in kind.
Once I had occasion to read everything that I could
lay my hand on with regard to the sense of smell, and i
found that there is virtually nothing known about it. 1
do not believe that there is any hypothesis as to its
modus operandi that is tenable, and the prevailing belief
that the olfactory nerves are excited by minute particles
flying off from odoriferous substances is to my mina
absurd. That a grain of musk should give off such par-
tides from the days of Marie Antoinette until now and
lose no weight thereby, is utteriy incredible to me. What
infinite minuteness of subdivision it involves! What
astonishing potency in the particle 1 What ceaseless
rapidity of ejaculation! Nothing but the emanations of
radium seem to be in the 8i.me class with it, and I should
not be surprised if it turned out by and by that a whole
series of activities, as unknown to science today as the
activities of radium were unknown fifty years ago, are
involved. Let him who is disposed to smile at this
excursus into science read all there is to read (it is not
much) about the sense of smell.
I should like to pursue it: I should like to discuss the
peculiar effect of cold upon smell, whereby most odours
are killed to the human nostrils though not even it would
seem, weakened to the canine nostril. Kerawak smdUd
tnat star fish under the snow at Point Hope though,
frozen as it was, to my ne^^e it had no perceptible odour
whatever. I stopped and baielled the dead dog on the
trail and it had no odour at all, in the cold and the wind :
yet to the dogs it smelled decisively, I suppose; though
POINT BARROW TO PLAXMAN ISLAND 267
of course it may have been the absence of imell that was
decisive : bit I think not.
But this book grows too long already and we mnst
go on.
A willing, good-natun d and sufficiently capable fellow
we found George, his white blood appearing more evi-
dently in his looks than in aught else, and I was sorry
that the son of a white father had not had better chance of
education and intellectual development. Walter soon
had him saying "please" and "thank you," and in his
quiet, laughing way effected improvements in his deport-
ment which I do not know that he would have bothered
about but for the tie of the mixed blood between them.
We reached Cape Simpson, named for the famous gov-
ernor of the rejuvenated Hudson's Bay Company, a
cousin of our exploring Simpson, about three in the after-
noon, and having dug up from the snow a sufficient supply
of driftwood to cook dog-food, and loaded it upon the
sled (our walrus meat done), we started across Smith
Bay, named by the same men for a chief factor of the
same company. Cape Simpson is interesting as the
"boat extreme" of the Hudson's Bay party. It was here
that Simpson left Dease and half the crew and advanced
on foot with six men, one of whom had been with Sir John
Franklin in 1826 and two with Sir George Back on the
Great Fish river in 1834.
Brilliant sunshine had again given place to a snow-
storm, and when that ceased and the sky cleared the
thermometer dropped to 30° below zero. We made no
more than six or seven miles on the sea-ice, which was
very rough, and then stopped for the night; our first
night without an habitation for shelter. Walter had
made a tiny tent at Point Barrow and demurred at
the time it would take to build a snow-house, so we
pitched it and walled it round with snow blocks and
camped therein. We were miserably crowded; only one
man could do anything at a time, so that it was as well the
two of them were outdoors cooking dog-feed while I pre-
268
A WINTER CIRCUIT
fi
I,)-
!J1
pared onr iupper. And it wa« cold. We Juui been ad-
vised to rely upon our two primu. stove., but had been
better advUed had we brought a small woodstove, for
exoelle as the primus is for cookinR it is a poor
dependence for warmth. It wns so cold after sup-
per that the ink frose as it issued from my fountain
pen and the day's record remained unfinished tdl the
"Thrncxt day brought the bitter northeast wind that
wo were to endure nearly all the rest of the time on this
coast. I was never colder in my life all day long than
I was that day when wo finished the crossing of Smith
Bay and reached an empty igloo west of Pitt Point-
named for the statesman, one supposes, though Simpson
does not say. My little new sled was a most convenient
vehicle, and as far as easy travelling wont it was beyond
comparison better than the common run of travel in the
interior. I had but to step upon the rumiers and ride
whenever I was so minded. But the keen wmd at from
20° to 30° below zero all day took all pleasure from it;
one's nose was continually frozen, or if a scarf were em-
ployed it was soon a solidly frozen mass from the con-
densation of the breath.
From the cabin west of Pitt Point we reached, as wo
supposed, Cape Halkett the next day, after an exceed-
ingly long, cold run. The chart, I was sure, was in error,
making Smith Bay too broad and misplacing Pitt Pomt,
if our igloo to the west of it had indeed been near it at
all-and we discovered later that it was so- I am sure
our run of the 19th March was upwards of forty miles,
and should be disposed to call it forty-five. I had in-
creased my clothing and my body was warmer, bnt the
wind, with a temperature steadily growing lower, was
bitter in the extreme. . , ,. i .„» ,^«.
We were exceedingly fortunate in finding a large, oc-
cupied igloo at Cape Halkett (Halkett was another Hud-
son's Bay Company director), and never was sipht of
Toke more welcome to weary, half-frozen traveUere.
POINT BABBOW TO PLAXMAN ISLAND 269
SnTl«?h"l^ insisted nn my going inunediately
™^;n ^ taking my place in the unhitching and
Wh M ^ ,Trt-' ■?*" ?° ^"-"^^ I ^«« ^"Uy nothing
loath to yield to his insistence. Now here was thn Jr^A
scamp of all the Kobnk Eskimos, an old ajnainten^e oJ
tempt of his at bigamy, by telling the commissioner a^
Point Barrow that he already had a wife on the KoynhA
nver I had not been in time to prevent Mr. Brower
from being yictmiized by him. Pretending to have mX
on deposit m a Fairbanks bank, he had bought sTv3
hundred doUars' worth of goods and had paid or Ihem
onred. However, I never waste much sympathy with a
trader who allows himself to be imposedTin anrsncS
way. Some little doubt I had had, when I found my prS
BrZ. '^M "^?^ '^""^^ "°* «° Mch-whether Mr.
Brower would accept a draft in payment for supplies, as
whether I had any right to ask him to, coming witho^
commercial mtroduction, but here was B Uy, unabirto get
a dollar's worth of credit on the Kobuk or Koyul^ ,fv!
ers conung up here and just "on his face," as they say
getting three or four hundred doUars- woAh at a sTrokJ:
a regular Eskmio chevalier of industry. He had lived the
wmter upon this resource and had gotten him much hon-
SeZslf *'^ ^^"^^ " ' "<*'-•' -^'> -<^^°^
Long ago I had been enabled to do BUly a service.
When first it was decided to extend the reindeer ente^-
fwi ^« «te"or country (from which it was very
shortly withdrawn again) a herd had been taken across
r^J^V '■°°' ^"""f"'^ °° N"'*"" S'""'^ to the upper
Koyokuk nver, and Billy had spent the winter as S
for the migration. By some neglect he had not been paii
and when a year or tpwo later he succeeded in wttiM
someone to make appUoation for payment, there were Z
STO
A WINTER CIRCUIT
funds avaUable and the matter seemed to have been en-
tirely forgotten in the bureau at Washmgton. I took it
UP and had some correspondence about it and at last
succeeded in getting him paid in reindeer since there was
no money that could be used. This must have been ten
or twelve years ago. But Billy had go^e from bad to
worse; whenever there was liquor to b. had he was drunk;
whenever he could find another native with inoney he
would gamble; he had taken his wif. to the mimng camp
and left her there, and there I had seen her a year b^
?ore; a thoroughly demoralized, plausible, good-humoured
scan^P of an Eskimo with no more conscience than a
cat Jhe worst sort of " wised-up" native, whose associi^
tion with miners on the Koyuknk, and especially with
hose^ongst them who seek the intimacy of the natives^
had ruined a character that one supposes was not very
"^t^ Ir S'tr, however, the duties of hospitality are
sacred in the Arctic, and are acknowledged and dis-
harged when all other obligations have long smce been
repudiated, and Billy was most cordial and helpful, and
we were very thanMul of the relief which his kindness
"^Towarfs the spring, at the dose of the trapping sea.
soiThe Colville river people gather at a little vdlage
some thirty or forty miles above the mouth and the
rTder a Point Barrow sends a load of grub and ammum-
tLn to barter for their furs. BiUy was thus employed
Mr Brower perhaps hoping partly to 'ecoup Inmsdf
for a debt of which he was already grown doubtfult^
fore we came, and it was his trail that we had been
follo^g the second human being we had met since
iS^Mwuk-the other an Eskimo gathermg up lus
trap^ I took opportunity to "deal" with Billy, as I had
St with him often before. He denied the attempted
Smr^ a half-hearted sort of way, and stoutly mam-
\Z7Zi he had money at Fairbanks, though I taew
tLt the one was fact and vehemently suspected that
POINT BARROW TO PLAXMAN ISLAND 271
the other was fiction. I told Billy that when a man began
forging drafts he was already within sight of a long term
of imprisonment, and tried to make him understand the
gravity of the offence in the eyes of the law. And I
pleaded with him to live a straight life instead of a
crooked one, invoking his accountability, not only to the
law but to God. Billy was moved by what I said, entirely
submissive and very penitent ; but not penitent enough to
tell the truth about the draft, so that I began to think that
I was possibly mistaken and that the rambling and in-
coherent explanation he attempted of some windfall in
connection with a mining operation might have founda-
tion. Strange things happen in placer mining, and were
there not at that time in Point Barrow two young Eski-
mos who had cleared a thousand dollars or so apiece by
working a claim on shares in the Chandelar country? If
I had not known Billy so well I might have taken his word
for it, even as Mr. Brower.
I tried hard to get the truth out of him. I made him the
offer (which I had really no right to make) that if he
would go back to Mr. Brower and tell him all about it,
and confess that he had obtained the credit fraudulently
and do his best to make it good, and would then return to
the Koynkuk and take Kitty away from the mining camp
and try to live decently with her, I would stand between
him and any trouble and would assume what remained of
his indebtedness. I told him I would give him a letter to
Mr. Brower undertaking to do so. But Billy was obdu-
rate, and so it was left ; and the next summer Mr. Brower
wrote to me that Billy had gone back to the Kobuk on a
supply ship — and that the draft had been dishonoured. I
have just beard that he has since spent three months in
gaol for a theft of skins and I should not be surprised to
hear of him drifting to the eastward, to the Coronation
Gulf country, now that nothing remains in Alaska where
he is unknown. That seems the present goal of those who
have worn out their character and credit everywhere
else. And I fancy that the Northwest Mounted Police
4
272 A TTINTER CIBCDIT
wUl by and by make short work with BiUy, when he ha.
n^eSrUTeatly ^^.^^^^^^^
„.ade our day of '-^LT- 4r a J^^^^^^ to
Iceland of — LS'/oirnX v-ring too
proper passage to Beecney , ^^^j^ ^^
much to the left to t^^ A'^«*™
-Prison Bay ^ -- ^^ -^ ^oJ SX?!
loasly directed to *« /'oral «nd r hgious^^^^ ^^^^^
f.e natives of the Indian countij, ^^^°^^ ^^^,, „„«
tion among trading "^ feSered I have vainly
glad that his name is thus '/^P^X'^t Company that I
fearched the two f t°"«;/^^J^t i-^hat he was
possess for any trace »* Hams^nj ^^ ^^^^
deputy-governor <>* t^« f 3^| ^^t „erf day we were
Ellioe Point, which it t"™«^ °Jl^ . ^ for "the
much nearer *«„%- ^J^eS^ fjf whomlfindthathe
Bight Honourable Edwar^»^^^ a privy conn-
was a member of f"™^™""' iwe-.', that it was largely
cillor from his "right ^^o^^T^^i^t^i,, lo^g, disastrous
due to his -diato'T eff°;t^ ^tat th^lj^^^, ^,,t
.ivalry ^^tween the Hudson s ay ^^^^ nation
Companies wa3 brought *» "^ e^^^^ ^^ ^^s deputy-
in 1821, and t'aat later in life, when ^^ ^^^
governor of the eompay from ms^^^^^ ^ ^^
Sg hit t?at he wa'sTne of the company's directors.
POINT BABBOW TO PLAXMAN ISLAND 273
md Jthat there was a post named for him on the Liard
W t^"'^^^'"''! °^ °*""^ '"'^ Simpson carried out
tollft v,° ^v^ "* '^' *^P*°«« °^ *te Hudson'. Bay
chapters of American exploration and have not, I th'T
had the fame and recognition they deserve, do not reaUy
redound so much to the credit of the company as mijht at
first appear. One of the obligations of "The Gotwnor
and Company of Adventurers of England tratog 2
Hudson's Bay in the original charter of Charles^H s
that of exploration. "The discovery of a new oassaee
jnto the South Sea '' is set down as thTflrst puTos'eofT
company, and .t is because they "have already made
such discoveries as to encourage them to proceed further
m pursuance of their said design- that "the sole trade
and commerce of all those seas, strait., bays, lakes
nyers, ete., is granted to them. Dissatisfaction had
often found expression in England with the snpineness
of the company in this direction, and now that it was con-
templating an application to parliament for an extension
or confirmation of its privileges, it desired to fortify it-
self by some "further pursuance" of the "said design,"
which, after two or three abortive attempts, it had ek-
tirely forgotten and neglected for a century
One of the things much needed today is a full, critical
history of the Hudson's Bay Company. Dr. George
Bryce ^s done valuable condensed work, following
Beckles Wilson f of a decade earlier (though both of
them have furnished their books with indexes that are a
mere exasperation), but the great mass of material en-
shrouded m the company's archives is scarcely touched,
and now that there can be no valid reason for keeping it
secret, should afford a rich mine for research. I have
hoped that Miss Agnes Laut would develop a sufficiently
scholarly temper to undertake it, having already dipped
il
274 A WINTER CIBCmT
into the records, but Bhe remains -«dd^ »° ^".fj^.
M fifteenears of constant travel had been spent m
Hnnert's llnd if there were prospect of five years' free,
SsnrS evening of life, as it would certa.nly be worth
""She whole distribution of the land on tWs nortt^eriy
ooast was very erroneously indicated by the chart we
Suhe awful flatness and -meness of tins coa^
Then, having taken a compass direction and carefuuy
POINT BABBOW TO FLAXMAN ISLAND 275
noticed, according to our instructions, the trend of the
•now-furrows and the angle at which we should cross
them to keep our course, we launched upon the ice of Har-
rison Bay, intending a straight line of fifty miles to
Beeohey Point, and for three hours pursued it, making
perhaps fourteen miles. That night we built our first
snow-house. While Walter busied himself with cooking
the dog-feed, George and I cut slabs of hard snow along
a rectangle that he divided into suitable squares, and set
them up, leaning inwards, one row upon another. We
did not shape the thing with a dome, for George con-
fessed little skill in snow-house building, although he
told me that if bis wife had been along to help him he
could have done much better. I did not resent this asper-
sion upon my assistance, for in truth I found it almost
impossible to extract the snow blocks when they were cut,
or to move them when they were extracted, without break-
ing them. George had a knack of twisting them along on
their edges, of easing and humouring them into place,
that I tried faithfully but unsuccessfully to imitate. They
squeaked and squealed, those blocks of snow, as he swung
them, now on one comer, now on another, and sometimes
the sound they made was piercing, but he got them into
place. When the walls were sufSciently raised and the
opening they enclosed sufficiently diminished by the in-
clination given the slabs, the little tent was thrown over
all and held in place by further blocks, and then we filled
every crack and cranny with loose snow. By and by,
when the hole was cut and we inside, George took the
lighted primus stove and sealed any remaining interstices
by the simple method of melting together the edges of
the blocks.
In this house we were far more comfortable than in the
tent. It was large enough in the middle to stand upright
in and to pve room for moving about on our necessary
occasions, and although the thermometer went down to
48° below zero that night, we were fairly warm inside.
Moreover the condensation of the moisture of our breath
'hi
i
27e A WINTER CIBCOT
Md onr cooking did not annoy n» as it had done in the
The art of building the beehive wiow-hou»e-a reaUy
Bkilfnl and beantifnl art-has passed from these westera
Eskimos. Mr. Stefdnsson describes it and illustrates it
as still practised by the people of Coronation OMjaA
Bathurst Iniet, in that interesting and valuable booK,
Mv Life with the Eskimo, and it is easy to see that it ctm
be made entirely cosy and comfortable with only a seal-
oil lamp burning, when one saw how greatly our own
clumsy and imperfect structure improved upon a tent.
The next day, with a temperature that never went
above -25°, we had the bitter northeast wmd again for
eight long-suffering hours and the building of the
enow-house took nearly two hours more. The cold and
the loose snow together began to give the dogs sore feet
and putting on and taking off a number of pairs of
moccl^sins added to our daily dog work. The POor brutes
were doing ill upon their nee and blubber; it went
through them almost unchanged. As I realized now, they
should have been put upon that diet for some time before
we left Point Barrow, to accustom their stomachs and
bowels to it. Lying at such low temperatures mtb no
possible shelter was also taking toll of their strength.
To tether the dogs at night was no small job. They were
tied in pairs; two dogs that got along with one another
had a stick passed through the snap, at the ends ot the.r
chains, the stick carrying the two chains was buried ma
hole dig in the hard snow with the axe, and the hole was
flUed and tamped. The cooked rice and blubber was
STed out to "them upon the snow. That mght our
driftwood being exhausted, it was necessary to cook the
dog-Ld over the primus stoves, f d that took an uncon-
scionable long time and consumed a great deal of oil.
Th^next day was just such another; the minimum
temSera" re -^', the maximum -30% and the bdter
northeast wind still stronger. I had not worn my rein-
deer breeches since leaving Point Barrow, dcemmg them
I '
w ■
POINT BABBOW TO FLAXMAN ISLAND »77
Z!r>in '" J'"''''.«'«> ^ «b.titnted the leather
mooMhide breeche. which I wear the winter throo^h i„
tte .ntenor but I wa. gl.d to put the fur on aS now
,,Tlf .hi ,li T^ "'P.* "^^ handkerchief in the hind-
Mc* of the .led, where they promptly froze up. Com-
plete fur. alone enable one to .tand thi. wind at 1^
land, and we were buoyed up with the hope that we were
olo.e upon Beechey Point, but it wa. not ,o. Desjue our
effort, to keep a straight cour.e, we were from time "
time oonscjou. that the dog. deviated from iT anTwe
"hawed" them back, but that conatant tendency toTncline
away from the course mount, up and tells. Even we onr-
.elves were glad to turn our face, from the mileraSle
•hore The land must have been the delta-outpo.t of the
ColnUe nver, which we should have given a wide berth
So we turned ou and pursued our way, constantly ex
pectmg to make land again and find driftwood, but by
!f iri ?u''i ^" ^'""^ '"""* ""-J had not seen a piei
tL7^l^"it ^"m '° ""°P "««^ °° »•"» '«• «°d cook do^
reed with the oil stoves.
hr,?lLT'''^'"^''l ^^ to <ro up a little quicker now.
but the business of cooking rice for twenty dog. on tZ
SrT Tr ''.'"' ^"'P^otingjy long, anfour .SLl
oddimuushed alarmingly. I began ^to be uneasy attte
prospect; much more than half the oil wa. gone a^d we
Sr^ey""*" ^"'^ ^'°'" '"^^"'f "'""P'^'^J the half Tour
An author may pretty safely assume ttiat when he find«
to find It so al.o ; happy would he be if he cruld as safelv
•ssume that when he is himself interested ^e fs i^t'^st
f.H 1^7 ^'° '"^'^"'f mud-banks amc,n.va dTrecTo™
and chef factors without much exaltation o spirit now
I am come to a river that stirs me. p "'. now
The Colville is the chief river of northern Alaska, and
278
A WINTER CIRCUIT
I"
h ■
one of the considerable rivers of the whole riohly-rivered
territory. Its headwaters interlock with the sources of
the Noatak, the Kobuk, and the Koyukuk, and it has
been for ages the means of intercourse between the na-
tives of Kotzebue Sound and the whole northern coast.
It was a pre-historic trade rouio by which the natives of
the Siberian coast exchanged their goods with natives far
to the eastward of Hersohel Island, passing from tnbo
to tribe, back and forth. But it has interest more stmiu-
lating than this. Discovering and naming this nver m
1837 Simpson made a report to his superiors that was
soon the common property of aU the "Hudson's Bay
Company's servants," and when Alexander Hunter
Murray, the intelligent and accompUshed trader who
built Fort Yukon in 1847,* reae^ied the middle Yukon,
he felt sure that it was the same river, the mouth of
which Simpson had discovered ten years before. Indeed,
twenty years later, that is to say, thirty years after the
discovery, W. H. Dall and his companions, arriving at
St. Michael to begin that great exploration for the
Western Union Telegraph Company to which the world
owed nearly aU its early information about the interior
of Alaska, were discussing and disputing whether the
Yukon and the Colville were the same river, or the Yukon
and the Kwikpak, upon which last they were about
entering, and as which the Bussians knew the lower
Yukon. But I have described the piecemeal discovery
of the Yukon elsewhere.
Again, Simpson named this river for Andrew ColviUe,
who was governor of the Hudson's Bay Company from
1852 to 1856, and Andrew Colville was brother-m-law to
Thomas, fifth eari of Selkirk, whose name shines like a
star amidst the murk of commercial greed and unscrupu-
lous rivalry of the fur companies; of all the Douglas
dan the one with fairest claim to be called "tender and
•Sir Join Eich.rd«.n wm largely liidebUd to •>■;? '" jP'f'X™?.
«d th. Sted coloured iketchee of nativei with which th»t explorert
POINT BABROW TO PLAXMAN ISLAND 279
true." There is, I think, no biography of Lord Selkirk,
yet few men have ever lived with more valid claim to
commemoration. Touched and distressed by the wretched
oondiUon of the Highland crofters, when
"Opulence, hep grandeur to maintain,
Led stem depopulation in her train,"
and revolving schemes for their relief by emigration he
expended an ample patrimony in buying up the shares of
the Hudson's Bay Company, that he might convert the
most attractive part of its immense domain into a settle-
ment for these evicted peasants, and in conducting their
emigration to the Red river. With wonderful resource-
fulness and energy he established his settlement in the
heart of the fertile wilderness, and when his settlers
had been driven out and massacred, marched with au-
thority as a magistrate and a company of soldiers to its
re-estabhshment and the punishment of the brigands
who had destroyed it. But the lawless predatory forces
arrayed against him proved too strong; the profits of the
fur trade too great. Denied the support of the Canadian
authorities and himself the victim of its venal courts
his constitution undermined by exertions and hardships'
Lord Selkirk died in 1820, broken-hearted, not knowing
that his settlement had at last entered upon a period
of prosperity and that he had laid the foundations of a
great commonwealth.
The name philanthropist has been shorn of much of
its meaning by common bestowal upon miUionaire trades-
men who fling the gold of their superfluous wealth into
the treasury of charity; Lord Selkirk spent not only his
possessions-he spent himself, his health and strength
his courage, his foresight, his splendid resolution, his
high-mmded singleness of purpose. I wUl write him one
who loved his fellow men and gave himself for them:
such an one, it is pleasant to imagine, as that young
ruler might have become whom our Lord looked upon
:
280
A WINTER CIBCUIT
and loved, had he obeyed the command, " sell whatso-
ever thou hast and give to the poor, and come, take np
the cross and follow me."
I am not sure if the name of Andrew Colville be peg
substantial enough to hang this reference upon, for I
know not what part he played in the Red nver enter-
prise beyond that he was a supporter as well as a brother-
in-law of Lord Selkirk. It was his good judgment that
picked out young George (afterwards Sir George)
Simpson, for nearly forty years the "govemor-m-chief
of Rupert's Land," the most energetic and capable ruler
these vast territories ever had, who gathered up the
broken reins of authority and united in his own person
the hostile loyalties of rival partisans, so that the fur
monopoly, with its good and evil features, became more
powerful than ever before.
Whether the point of land we had seen the previous
day were Berens Pjint of Simpson, named for another
Hudson's Bay governor, or Point Oliktok of the Eskimos,
or if the two be identical, or indeed whnre it lies at aU,
I am quite unable to say. The chart we were following
is hopelessly muddled in this locality. But I recall that
the next day, stiU travelling in low temperature agamst
the biting wind, we had our first glimpse of the Franklin
mountains away in the distance to the south of east, and
were greatly cheered and elated thereby. It was fittmg
that one of the noblest characters in the whole history
of exploration, who now enters upon the scene, should
be thus heralded to us, and the naming was a graceful
tribute of Simpson to his distinguished predecessor.
For Beechey Point, which we actually reached at noon
on the 24th, and where we saw the beacon and the station
mark of recent surveys, and a nameless grave, was the
farthest point within Sir John Franklin's vision when
he was compelled to turn back to the Mackenzie from
the reef known as Return Reef. He named it on the
17th August, 1826, for his friend Captain Beechey. Two
days before Beechey had named the farthest pomt of
POINT BABBOW TO FhAXMAS ISLAND 281
land visible from the Blossom when his advance was
■topped by the ice, Franklin Point, after his friand Cap-
tain Franklin. The map of the U. S. Qeologioal Sur-
vey, the best map of Alaska in existence, wrongly calls
the point "Beeoher"; tlie generally admirable Oeo-
grvphic Dictionan/ of Alaska wrongly identifies it with
Simpson's Point Berens; and these are only typical
examples of the confusion and inaccuracy by which the
whole geography of this coast is marked.
We were already experiencing that worst annoyance of
Arctic travellers, the accumulation of frozen moisture
upon onr clothing. The low temperature and the keen
wind cover everything with congealed breath; even the
mittens and gloves gradually become stiff with it, and
little by little the bedding absorbs vapour from the body.
The cooking in the snow-huts fills the air with steam,
which is presently condensed into moisture and frost and
settles upon everything. Shortness of oil, due to the
unanticipated use of it for cooking d' 3:-feed, made it
necessary to extinguish the stove as soon as supper was
ready, so that we had not even this inadequate instru-
ment for drying onr stuff, and our garments must be
put on each morning encrusted with such of the ice of
yesterday as conld not be beaten off.
At Beechey Point we loaded up with wood and went
on for f IT or five hours of very rough travel across open
ice to aL ither distant point; though whether we crossed
Gwydyr Bay of Franklin, or were merely traversing a
lagoon between islands and the mainland, the haze which
overspread the scene prevented ns from knowing. Wood
piled high on already loaded sleds is a nuisance in any
sort of rough travel and calls for continual readjust-
ment and resecuring, but we could take no chance of
lighting upon a supply when the approach of night
brought the time for camping. The dogs continued to do
iU on their ration of rice and blubber, their bodies as-
similating only a part, though an increasing part, of the
nntriment it contained, and when we were compelled to
. i.i
lit';-
282 A WINTER CIBCUIT
oook with coal oil it was not possible to prepare a full
ration for twenty dogs, even such as it was. They were
always hungry; hungrier than dogs of mine ever were
before; and it was distressing to see their distress with
no means of relieving it. We were now two weeks on
our journey, with only one day's rest, and to push on
with aU possible speed was still our only course.
The next day's travel must have taken us past Ee-
tum Beef and Foggy Island, and so have brought us well
int" the field of Franklin's explorations. It was his de-
tention of eight days at this island, during which the fog
lifted two or three times just enough to enable hun to
embark, only to descend again and compel him to return,
which prevented the complete success of the jomt efforts
of himself and Beechey to determine the northwest limits
of the American continent at a stroke. I have already
said that had this undertaking been completely sucmss-
ful I think it would stand out as the most brilliant of all
exploring enterprises that ever were set on foot. Noth-
ing that funds and foresight could provide was lac™Ki
never were more capable commanders. Beechey did his
part to the full, and beyond the full; only this eight days
dense fog prevented FrankUn from accomphshing his.
Franklin began to retrace his steps on the 18th August.
Elson with Beechey '8 barge reached Point Barrow on the
23rd, five days later. Had Franklin been able to push
nnintermptedly on after the 18th he could not possibly
have made the 160 miles in a straight line that lay be-
tween them in those five days, judging by any previous
rate of travel; and Elson was unable to wait at all; was,
indeed, just barely able to extricate the barge from the
ice and make good his retreat. At one time when she
was driven ashore by the ice he had made all arrange-
ments to sink her in a lagoon that she might not become
the prey of the natives, and to endeavour to take lua
party back on foot to Kotzebue Sound. Franklin could
not have met Elson. Yet he says that could he have
known that Beechey had penetrated so far to the north,
a,
POINT BAHBOW TO FLAXMAN ISLAND 288
notUog ahonld have stopped him presging forward. He
knew that Cook had been unable to proceed beyond ley
Cape, and fully expected that it would be neceaaary for
hia own party to go on to the general rendezvona at
Kotzebne Sound.
As a schoolboy with a highly inflammable imagination
I think the two great regrets of my life were that Prince
Charles Edward turned back from Derby and that Frank-
lin turned back from Foggy Island; though the one was
doubtless as inevitable as the other. Yet one speculates
and wonders. Beeohey cruised about in Kotzebue Sound
untU the 27th October; if Franklin had been able to reach
Point Barrow at all, even if compelled to walk around,
and by the aid of his faithful Eskimo interpreter Au-
gustus had been able to procure a couple of native
oomiaks, he might possibly have reached the rendezvous
before Beechey's final departure;— or the melancholy
Search which stirred the world might have been antici-
pated by twenty years. One remains sorry, however,
that such an excellently well-laid plan, so amply provided,
and so resolutely put to the execution, should have failed
of entire success.
On the 26th we must have passed Franklin's Prudhoe
Bay and Yarborough Met and camped somewhere near
his Anxiety Point. The wind had swung behind us and
the temperature rose so that our progress was not so
painful, but by night the one was back in its old quarter,
and the other fallen to —25°. Whenever the haze lifted
George was standing on top of his sled with his tele-
scope at his eye. But we really saw nothing; all day we
had not even a glimpse of the Franklin mountains that
we should now be fully abreast of. When I told Walter
that night that we must be in the close neighbourhood of
Franklin's Anxiety Point, he said, "I don't think he
was half as anxious as I am, for he didn't have a bunch
of hungry dogs to feed and next to nothing to give them. "
George did not bother much about his team; I suppose
the Eskimos are too much used to it to worry greatly over
384
A WINTER CIECUIT
half-Btarved dog», but Walter took the oondiUon of hii
charges very much to heart.
One interesting item is noted in my diary; we saw
human footprints and bear tracks that must have been
seven months old. They were made in half-melted snow
of the fall, George said, not later than September, and
perhaps the last part of August; the superincumbent
snow of the winter had been swept off, leaving the plain
impress as it was made. Walter and I were remmded ol
the footprints of Professor Parker and Mr. Brown that
we found at about 16,000 feet and again about 17,000 feet
on DenaU, made a year before; the slight compression
of the snow by the foot having served to retain them,
and we discussed whether anything yet remamed of the
miles of steps we cut all up the narrow, broken Karstens
Eidge Then we feU to wondering whether the very slow
movement of the upper glacier had yet overwhelmed the
cache of grub and fuel oil covered with a heavy wolf
robe and surrounded by blocks of snow, that we left at
our last camp at 18,000 feet, and Walter said, "Myl I
wish we could climb Denali's Wife before I go outside
airainl" His heart had always been set on that com-
panion peak. But I said, "You wUl have to save that for
a vacation when you are in charge of the hospital at
Tanana"— and we laughed it off. , , xi.
It may be supposed that our reading lapsed mider the
stress of this north coast journey, and it did. There waa
no leisure and no comfort for it. I managed to read aloud
for a Uttle every night, but Walter was too tired after
the labour of dog-cooking to Usten much, ^f «Jen we
had said our prayers in our sleeping-bags, both the boys
were soon asleep. Not needing so much sleep as they,
I managed to cover a few pages of Gibbon nearly every
night while the tiny acetylene lamp held out, but reatoig
in heavy fur mitts, longing aU the time for the comfort
of complete immersion within the deer skins, is unsatis-
factory. We kept our diaries faithfully, however though
page after page of mine is blurred by the ink freezmg
POINT BABBOW TO PLAXMAN ISLAND
2S5
ai it flowed. Walter nied a pencil, but in all my winter
travelling I have not yet been reduced to leadpencil.
AU tort* of abominable ink pellets and powders I have
used, but very rarely indeed a pencil. Sometimes Walter
would ask for the recitation of poetry and I would pnt
him to sleep with Ivry or The Armada or something from
ISarmion or The Lady of the Lake, from Henri/ V or
King John or the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, The
Traveller or The Deserted Village — the schoolboy lines
that have stayed in my memory all my life ; sometimes
we would join our voices in hymns or songs that we knew
by heart. We were not at all imhappy and never for a
moment lost interest in our journey— only we were never
really comfortable, save when, in complete furs from head
to foot, we buried ourselves in our sleeping-bags — and
even then there was not enough to put under ns to make
US very comfortable. Moreover I am never very com-
fortable when I am wearing the same clothes day and
night, week after week, and cannot wash myself at all —
of which weakness I know very well our modem live-as-
the-Eskimo Arctic explorers will be sufficiently con-
temptuous. We always changed our footgear when we
came into camp, and when a pair of socks showed holes
we threw them away and put on a fresh pair, but that
was the extent of our change. I knew that the faces of
my companions were sad sights from grime and frost-
blisters, and they knew that mine was; it was just as
well that we had lost onr little mirror and coold tell noth-
ing about onr own.
I pass over another long, wretched day of cold and
wind, so similar to its predecessors that it presents noth-
ing of note, and differing from them only in that it added
the disappointment of not reaching Flaxman Island as
we had confidently expected, and come to the 28th March,
which was the worst day of the whole journey. The tem-
perature when we left onr snow-house was —37°, and
the wind in the prevailing northeast quarter was stronger
than ever. For three hours we struggled against it, rig-
286 A imiTSB OIBOinT
iiut now to k height th»t twept the loose mow before it
TUrty-Mven below wro it not a bad temperature for
traveUing if it be calm, but travelling againit a hi^
wind at that temperature hour after boor, ii Mowdingly
painfnl and trying. I have read that eome of Captam
Soott't men were out in a wind at 70 below wro. I do
not question it. but, like the devil., I "believe and
tremble." ■, • n i u i
Then George, who for eome reaaon had faUen Ix-tiiri.
with his team, though I usually insisted he should I,- n
the lead, since it was "up to him" to find the w ■ , .am.-
running up and said he thought we were trom' -a too
far south, and that, in such weather, we wei« n da.iser
of missing Flaxman Island altogether. Walter aocr^rJ-
ingly turned out, and a UtUe later at a repetition of
George's request, turned out again. We had gone on
thus for perhaps half an hour when, through the dnviiv-
snow, Walter and George saw something shado^ and
dim to the left and called out simultaneously. We turned
at right angles at once and made for it and ^rjAoTQj
had the satisfaction of seeing a considerable buildmg
and the masts of a small sloop lying before it. By tlus
time the wind had increased to a gale and it seemed like
a direct interposition of Providence that we reached
Flaiman Island when we did, and that we had not missed
it altogether. If we had not turned out when we did we
Bhould certainly have passed it by. George told us that
although he could see nothing, and had seen virtuidly
nothing all day, he had all at once an uneasy feehng that
the island was close at hand and we in danger of missmg
it The wind gradually increased to a storm, and tbe
storm to a bUzzard, and for sixty hours there was no oes-
Kition. Unless we had reached Flaxman Island Jnst when
we did, we should have been in very evU case indeed.
vin
FLA2MAN ISLAND AND THE JOUBNBY TO
HEBSOHEL ISLAND
vm
PLAXMAN ISLAND AND THE JOUBNEY TO
HEBSCHEIi ISLAND
l8 it evidenee of Franklin's interest in life beyond the
bounds of his calling that he named this island for the
sculptor John Flaxman, the "pure and blameless spirit"
who died in the year in which he was thus honoured or
was It not entirely disconnected with professional pridet
It may have been the monument to Nelson in St. Paul's
cathedral that prompted it, for Franklin served in the
battle of Trafalgar, or it may have been the ambitious
design for a figure of Britannia 200 feet high with which
Flaxman proposed to crown Greenwich Hill as a monu-
ment to the naval victories of England in the great war.
I notice with much interest that this design has been
revived as a project to commemorate the part played by
the "grand fleet" in onr greater war, so that, even as I
write, there comes a copy of the London Spectator with
a reproduction of tl , drawing, more arresting, I thought,
because no man ever before saw picture amidst the sedate
exeeikncr ^'°"™"' **° '''*''^"'® °^ ""'' '"'rin*'"
I am content to answer my own question by saying that
Franklin's interest in artistic matters has other evidence
toan this island; he named a bay near the mouth of the
Mackenzie for his friend Mr. Phillips, professor of paint-
ing at the Boyal Academy.
Most people with any smattering of artistic knowledge
mil probably remember Flaxman best as the designer
of the exqmsite little cameos that stand out so chann-
^ly m dead white upon the dead blue background of
Wedgwood pottery;-the pottery that brought to multi-
tnaes their first acquaintance with the grace of Greek
290 A WINTER CIBCUIT
art. But Flaxman's name chiefly recalls to me the noble
line drawings which he made to illustrate Homer's Iliad,
and I can still in memory turn the pages of that book
and recapture something of boyhood delight, as I can
still see the airy, flowing draperies of the procession of
gods and heroes that moved with such Ughtness yet such
dignity around a prized family teapot and cream pitcher
that appeared on special occasions.
There is an accidental yet deep congruity in the asso-
ciation of Flaxman's name with this Arctic island. The
marble of his statues was not purer than its snows; the
lines of his drawings scarcely less severe and unadorned
than its contour as it rose above the ice; and when we
left it and from a distance looked back upon it, its dead
whiteness stood out against a sky that was blue once
more. , ja. • ^ a
The substantial dwelling which we found on the island
and in which we sojourned during the two and a half
days of the storm, was erected by Mr. Ernest de Koven
Leffingwell, in part from the wreck of the Duchess of
Bedford, and was his headquarters for several years dur-
ing his surveys of this north coast, to which several
references have been made. We were singularly fortu-
nate in having this house for our stay. There was a great
sheet-iron stove still in place, and the outhouses, though
they had been much drawn upon by previous sojourners,
furnished abundant fuel. The house had been left almost
as it stood by Mr. Leffingwell six or seven years before,
several pieces of rude furniture still in the livmg-room
and several hundred books still on the shelves. But the
condition of those books reminded me in a small way ot
what the gentle Boers did to Livingstone's library at
Kolobeng in 1852 as a punishment for daring to "teach
the niggers," when they raided his mission in his absence
and carried off his school children into slavery after
slaughtering their parents. Handfuls of leaves had been
torn from book after book, and used, I suppose f or kind^
ling fires. All the books on the shelves in the vicimty of
FLAXMAN AND HERSCHEL ISLANDS
2»1
the stove had been tbns treated ; only those on the remoter
shelves were unbanned. Several large volumes of Bol-
lin's Ancient History had been gutted, Plutarch and
Dickens alike bad been most despitefuUy used, a number
of French and German books had suffered. It seemed
a great pity that there was no one on ♦lic coast who cared
enough for the»» books to rescue them. I suppose the
natives were the depredators; a quick fire is highly de-
sirable under seme circumstances, and books mean no
more to Eskimos than to Boers. Coming out of that
intolerable wind T can conceive that I might almost have
been brought to the sacrifice of Boll^n myself!
It was an immense relief to be able to tie our dogs in
the lee of the ruined outhouses, to hang up all aar accumu-
lation of icc-stifffnod gear around the stove, to turn our
sleeping-bngs int^ido out and spread them along the
rafters. Soon the wholo neighbourhood of the stove was
festooned with fur boots, scarves, mitts, artigis, dog-
mocassins, felt insoles, and bunches of stockings and
socks. What a blessed thing nwre shelter is when one
has been buffeted for honrs by a merciless icy blast!
How we did revel io the unac<'a«tome<l warmth of a real
stove and the commodiousnoss of a r»al house again!
Double rations for the dogs were soon '■ >oking, and
a special meal for ourselves ihat varied our perpetual
stew and beans.
This house gees back to the vaguely-ambitious "Anglo-
American Polar Expedition" of 1906, when Messrs. Mik-
kelsen and l.«Singwell brought a 6.5-foot yacht, the
Duchess of Bedford, to this place, having had hopes of
taking her to Banks Land. But here she froze in, and
from a point to the westward a winter dog-sled journey
was made northward over the ice, just reaching the 72nd
parallel at about the 149th meridian. They could and
would have gone further but that the deep soundings
they found seemed to indicate that they had crossed the
continental shelf and that there was no land to be found
beyond. This enterprise finished, the sinking of the ship
*! I , !
292 A WINTEE CIBCTJIT
through the pulling out of her caulking by the ice in the
spring, put a finish to the expedition as such. Mikkelsen
made a sled journey back to civilization— to which I re-
ferred at Cape Lisbume— and entered upon his later,
and, I think, more important explorations in Greenland;
while Leffingwell remained at Flaxman Island and prose-
cuted for three years the careful triangulation of the
coast for which he must always be remembered in the
annals of geography.
Although nearly seventy years had elapsed since the
line of this coast was completely traced, I think I am
right in saying that no instrumental survey of any part
of it had ever been attempted. Stockton in the Thetis in
1889 had made several astronomical determinations of
positions which showed that much of the coast was set
down about four miles too far north; the chart we used
had a note to that effect. But the map remained just as
the rough field notes and compass bearings of the Frank-
lin and Simpson boat expeditions had left it. When one
remembers the fog and foul weather that was encoun-
tered it is no matter for wonder that the resulting map
was very inaccurate. I am told that when Mr. Leffing-
well 's work was done and he was gone homo with his
mass of figures to work up, there arose some question
about the measurement of the base line upon which the
whole system of triangulation depended; whereupon he
made another voyage to Flaxman Island to remeasure
that line and remove any possibility of error.
There is something very admirable in the devotion of
years of one's life to unselfish, public-spirited labours
such as this. We have been more accustomed to asso-
ciate work of this sort, all over the world, with leisured
Englishmen than perhaps with men of any other na-
tionality; it should be matter for congratulation that
young Americans of the same class are turning to such
useful and laudable diversion. By the kindness of the
United States Geological Survey I have just received a
proof of Mr. Leffingwell 's maps, the publication of which
; L
FLAXMAN A>fD HERSCHEL ISLANDS 293
haa been delayed by the war, with the assurance that the
whole report will shortly be issued. I have no acquaint-
ance with Mr. Leffingwell, save the slight yet not negli-
gible acquaintance that rummaging amongst the remains
of the books that he deemed worthy of transportation
to the Arctic regions can give, but I venture to call the
attention of the geographical societies of the world to
the work he has done on the north coast of Alaska, as
perhaps no^ unworthy the recognition of their major
awards.
I lit upon a volume of Sir James Stephens' Lectures
on French History, and tore out the heart of its compari-
son between the constitutional development of England
and France; I found a curious book on Left-Handedness
by the Scotch-Canadian archeologist and educator, Daniel
Wilson, and I picked up and brought away as a souvenir
a little reprint of a translation of Schiller's Revolt of the
Netherlands, while Walter carried off as his prize a
primer of French literature.
The day after our arrival was Good Friday, and amidst
the unabated howling of the storm outside I read to the
boys the narrative of the tremendous events of that day
and we joined in its moving devotions. I recalled the
crowded, fasting, three-hour congregations of many Good
Fridays, and I doubted if there were amongst them any
deeper feeling than that which we shared in this desolate
spot ; great churches and funereal draperies and solemn
music are not essential to the emotions of that anniver-
sary.
Towards evening there came a lull in the force of the
wind, and Gteorge, who was busied with the dogs, came
in and said that a sled was approaching. We knew who it
must be ; the sloop lying in the ice had at once been recog-
nized by George.
It may be recalled that I spoke of a trader who had
given trouble to the schoolmaster at Wainwright and had
removed to Point Barrow. He gave greater trouble
there. Late in the fall, when the precarious navigation of
I '
' ' i^i
294 A WINTER CIRCUIT
these waters was definitely closing, he had abducted a
girl, a daughter of Mr. Brower's wife by her former
Eskimo husband, a few months married to an Eskimo
boy. To what, if any, degree the girl was consenting, I
could not discover— it seemed a case of "Once on board
the lugger and the girl is mine 1"— but I learned with
indignation that a warrant for the man's arrest, issued
by the United States commissioner and entrusted to a
specially deputized native constable to serve, while the
sloop stUl lay at the edge of the ice waiting for a fair
wind, had been insolently defied, and the man had sailed
off intending much further voyage to the eastward with
his trading goods, but brought up here by the closing in
of the ice. Now I have no personal courage to boast
about, and the habit of my calling of many years makes
me shrink from the thought of anything like personal
violence, but had I been that United States commissioner
I think that a high resentment at the contemptuous dis-
regard of my lawful authority would have overborne all
other considerations and nerved me to summon such
armed posse as the place afforded, native or white, and
to go in person and take that man. It is but one more
illustration of the futility of our system of primary jus-
tice, which forces the unpaid magistrate's office upon
those who, by character or calling, are not fitted to it, and
provides no proper means for the exercise of its author-
ity; one more illustration of the need of an Alaskan con-
stabulary modelled somewhat upon the Canadian North-
west Mounted Police, to which need the present governor
of Alaska draws attention in his 1918 report, just to my
hand; another raven sent out of .he ark, I fear.
So here were the man— and the girl, as a fresh word
fiom George brought— on their way to visit us. The
affair was none of ours; we were merely travellers
through the A.rctic solitude glad to see any other human
beings, eager to learn anything we could about the re-
mainder of our route, and to replenish our suppUes from
a trader's stock, if possible.
FLAXHAN AND HERSCHEL ISLANDS
295
What we learned was very encouraging. With good
weather we should be able to reach Barter Island in two
long runs, and at Barter Island was the base camp of Mr.
StefansBon's exploring expedition, with a number of peo-
ple, white and native. Mr. Stefunssou, be told us, had
been sick most part of the winter at Horschel Island,
and still lay there, but a party under Storker Storkerson,
his lieutenant, had a week or two before set out north-
ward over the ice from Cross Island, which lies seven or
eight miles off Franklin's Anxiety Point, and thus had
been passed by us unknowing. Cross Island was named
by Stockton of the Thetis for a grave marked by a cross.
Storkerson 's enterprise was organized under Peary's
system of supporting parties returning when a certain
distance was covered, and had nine sleds and sixty-eight
dogs, and altogether thirteen men, of whom five were
the advance detachment and the remainder the supports.
Its purpose was, of course, to reach northern land, if any
such were reachable, or at any rate to push still further
back the region of the unknown. As to plans beyond this
there seemed nothing definite ; some said he would work
to the eastward to Banks Land, where a schooner was to
search for him; some that he would seek to drift west-
ward on the ice with the intent of reaching the Siberian
coast.
Storkerson had joined the Duchess of Bedford when
she cleared from Victoria in 1906 as a sailor, but had been
quickly promoted to mate when the position fell vacant.
He accompanied Messrs. Mikkelsen and Leffingwell on
their ice journey of 1907, had remained on the Arctic
coast and married there, and had been associated with
Mr. Stefansson in his later explorations, who taught him
the use of instruments. At this writing the party is long
since returned safely, having reached a latitude of 73°
58', and thus made the farthest northing ever made on
the Pacific side of the American continent, some 35' be-
yond CoUinson's record of 1830. Without any disparage-
ment to Mr. Storkerson, who was himself sick during
•»»'*»««* .
296
A WINTER OKCrnT
m
mnoh of this Jonraey, we may feel that if the driying
force and confidence of Mr. Stef&nsson'g personality had
not been so unfortunately withdrawn, mnoh more might
reasonably have been expected of this large and well-
provided party. They went neither east nor west but
returned the next November to the point at which they
left.
Our roving trader, who "fears not the monarch and
heeds not the law," was willing to sell us some coal oil,
sugar and dried potatoes, and that was a welcome recruit-
ing of our stores, especially the coal oil, but he had noth-
ing in the way of dog-feed 'o dispose of— indeed was
about to start over the ice to look for open water and
seals that he might feed his own dogs. It is sometimes
twenty miles to open water from Flaxman's Island, and
I know not how he fared. Once, when he had gone out-
side to a cache of supplies made when the boat froie-in,
the girl, who was squatted on the floor with a wistful
look in her eyes, began timidly to speak to me, but had no
more than asked me whether I had heard about her from
her step-father, when the man returned and she was
immediately silent. I felt myself under obligation to
ask her, in his presence, since I had no opportunity to
sp^-ak in his absence, if she were with him voluntarily,
and she said that she was— with no great alacrity, how-
ever; and he presently withdrew with her and we s»w
them no more.
They were living, we learned, in a hut on the mainland,
at the mouth of the Canning river of Franklin, having
moved away from this house because driftwood was
plentiful on the other side of the channel and very scarce
here. We felt grateful that they had not remained until
all the outhouse-material had been burned up. There
was nothing whatever that we could do in this matter,
but I felt sorry for the girl, a rather pretty, well-formed
girl, with good English, whether the willing or unwilling
victim of the man. I told the polici; inspector at Hersohel
Island of the case, and I understand he was refused per-
FLAXMAN AND HEB8CHEL ISLANDS 297
minion to pass into British waters and trade in British
territory. He will have to return to Point Barrow when
the revenae cutter is not in its vicinity or he will be dealt
with summarily; and I am anxious to see the time come
when immunity from penalties for the violation of the
criminal law, so long boasted by those who use these nar-
row waters of the north, will be as obsolete as piracy on
the high seas.
Canning, of the Canning river, was of course Qeorge
Canning, the dominant force in British and even, per-
haps, in European politics at that time; he who "called
the new world into existence to redress the balance of the
old," as he said when he recognized the South American
revolutionary governments, and is supposed to have sug-
gested to James Monroe his famous "Doctrine."
We woke on Saturday morning to wind that had not
diminished, and although Walter grew impatient and
wanted to be moving, George said "No!" So I did not
take Walter's wishes into consideration. When one em-
ploys a guide there is no other sensible course than to
depend npon his guidance unless he prove himself in-
capable, and I had all along put upon George the respon-
sibility of such decisions. So we settled down to another
day of rest and refreshment and I browsed amongst the
books. In the afternoon Walter and I resumed our
Shakespeare and ■'PfQt .1 couple of hours with the Mid-
summer Night's Oream.
If it were Jioiic' J iom<} page- bask ihat I passed over
several of Fvankl-i's riiimes without c ju:nient, it may be
as well to say t ■?. d '.'as b<>R..u. -^ I can find nothing to
tell about them. 0\r)3lyr Ba,% r'mdhoe Bay, Yar-
borough Inlet, Fraijili!! :a«reij ;iienlion's as the names of
indentations of the coast without any v^f^rd as to those
whom he designed to liv.nou.-. The only one that I can
make any conjecture about is t! • last, and I'ince it dis-
appears altogether from Mi. L.-.^'tiirwell's map, it is not
worth speculating as to whethei it were named for
Charles Anderson-Pelham, earl of Yarborcugh, or not,
298 A WINTER CIRCUIT
though I think it likely, «inoe he was commodore of the
Boyal Yacht Squadron at that time.
Doubtleis Mr. Leffingwell was juBtifled in obliterating
Yarborough Inlet; it ia in the oloae vicinity of Foggy
Iiland and Franklin could do no more than guess at the
real features of this repon; but he erred in retaining
the misspelled Heald Pomt, since Franklin plainly prints
it "Herald"— a similar case to Pcard and Pearl. And
what shall we say to the multitudes of new names with
which he has covered his chart t— remembering W. H.
Dall's rather petulant complaint in his Alaska and Its
Resources of the names with which the British explorers
have so "plentifully bespattered" the north coasti
Every whaling captain that ever visited these waters,
every trader, every squaw-man on this coast, has his
island or his point. One can fancy the Marquess Camden
and Sir Francis Beaufort uneasy at some of their com-
pany, the carl of Yarborough quite willing to make his
bow and withdraw, but maps make as strange bedfellows
as poverty itself. There are indeed so many little
islands and sandbanks amongst the shallows of this
coast that when Mr. Leffingwell's local names were
exhausted he had to resort to numbers to designate the
Sometimes I wonder if there can be many who share
my desire to know the origin of place-names. I think
not- I think if the desire were common there would
arise some more extensive attempt to satisfy it than ex-
ists today The gazetteers and encyclopajdias care little
or nothing about it; they give latitude and lons^tude,
population and resources, but are not interested in the
meaning or origin of names. Yet to me they are full of
interest, and often carry locked up in themselves the
beirinning of the history of a place. Long ago when
passing through the panhandle of Texas, my curiosity
was aroused as to the origin of the name of the Canadian
river What was a Canadian river doing flowing through
New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma! I tried to find out.
FLAZUAN AND HESSCHEL ISLANDS
899
I oottld of course guess that it arose from an earlj
wttlement of Canadians upon its banks, or from early
visits of traders from the north; but, if so, there shonld
be some record, some tradition, that could be cited. Hav-
ing exhausted local sources of information I applied to
the national authorities; I wrote to the Bureau of Geo-
graphical Names, and I was informed that the name
probably arose from the corruption of "oaSonita" or
little canyon, the river's course being marked by such
features. But, as I pointed out, if that were only a guess,
why was net a guess about early Canadian settlers just
as good! and I asked for some evidence that the name
was a corruption of a Spanish word; some citation of an
old map on which it bore that name. As a matter of fact,
on the old maps that I have seen the name is Colorado or
Red — one of the many Colorados in the southwest. My
second letter received no answer: government bureaus
are still not anxious to encourage people who "want to
know yon know " ; and I have never to this day had any
light on the origin of that river's name.
There are few more exasperating things than to want
to know something that it is entirely legitimate and even,
as I look at it, laudable to want to know — and to have no
earthly means of finding it out; and it is one of my
strongest "intimations of immortality" that there must
be another life in which all the things we were so anxious
and so unable to know will be leamablc — as the old Scotch
lady felt about the Oowrie conspiracy.
There is Manning Point sticking out from this north
coast, further to the eastward. For some map-maker's
reason it is selected to appear on maps of the whole con-
tinent, and I have even seen it on maps of the world. Yet
I can discover nothing about it ; Franklin simply names
it and passes on. And this north coast has many such
names. I wonder if there be anyone in the world who
knows why Franklin named Manning Point, or, besides
myself, cares T
Meanwhile I am grateful to the Alaskan Division of
MlCIOeOfY DESWUTION IBT CHAIT
(ANSI ond tSO TEST CHART No. 2)
'tarn |££
I
1.8
irnt^n^
jd APPLIED IM/^GE ln(
1653 East Mom SI'c
U609 USA
^|« m^— ' '111 I ' II I
ill
300
A WINTER CIRCUIT
the United States Geological Survey and particularly to
Marcus Baker, for the admirable Geographic Dictionary
of Alaska, which has done so much to discover and pre-
serve the origin and meaning of our place-names. The
Qeological Survey is the one government agency in
Alaska that is beyond all adverse criticism; a model of
disinterested and scholarly soientiflo work.
At 4.30 on the morning of the last day of March I
roused George and bade him go out and report on the
weather. When he returned and declared it "all the
same" I settled myself to spend a quiet Easter at Flax-
man Island. We rose two or three hours later and had
finished a leisurely breakfast when there seemed indica-
tion of a lull in the wind. Pi esently an occasional gleam
of sun appeared, and, as it was soon evident that the
storm was over, when we had said the service of the day
I gave the word to make preparation for our departure,
for there was no question that on the score of dog-feed
alone we must move as soon as moving was safe. By 9
o'clock we were all packed up and ready, save for hitch-
ing the dogs, but when George and I had hitched our team
they had to stand a solid hour while all hands worked
at the recovery of Walter's harness. George and I had
brought our harness indoors ; Walter had thoughtlessly
left his lying where it was taken off. Some obstruction
or other caused an eddy in the wind, and a notion may
be formed of the violence of the storm when I say that
the harness was buried three or four feet deep in snow
that was almost as hard as plaster of Paris. We had
to cut out great blocks of snow with the saw and the
axes, to lay bare all the neighbourhood of the front of
the sled, and it had to be done very carefully lest the har-
ness itself be chopped up in the process. Once more we
realized how exceedingly fortunate we had been in reach-
ing Flaxman Island when the storm began.
So late a start made us very doubtful of reaching Col-
linson Point, but the storm had done us one great service :
it had swept all loose snow entirely away, had gathered
PLAXMAN AND HERSCHEL ISLANDS 301
it into drifts and iuere hardened it to marble, and for the
first time since we left Point Barrow we had an entirely
soUd surface to trave'. upon. Here and there, also, ap-
peared traces of the tracks of the sleds carrying supplies
from the ba-" camp of the exploring expedition to its
outpost at Cross Island, but it was not possible to follow
them, so much of them was overspread with hardened
snow. We knew that we were crossing Camden Bay
and that Collinson Point is near the bottom of it,
but the bay is a good deal deeper than our chart
showed it.
Franklin named Camden Bay for the marquess of that
name, the son of that Chief Justice Pratt who rendered
the famous decision against the legality of "general war-
rants" in the contest of the Crown with .John Wilkes.
Raised to the peerage as Earl Camden when ho became
lord chancellor, it was his familiarity with this "little
lawyer" that Garrick boasted about to Bos well. "Well,
sir, he was a little lawyer to be so intimate with a player,"'
said Dr. Johnson. His son, honoured here by Franklin,
was successively a lord of the admiralty, a lord of the
treasury and lord lieutenant of Ireland in the ministry of
William Pitt, and afterwards lord president of the coun-
cil, chancellor of the University of Cambridge and a
knight of the garter. And now, Ned Arey, with your
Eskimo wife and bunch of half-breed children, what have
you to say for yourself that on Mr. Leffingwell's map
your island intrudes into my lord's bay? I may best
answer for him as I found him, "The rank is but the
guinea stamp. The man's the gowd for a' that."
Collinsoii spent his third Arctic winter (1853-54) in the
Enterprise u this bay, after his wonderful voyage along
the winding channels of the mainland coast of America
up to the very waters in which Franklin's ships were
sunk— though he found no trace of the expedition— just
too late in getting back here to Camden Bay to make his
way to Point Barrow and home. The gate was closed
again. He had to wait a year to get in; he had to wait
111
802
A WINTER CIRCUIT
a year to get out; such are the fortunes of this northern
passage. Perhaps with modem motive power it might
he possihle with extreme good luck as to the season, and
skill in making the most of good luck, to accomplish the
voyage from ocean to ocean in one season, along the
known and charted waterways; hut even today, with
every advantage, the chances would he very much against
it The Northwest Passage teems with historical and
geographical interest; there is little likelihood that it will
ever have any other.
We did not reach Collinson Point that night— nor any
other point, although we travelled till 8 o'clock and had
to make another camp without wood fot cooking dog-
feed. It was midnight when the hoys had finished cook-
ing over the primus stoves, and when the food was cooled
and served out, for a moment there was no sound hut
the happy gohbling of many mouths. Then Kerawak,
who was tethered nearby, lifted up his voice in a mixture
of yelp and howl that said plainly enough, "Great Scott!
is that all? Is that all we get for snpper!"--for the
ration was very scant. It was a poor Easter for man
and beast . .
I am sorry that the Bomanzoff mountains of * ranklin,
which we were now abreast of, tend to disappear from
American maps and would make a pie-', that the name
be retained. They are sufficiently separated from the
Franklin mountains to the westward by the vaUey of the
Hula-Hula river to justify a separate name and tb^y
commemorate a "distinguished patron and promoter of
discovery and science," Count Nicholas Bomanzoff,
chancellor of the Bussian empire, who bore the cost of
Kotzebue's famous voyage and of the expeditions that
surveyed and mapped the New Siberian Islands. I think
he is entitled to his mountains, and I am glad to see that
Mr. Leffingwell restores them to him.
By noon today we reached the first occupied habita-
tion that we had seen since we left Cape Halkett, where
two white men, an elderly one named Sam Mclntyre and
m
NORTH COAST-fOOKINC DOC FF.FD.
. ill I
Ij'i
It
FLAXMAN AND IIERSCHEL ISLANDS 303
a pleasant quiet youth named Paul Steen, were winter-
ing. Wo were glad to spend an hour with them, tc de-
liver the mail we had brought for them, impart our
news, and to accept insistent hospitality that would not
even allow us to withdraw a cork from a thermos bottle
Mclntyre's account of himself interested me very much
Ho told mo he was the son of the chaplain of the 77th
Cameronian Highlanders in the Crimean War, who was
severely wound jd by a shell at the battle of Inkerman
when he and a Roman Catholic chaplain together were
carrying a wounded man off the field; the Roman chap-
lain being killed on the spot. He knew the names of the
Crimean commanders and spoke of Col. Baker, later
Baker pasha, as a constant visitor at his home quarters
and playmate of the children. I recaUed the scandal
m connection with this officer, which brought about his
dismissal from the British army and his transfer to the
Turkish. Melntyre expressed himself as greatly in want
of a Bible, and because that is a want that does not seem
to be keenly felt amongst the white men of the Arctic
coast, and we had a little Now Testament and the Prayer
Book with its copious extracts from the Scriptures, I
gave him my Bible.
He told me a story of Bishop Eowe that i^ so character-
istic that it is worth setting down. He said that he and
some companions were stormbound and short of grub
somewhere in the Seward peninsula when the Bishop and
his dog-team "blew in" and decided also to await better
weather; that the Bishop opened up his grub box and
bade the boys help themselves, but that they told him he
had better keep his o^vn grub since they were all short.
The Bishop howeve-. insisted upon sharing and sharing
alike, saying, "As long as it lasts we'll eat it, and when
It's done we'll aU go on the bum together." Again and
again Molntyre repeated this saying with great relish.
I knew that Bishop Rowe had never travelled in the
Seward peninsula in winter, and that it must be an echo
of some occurrence elsewhere, but it is just what the
rifi
l\n
304
A WINTER CIRCUIT
Bishop would have done, whether or not just what he
would have said. I was a little disconcerted when my
rpference to Molntyre's interesting extraction provoked
smiles from the white men who knew him, and to learn
that he had a reputation for romance.
Ten miles more brought us to Barter Island and to the
extensive building, half underground in sensible ver-
nacular fashion, of Mr. Stefansson's base camp, and here
we were hospitably received by Capt. Hadley,* who was
in charge, with two other white men and several Eskimo
women and children and a great deal of stuff. The
schooner Polar Bear, belonpng to the expedition, la>
in the ice. Hadley I found a most interesting man and
we sat up till midnight, talking, although I had had little
sleep the previous night— and then I went reluctantly to
bed. He had been on the Karluk when she was lost, full
of scientists and all sorts of expensive and elaborate
equipment, and bore no small part in bringing the sur-
vivors to Wrangell Island, there lying many months until
rescued by the King ami Wing. Having just read the
Last Voyage of the Karluk it was illuminating in many
ways to hear Capt. Hadley 's account.
But what interested me most keenly was his statement
that while on Wrangell Island, again and again, on clear
days, he had seen land with mor' Lain tops far to the
northeast. Now those read in Arctic voyages will recall
that Kellet in the Eerald in 1890, after discovering the
island that bears his ship's name and landing upon it,
reported further extensive lofty land in about 72° north
175° west, and that five years later Eodgers in the II. S. S.
Vvncermes anchored on that spot and reported no land in
sight for thirty miles in any direction. Moreover the
Jeomette, in her long, slow d-ift in the ice, saw "not one
speck of land north of Hera! ^ Island" until she was 30°
further to the west, and again Berry in the Badgers,
searching for the Jearnnette's people in 1881, reached
• I learn with great regret that Capt. Hadley died of tha tnfluenn in
San FranciKo the following year.
FLAXMAN AND HEBSCIIEL ISLANDS 305
.iwn'".'! ^^f "^ '''*'' 1"«»«ons= There could be no pos-
o^M v."* I' ^1* '='""'' ^'"'^' ^' «"*. "^ mirage rC
could .t be when it lay always in the saae place and borl
always the same shape? Could he make any estimate of
the d,stance» It was very far off, perhaps^n hundred
m. es, perhaps more, it was in.possible to ay, but U had
bold rugged mountain peaks covered with snow in places
dSt'of'thTr '*'"• ' """"'*'' ^™ 0^ '^^ •^--^«
dntt of the I tncennes voyage, of Berry in the Hodaers
There : "' '^ .'"" '''™^"- *•""■*?" ^e seemed tofb S"
how m '°"! '^r''* ''^°"' "■« '"«'- •'"t it did not matt^
how many sa.d there was no land there, he had seen i[
S r T^' ""'' •''"' "" "'"''^ '^°»bt about it than
about the sland we were on now. How many times alto
ifZZ'^ '"' ''' ''''' """ ^""^ "^'^''-''y seen uT Well,
he had made no count; every thoroughly clear day and
he sa.d that though clear days were raref when they Ce
clear they were wonderfully clear. Had he seen the
land twenty times » Yes, fully twenty and probably more
So there U s tends : Rodgers did not see Wrangell Land*
for fog, though but a few miles off his course; there may
Jteadnl'n "T ''f '' 'I'' "°* '''■' '"« •^««'™««« drifted
steadily northwest away from Herald Island and in this
land .s reported northeast. And Hadley's testimony
agrees remarkably with Kellett's description- "There
was a fine clear atmosphere (such a one as can only be
tenl!r, .' "^r''^: '^"'P* '° '^' direction of this ex-
tended land, where the clouds rose in numerous extended
masses, occasionally leaving the very lofty peaks un-
capped, where could be distinctly seen columns, pillars
,1/""^ *J:°''*° P^"""'' "''^^oteristic of the higher head-
lands in this sea. East Cape and Cape Lisbume, for
example. As far as a man can be certain who has 130
OwootJertM.
li LI
) !
306
A WINTER CIRCUIT
pair of eyes to auist him, and all agreeing, I am certain
we have discovered an extensive land." *
It was the belief of Dr. Petermann, "the grea' Qer-
man geographer," in this land and its extension to the
north, that lored De Long into deciding upon the Bering
Straits route. Dr. Petermann is the classic i^xample of
the "armchair geographer." He was certain that the
pole could never be reached by the Baffin's Bay and
Smith's Sound route; certain that it could never be
reached by sledges ; believed that it could be reached by
the Bering Sea route in one summer with a suitable ves-
sel and a commander experienced in ice navigation. It
was his armchair theories that were responsible for the
tragedy of the Jeonnette. The species is not yet extinct.
There it stands acd there we must leave it; and the
question will probably never be solved save by some such
undertaking on the ice with dogs and sleds as Stef&nsson
had planned and Storkerson was at this time attempting
to ezeoate. To gain a northing of 75° or 76° and then
drift westward upon one of the enormous old ice-floes
of these waters, or continue the sled journey in that direc-
tion should the drift be otherwise, depending upon seals
and bears for subsistence, offers, it would seem, the only
likelihood of exploring this region, and Mr. Stefansson
has demonstrated the praotioability of the procedure.
It may be, however, that the aeropjane will fulfil the
confident expectations that are entertained of it and ren-
der dogs and sleds obsolete for polar explorations; I
have my doubts.
Storkenson's journey has had one result: it has erased
from the map the "Keenan Land" reported by a whaling
captain of that name on the ship Stamboul of New Bed-
ford in the eighties. A more extended journey of the
same kind might put KeUett's "Plover Land" back on
the map, or finally erase it also.
•I quota from 0«1»tii'« MeOUmfi DMOowfSf «/ «»• Kort^nml P—>^.
when put of Kellotfi diipatch to tho Britidi adminlty i> timnKrllxd,
p. 4».
i
i '
W
PLAXMAN AND HEBSCHEL ISLANDS W
The two other white men were also in»ere«tinff. Be-
fore they joined the expedition they hnil been on Victoria
Island trapping for a certain degrcnenilo Russian Jew,
now languishing in the «raol at Herschel Island for de-
frauding the Canadian customs, and the stories they told
me of this man's treatment of the natives, of his abuse
of little girls, of his outrages upon common decency,
besides his rapacity and greed, aroused my highest in-
dignation. The white fox threatens to be as fatal to those
remote isolated folks as the sea-otter was to the Aleutian
Islanders. What a responsibility rests directly upon the
woman who started the silly fashion of summer furs!;
but she is probably of the kind that "could never know
why, and never could understand."
I left Barter Island with much regret that I could not
spend a day there, there were so many other things I
wanted to talk to C jt. Hadley about. They gave us a
great breakfast of meal and hot cakes, and were able
to let US have some dog-feed, and all hands speeded the
parting guesis. Our destination for the night was a na-
tive village 35 miles away named » ngun, with an inter-
mediate village named Orokt^lli and a wh:te man's
cabin on the day's run also. We \.ere come to the popu-
lated part of the north coast. But to avoid sandbars we
turned too much out to sea, and were presently amongst
the heaviest, roughest ice of the winter, getting ourselves
into a blind lane amidst great bergg and pinnacles which
gave no egress, so that we had to retrace our path.
Here was a sample of the ice for which these seas are
noted. In an efifort to force a passage we came near
breaking one of our sleds and it is certain that vehicles
for travel amongst such ice must be immensely heavy
and strong. It was 1.30 before we had extricated our-
selves from this labyrinth, and in another half hour we
reached the native village referred to. After a brief
stop to shake hands, we went on a couple of miles tu the
cabin of an old trapper named Basmussen for our lunch,
not attracted by the interior of the igloo we entered; but
308
A WINTER CIRCUIT
II
'K !
iii
George, who recognized some relatives, stayed behind
to eat seal-meat, for which he had become very hungry.
After an hour at the trapper's cabin, where George re-
joined lis, we pushed on for three hours or so more, and
came to the igloos of Angun, our night's stop.
Here were none but two old women and some children
(the men had gone to Demarcation Point to traffic with
the trader there), and they were most kind and helpful.
They pulled off our fur boots for us, turned them inside
out and hung them up to dry (an attention that is part
of the hospitality at every genuine Eskimo dwelling, and
almost corresponds to the water for washing the feet of
(,) e East) ; they helped to cook dog-feed and insisted on
washing our dishes after supper. Then they sought our
gear ever to find if any mending were needed, and their
needles and sinew thread were soon busy. Notliing could
be more solicitous and motherly than the conduct of these
two old women, and when I gave them each a little tin
box of one hundred compressed tea tablets, having first
proved to them that one tablet would really make a good
cup of tea, they were so pleased that they danced about
the floor.
Point Manning, Point Sir Henry Martin, Point Griffin
and Point Humphreys of Franklin that we passed this
day, I can tell nothing about since Franklin tells noth-
ing, but his Beaufort Bay, which he named on the 3rd
August, 1826, for- Captain (afterwards Sir Francis)
Beaufort, six days before Beechey honoured the same
gentleman on the west coast, has had a singular fortune,
for it has been expanded into the name that is applied to
all the waters north of Alaska. At any rate I know no
other origin for the term "Beaufort Sea" which is now
commonly so employed, and has found its way into the
more modem maps. Some convenient term was needed
to distinguish this part of the Arctic Ocean, and I con-
jecture that from "the seas north of Beaufort Bay"
came the simplified "Beaufort Sea." The exploration of
the Beaufort Sea is likely to engage attention for a long
k
'kt
ii
PLAXMAN AND HERSCHEL ISLANDS 809
iX°aV:Sn/'^ '"^'"°'^ "^ ^'^ ^-t British
teble was soon spread with a fine meal to wlich wo Z
tnU justice. After many years' wl,«i;n„ * T
coast, and for ten years pursued his search from the Col
trapping and h^s a^^o^wntX dTorh^tr^y
canbou hunter and trapper, besides a number of yZS
chldren so that the establishment has some?hinnf I
patnarchal a^ We were told that this sonT-Gallelr
X;"^r:t^rd;:r"-*°^*''«--"-^
I found Arey a very modest, intellieent man fnli „*
'^'TZSLfir"" "^ " "S ""S "..f
prospectors of the interior country whose unrecorded
travels preceded any explorations of surveyor" Tt^av
^U be that in the flourishing days of whaS,' vesTell
agam and again invaded this unknown regionTa ZZd-
iSihood oV find-" ^! ""^ "^'^''*' ^"^-J -^«- the
iiEelihood of finding land, since had they seen land ihZ
would have reported it. I left Ned Arey'SK^^
H
1 :l
310 A WINTER CIRCUIT
that he was entitled to his island, and glad that Mr.
LeffingweU had given it to him. „ , . ,. „„„.!,
AhTst opposite Arey's place on Icy Eeef « the nionth
of a rivar which Franklin passed nnnotioed. It wae
2tmed mnch later the Turner river by 0-;^""
whn he was serving in Alaska, in honour of John Hen^
Turner of the coast survey, said to have been the first
wS^ man who ever passed from the valley otth.PoT-
Tpine to Herschel Island. I think Mr. Turner has more
ZXn place-names to his credit than any other person,
Tcount up a glacier, an island, a Ir.ke, a mountain and
a river. I daresay they are all deserved. ^ , .
That night, the 3rd April, we reached Tom Gordon's
tratog station near Demarcation Point, four or five
Xs within Alaskan territory. This new station « an
^tpost of the same San Francisco fur house that Mr
Brower represents at Point Barrow, and they have yet
Mother east of Herschel Island. Mr. Gordon was for a
Tmber of yeavs resident and trading at Pomt Barrow
and this was his first season here. A warehouse and a
combined store and dwelling, still unfinished, rose stark
Zi fte sandspit, in the style that '^<>^''';JTZ^^
how to vary from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean
The place was swarming with natives come hither
frLtbe inland rivers and mountainsforthesprmgtrad^
iuK and since there was nowhere else to .ay they stayed
attbestore. Gordon seemed to keep open house for thm
there was cooking and eating going on aU the time.
Sh was his o^ family, I never -ally distinguished
Tongst the numbers of women an chil^^^ wh^ JJ
Srent?:^f«trou;erfrawool^
farge holes cut in it for their naked breasts, that their
cwfdren might apply themselves thereunto with the
•^Tom gS found a man of the extrenie good natare
andZpitable generosity that this state of bmgs wonW
imply. I had diflculty in doing business with him at alL
'4
'
If'
FLAXIIAN AND HEBSCHEL ISLANDS
3U
I deBired to make some arrangements for Oeorge's re-
tnm to Point Barrow that he might pick up here his
necessary supplies and not have to haul them all the way
from Herschel Island, for four hundred odd miles is a
long way to carry everything one needs. I had cached a
little stuff at Flazman Island for him, procured from
the fugitive trader; I wished to purchase here the best
part of what he would still need, and leave it. Bat it was
hard to make Mr. Gordon take payment for anything. I
had brought a sack of mail for him; the first he had had
in seven months, and he was so overjoyed at getting it,
at hearing news of the world and of his long-time home
at Point Barrow, that he wanted to give me everything
I tried to buy, and it was only when I made him under-
stand that I would buy what I wanted at Herschel Island
if he would not sell it to me, that he yielded.
Crowded beyond all comfort as the place was, it re-
joiced me that the people were here, for they were,
mostly, of the roving, inland Eskimo bands of the Turner,
the Barter, the Hula-Hula and the Canning rivers, that
are very hard to visit and that we should otherwise not
have seen at all — as we did not see any of the Colville,
Kupowra or Sawanukto people. The north coast 'n the
main, affords no winter subsistence comparable w i that
of the west coast; the ice commonly holds fast too far
off shore for sealing; and the inhabitants resort to the
mountainous inland country still frequented by herds of
caribou.
When I had vainly waited a long time to see if the
relay cooking and eating wonld come to a natural term,
Mr. Gordon advised me to "pitch right in and talk,"
and with George as the best interpreter available I s^oke
to them; his English being more ample along reli'^ous
lines owing to his constant attendance at chnrrl^ than
one would gather from its general meagrenesF. and, as
I had already discovered, his knowledge and understand-
ing of the fundamentals of Christianity, fairly good. So
I spoke as simply and as cheerfully as I could of the
li
S12
A WINTER CIRCUIT
Ml
10 s I
Besnrreotion, this being still Easter week; of the meaning
of the cross and the empty tomb. They stopped their
cooking and eating and washing dishes and listened with
the keenest attention, and when I was done some of
them asked questions that set me going over the whole
ground again, so that I suppose I was talking to them for
nearly two hours.
Amongst the motley throng in ragged, greasy furs
were one or two hard-faced young women whose tawdry
velvet cloaks and stained silk shirtwaists spoke of the
proximity of white men with money to waste, and I re-
flected that the degradation of woman bears the same
unmistpkable marks on the Arctic coast as on Broadway,
and that perhaps whaling expeditions are not the only
ones that tend to the demoralization of the Eskimos.
Their soiled incongruous finery was much more mdeoent
than the naked breasts of the teeming mothers.
When our service was done, and George and I had
sung a hymn from the Point Barrow book, in which many
tried their best to join, the cooking and eatmg and wash-
ing dishes were resumed and it was long after midnight
when the company settled down to rest, the whole floor
of store and dwelling being covered with sleeping forms,
so that when I had occasion of some dog disturbance to
arise in the night, it was with the utmost difficulty that 1
was able to make my way to the outer door.
Even in Franklin's day the neighbourhood of Demarc^
tion Point was much resorted to by the Eskimos, and
since the establishment of the trading-post will undoubt-
edly stimulate resort and in all probability a village will
be built, this would be a favourable spot for a mission if
it were not for the complication which the mternational
boundary and the proximity to Herschel Island intro-
duce Any work set on foot here by the Bishop of Alaska
would inevitably aid the trader at this place at the ex-
pense of the Hudson's Bay Company at the other, already
hard pressed by competition east and west; that is to say,
by drawing people hither would put more business m the
FLAXMAN AND IIERSCIIEL ISLANDS 313
hands of the San Francisco furrierg. More cogently,
though the influence upon commerce cannot wisely be
ignored, it would inevitably impair the work of the
Herachel Island mission from the same cause. The
most feasible arrangement would be to set up at
this spot a branch of the Herschel Island mission,
although even that would doubtless arouse com-
mercial jealousy and ill-will. The intrusion into the
missionary jurisdiction of Alaska would, I am sure,
be not only allowed but welcomed by Bishop Howe,'
since some bands of Alaskan natives wonld be served
that there is no present possibility of reaching from
the Alaskan side. Having little patience with such
artificial restraints as international boundaries in mat-
ters of this sort, I wonld advocate a moderate subsidy
from the American Board of Missions to the Bishop of
the Yukon territory, to cover the cost of maintenance of
the branch. That bishop could visit Demarcation Point
on the journey that he is compelled to make to Herschel
Island, while it would bo quite impossible for the Bishop
of Alaska to visit it at all. Then a second man at
Herschel Island, with a roving commission, could follow
the migrations of the inland folk, with a sub-base at this
place. I call to mind the noble disregard of political
boundaries with which the missionaries of the Church of
England evangelized the Yukon country long ago. What
have political boundaries to do with the spread of Chris-
tianity f
We did not leave until 10 the next morning, and in an
hour we passed within sight of the monument erected by
the international survey a few years ago, and into British
territory. In passing the boundary we passed the mouth
of a river— one of many small streams that debouch upon
this coast— which "being the most westerly river in the
British dominions on this coast, I named it the 'Clarence'
in honour of His Royal Highness the Lord High Ad-
miral," writes Franklin. The duke of Clarence four
years later became king of England as William IV.
tu
A •WINTER CIBCriT
t !
Another hour or bo brought n* to a tiny native wttle-
ment named Ky-ny«r-o-vik, and here we stopped for
Innoh. Fonr hours more brought as to Laughing Joe'a
home, with many people in one igloo (including two more
ailk-and-velvet-clad, oigarette-Bmoking girlB),and here we
lay for the night. It "as disconcerting to find our mam-
fest-proBtitnte prl», ^ ho were danghtem of the house, in
no way regarded askaace by the others, to find them jom-
Ing fervently in the devotions; but the introduction of
reUgion into the life, '.he securing of the response in con-
duct as well as the response in emotion, has always been
the difficult slow task of the missionary. It is but a very
few years ago that the first convert was baptized on this
coast. The whalers, grafting the sordidness of gain upon
the native looseness of sexual life, made prostitutes long
before the missionaries made Christians.
Since we left Barter Island the weather had been much
more pleasant, the wind either behind us or in the south.
The days were now so long that there was no need to
hurry; the surface was without loose snow and fairly
smooth, and there began to be some pleasure in travel
after the pain and discomfort of the eariier stages.
Moreover to have a comfortable place to stay at night is
in itself an immense gain. , ,,. , .
But on the last day of our eastern travel, the long day
that took us from Laughing Joe's to Herschel Island,
the wind had swung back into its old quarter again,
though rather more dead ahead than usual, with the ther-
mometer at 40° below zero when we started. The mini-
mum of the night had been 51 ° below, which is ' ' some cold
for the fifth of April" as Walter said. I recaUed that
I had read almost with incredulity in Bartlett's book
that on his journey down the Siberian coast, when he had
left Wrangell Island to seek rescue for the Karluh sur-
vivors, he had experienced a temperature of —65 at
the same time of year; but since it is known that the
Asiatic coast is a good deal colder than the American,
it may even have b<)en so, though the temperature must
FLAXMAN AND HEBSCHEL ISLANDS 816
have been a min' nm reading at aight, sinoe the snn b*-
gini to have a good deal of power in tbeae latitndei in
April. At noon, in the direct tun, the thermometer stood
*' ~^*°' ^^"'^ meung that hii rays raised the tempera,
tore 36° above the night minimum; but it was ttill bit-
terly cold since the wind was inevasible. For the first
time during the whole winter we did not stop to eat; we
had neither bite nor sup from morning till right; I had
on my complete furs with my drill parkee over the heavy
fur artigi and a scarf wrapped again and again round
my face, yet I froze the bridge of my nose and the space
tween my eyes.
At length we crossed from the mainland to the island,
crossed a sandspit and were on the homestretch; but it
was a wretchedly tedious home stretch, for the island is
a long one and the town near its eastern extremity. Mile
after mile, mile after mile, we passed along the bluffs of
the mountainous island, until I thought in the prolonged
misery of that wind that the town was a myth.
B> about four o'clock, our time, but six o'clock by the
time kept at the place, on the 4th April we reached the
Eskimo village, and mission station, and Northwest
Mounted Police post, at Herachel Island, and were most
kindly welcomed by the Rev. Mr. Fry and his wife, who
had been expecting us for some time. So safely ended,
thank God, the longest and most cheerless stretch of our
winter journey. In the prospective itinerary that I had
drawn up before leaving Fort Yukon, I had set the 5th
AprU as the earliest, and the 15th as the latest, date for
arriving here, so we were we:i within our schedule and
might congratulate ourselves on having made a very good
journey from Point Barrow.
Noni: The name of the Hula-Hula river, which 1 mentioned near Nad
Arey ■ place, wae not elucidated becauae for long I could Ind no eznlana-
Hon of it. I have now learned that it wae named from a great danc£ held
sf'f.kTrT'"?'; '"'"?«' ky "O"" «'lo" «'om HouoIiSu wintering at
Herechel laland, to which women were gathered from all around itV L-.
to have been a ootoiioua occaaion of dninkemieia and profllgtcj. ^^
IX
HEBSCHEL ISLAND AND THE JOURNEY TO
FORT yUKON
I .
1
IX
HEBSCHEL ISLAND AND THE JOURNEY TO
FGHT YUKON
These is, I think, no question that the Herschel for
whom Sir John Franklin named this island was Sir John
Frederick William of that name, the scarcely less famous
son of the famous astronomer-royal to George III.
Until I looked up the dates and facts of these two lives
I had supposed it was the father who was thus distin-
guished, but the elder Herschel died in 1822 and it is
Franklin's habit to say "the late" when he confers a
posthumous honour. I am sure if Franklin had thought
of the trouble and vexation that would attend the efforts
of a humble tracer of his footsteps, nearly a century later,
to attribute his compliments to their rightful recipients,
he would have been more precise. I am convinced that
the younger Herschel is intended because the name of his
close friend and associate, Charles Babbage, of calculat-
ing machine fame, is given to a river a little farther to
the east. These two young men, with a third, George
Peacock, afterwards Dean of Ely, made a compact while
undergraduates at Cambridge, to strive for the advance-
ment of mathematical science, and to "do their best to
leave the world wiser than they found it." They lived
to execute it in notable degree, all three making very
valuable contributions to the science of numbers. Sir
Jchn Herschel was a scientist of the noblest and most
attractive type. Not only was he one of the greatest
astronomers (for he and his father together mapped the
whole heavens) and a distinguished chemist — but he was
a man of letters as well, who would have been, like Dr.
Johnson, "respected for his literature" had he possessed
no other claims to respect. He amused the leisure of his
S19
325 A WINTER CIRCUIT
^nl^^rhriadXlish translations fron. SchiUe.
u= ,»i ailvpr that have not been aiteciea uj "» ., ,
images respectively: so that every f , „ j^^j
1! about his "negatives" IS ^""^-f . «^;2in /ave t^^
It is matter of g-tific« ^ ^^ ^^^S dfaughts-
remain to speak oj^^^t.^^^he rd tTscr^be^ where
last jnmping-oft place as l nea j^ ^jj„
no law existed and no writs ran a Pf/X °, j^^itiuty
reject all restraint -f^^P^^^f J^^if o/sTZdred
for conduct; when a ^^''f j;/^ ^eoured the coasts
„,en of their crews -'"^ered h r ^and ^^o^^^^ ^^
for Eskimo women. I "^^ ?°*i"J,t Sa^st which this
is justified. j-„„,o„t nnd in 1906 the
imnndsen is always very di^^^^^*' ^"^ '^^ ^,, the
JOUBNET TO FORT YUKON 32X
men" between the lines when it is not openly expressed.
"I prefer not to mention the many and queer tales I
heard during my sojourn here," he says. He commiser-
ates with Archdeacon Whittaker, who was then in resi-
dence with his wife and children, upon his difficult task.
In April, 1918, it had a police post, a mission and a
store, with their meagre staffs, and I think no more than
two or three other white residents, while the Eskimos
were much scattered at their trapping and hunting, so
that only two score or so were at home.
Two days before our arrival, Mr. Stefansson, who had
been lying sick here most of the winter, bad started
across country for our hospital at Fort Yukon, between
three and four hundred miles away, with several sleds
and teams, four natives, the only constable at the post
besides the inspector, and the Rev. Mr. Fry; having sent
an express across to our physician. Dr. Burke, asking him
to meet him at the Rampart House, following a previous
one that asked the doctor to come on here. Mr. Fry,
finding that he was only in the way with so many at-
tendants, begged off at the end of the first day and was
just returned. I had mad< -.p my mind that I would do
my utmost to persuade Mr. Stefansson to that course,
and had thought to take him over with us ! It seems to
have been typhoid fever from which he had suffered,
Constable Lamont dying of the samj complaint early in
the new year, and the convalescence from typhoid fever
IS often attended by complications and tedious digestive
derangements. Now, how came that disease to Herschel
Island, selecting just two cases as it had done the previ-
ous September at Fort Yukon?
We lay four days at Herschel Island, four days of
sweet rest and refreshment, and of high appreciation of
a white woman's hospitable housekeeping. There is no
stint, there is almost no limit, in Arctic hospitality; go
amongst whom one will, all that they have is yours. But
there is a charm about the amenities of civilized and
cultivated domestic life that is the richer for its rarity in
ill
322 A WINTEK CIRCUIT
these parts. And there is deep satisfaction in sojourn-
ing with those whose hearts are wholly congruous with
one's own in aims and purposes. We called on the police
inspector and the Hudson's Bay Company's agent, and I
tried to buy some little distinctive Hudson's Bay wares,
as the gay, tightly woven wooUen scarves so much prized
by the Yukon Indians, for gifts when I was returned.
But, whether owing to the war or not I cannot say, there
was lack of all such stuff; there was nothing of the
admirable woollen weaves for which the company is
noted The Hudson's Bay method of business is primi-
tive beyond what would be tolerated anywhe- in Alaska.
The shop or store is wholly unwarmed-for fear of fire;
such canned goods as would spoil by freezing are kept
in the dwelling and there is no stove or any means ot
heating the store. This, I was informed, is the^ custom
at every Hudson's Bay post. No trader who had a com-
petitor could afford to treat his customers m such a way.
It was not particularly cold weather while we were at
Hersohel Island; indeed, the first touch of sprirg was in
the air; but the inside of the store was like a trozen vault.
Yet whatever the temperature, he who would trade at the
store must stand and make his purchases unwarmed
Later, when we were buying supplies for our further
journey, everything was put up in just such Paper bags
as one would find in a shop "outside," instead of in the
cotton sacks that are universal throughout Alaska. Now,
naner bags are simply impossible receptacles for sugar
and rice and such things in a sled. The prices were as
high in proportion as the Alaskan prioes-m either case
"all that the trade will stand"; and one missed the
little open-handed mitigations of the extravagant cost
of everything to which one is accustomed in Alaska, i
wondered what the Eskimos did for dishcloths; the cot-
ton sacks of the interior trader being the steady resource
of the Indians for that purpose,-and of most white
men too. . . * „ „4.
The principal commodity of these parts, just as at
JOURNEY TO FOBT TUKON 323
Point Barrow, is furs, and of tliem lynx and white fox
the chief, with the latter largely preponderating. It
seems that it is only when the lynx is disappearing from
the interior that it is found on the coast, and this was the
case just now. But the white fox is an Arctic coast ani-
mal, is, indeed, as I was told by trapper after trapper,
really an ice animal, just as the polar bear; and subsists
mainly by playing jackal to the polar bear's lion, follow-
ing in his tracks and cleaning up after his kill. The men
who made the largest catch of white foxes around Point
Barrow killed seals, left them lying on the ice, and set
their traps around.
The last reports from the fur market received at Point
Barrow quoted white foxes at thirty dollars and lynx at
twenty-five. Mr. Brower was paying twenty for foxes;
at Demarcation Point Mr. Gordon was paying fifteen, and
here at Herschel Island the Hudson's Bay agent was
paying twelve, and about the same for lynx— all of these
prices "in trade" of course, so that there was the large
profit on goods sold as well as the profit on the furs.
There is no more lucrative business than fur trading
upon a rising market, and when the market rises by leaps
and bounds as it has done for the last three years, it be-
comes an occupation that might commend itself even to
"Get-Bich-Quick" people like J. Eufus Wallingford.
Walter was using a lynx robe sewn together as a sleeping-
bag, holding it warmer than any caribou or reindeer bag
could be, as I daresty it was, and at any rate it saved the
buying of another bag. Now the fifteen good skins of
which that bag was made were bought in 1915 or 1916
at five or six dollars a skin, and, with the tanning of the
skins, the blanket lining and the making, the robe cost me
between ninety and a hundred dollars, which was the
standard price in the interior for any good, large, warm,
robe. Had I bought the skins one year before I did, I
could have had them at $3.50 apiece, and the robe would
have cost no more than $55 or $60. But when I am writ-
ing, the price of lynx skins has risen so enormously that
8M
A WINTER CIRCUIT
l t
the BtowB here at Fort Yukon are actually paying forty
dollars apiece for them, so that if I were to have such a
robe made now the skins alone would cost six hundred
dollars I The robe has been in use on the trail for three
winters, but it is not much the worse for it, and I have a
feeling of resentment thr '. the vagaries of fashion should
place me in the position of using such preposterously
expensive bedding. It almost goes without saying that
this startling increase in price has proceeded side by
side with a steady dwindling in the number of skins taken,
or else every native community would be rolling in
wealth, and now that the high-water mark of extravr.-
ganoe has been reached, there are no more skins at all.
Instead of the six or seven thousand skins that would
be bought by the traders at Fort Yukon in an ordinary
year, this year they have bought less than three hun-
dred • The same thing is true of the white fox, reports
from the coast at this time (April, 1919) indicating that
there has been virtually no catch at aU the past winter.
Like all wild creatures, the lynx and the fox come and
go, gradually increasing and then suddenly diminishing
almost to disappearance, but I am of opinion that the in-
tensive trapping stimulated by the unheard-of prices of
the last two seasons has swept the country so clean that it
is doubtful if enough remain for propagation.
When it is remembered that the Hudson's Bay post
at Herschel Island is flanked on the west at Demarcation
Point and again on the east at Shingle Point by a sta-
tion of a San Francisco fur house, and that independent
fur buyers from the interior make visits every winter to
the coast, it will be seen that the Great Company's
monopoly is altogether of the past, and it may be ex-
pected Ihat it will be compelled to meet competition m
prices, and perhaps adopt a more accommodating atti-
tude towards its customers ; the "take it or leave it" days
•It mutt be rememlxTed tiat the fun from many thoujand iquar.
mile. ftSd tteir way to Fort Yukoat it 1. the chie! fur market of interior
Wr^
JOURNEY TO FORT TUKON 326
are done. I hop , on the one hand, that the pressure wiU
not bf< 80 great as to tempt it to nndennine the mainstay
of it^^ ;)re8ent strength, its reputation for handling noth-
ing but "good goods," and on the other, that it may be
great enough to cause it to install stoves in its stores,
and perhaps even lay in a stock of cotton bags. From
the agent, Mr. Harding, we had every kindness and con-
sideration, and I found him the proud possessor of the
first edition of Sir Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages
Through the Continent of North America— & very valu-
able book nowadays— in which the famous journey to the
mouth of the great river that bears his name is de-
scribed. My own edition was a wretched cheap reprint,
and I enjoyed re-reading the book, which he kindly lent
me, in the dignity of the original quarto. Cheap re-
prints with their poor type and their absence of plates
and maps are not the same thing as the original edition.
Anothe' book that I found here, and read through with
the greatest interest, was David Hanbury's Sport and
Travel in the Northland of Canada, a very valuable ac-
count of adventurous travel through the Barren Lands to
the Coronation Gulf. Cowie's The Company of Adven-
turers (another Hudson's Bay book), I also found here
and devoured; and was particularly glad to have lit upon
Hanbury.
It was pleasant to me to find both the Hudson's Bay
agent, and the missionary, the Rev. Mr. Fry, intelligently
interested in the geography and exploration of the conn-
try, for it is surprising how little such interest is mani-
fested all around this coast. The walls of the mission
house were spread with the excellent Arctic charts of the
British Admiralty, issued after the last of the Franklin
search expedition of the fifties, which there has been very
little occasion to add to or alter, save for Amundsen's
mapping of the east coast of Victoria Island, until this
present time; and I found Mr. Stefansson's three new
islands of the Parry archipelago carefully inserted in
their places. Naturally, Mr. Stefansson's presence had
326
A WINTER CIRCUIT
gtimulated enquiry, but Mr. Fry brought those charts
with him when he came to Herschel Island. I wish that
every missionary would show as much interest in the
country to which he is sent; there is valuable work yet
to be done in many lines in many quarters of the globe
that a properly equipped missionary may very well do
without any interference with his main occupation, in-
deed with distinct furtherance thereof: and I am jealous
for the tradition of lO'ssionary contribution to the
world's knowledge of the world. In some respects a mis-
sionary of general education is better fitted for such work
than a scientific specialist who is a)', at sea outside his
specialty. , , ^ , , ■,
On the Sunday that we spent at Herschel Island I was
given the opportunity of speaking twice to the natives,
through a fairly good interpreter, and of addressing the
whites who assembled in the afternoon. I was glad to
see that the whole native t.ivioe was in the vernacular
tongue, mainly the work of Archdeacon Whittaker, who
was here for a number of years, who also translated
many selections of Scripture, and of noticijg the hearty
and intelligent participation of the Eskimos therein.
Man after man stood up and read aloud from the Scrip-
ture selections. At the white service the one prisoner
at the police station, the Russian Jew to whose enormi-
ties I have already referred, was present by special per-
mission, and at its conclusion he came forward and unctu-
ously thanked me. I know not when I have been more
repulsively impressed.
But what engaged my keenest interest at Herschel
Island was Mr. Fry's account of the activities of the two
men far to the eastward, Messrs. Hester and Gerling,
who have been engaged for some years past in the
evangelization of the "Copper Eskimos" the so-called
"Blond Eskimos" of the sensational newspapers a few
years ago, ranging about the Dolphin and Union Straits
and Coronation Gulf. Here are two missionaries that
I can find it in my heart to envy. Set down amongst
JOURNEY TO FOET YUKON 327
an entirely primitive people, only now makinsr acquaint-
ance with the white men, with the task and the oppor-
tunity of at once enlightening and protecting them, what
an immensely important position they fill, what con-
sequences to the future of these folk hang upon the
execution of their di'ticsl And who that heard the
vile stories of the doings of this special malefactor
here present, not to mention any others, amongst
these very people, can question the imperative need of
sending men of Christian character and courage to them!
A fugitive from justice, with a reward offered for his
apprehension by the Hussian authorities, while yet there
were Russian authorities, for shooting a Cossack coast
guard in some liquor-smuggling affray, he was brought to
book here in a very mild way because he had defrauded
the Canadian revenue by a false declaration; but for his
crimes against the natives was like to go soot-free owing
to the difficulty of procuring testimony from so far off.
I began to have a great longing to go on to the east-
ward and visit Messrs. Hester and Geriing and see for
myself the work they are doing and the people amongst
whom they are doing it; and in the perverse way of one
who wants to do what he knows must not be done, I dwelt
upon the admirable sledding from this time forward even
well into the month of June that the Arctic coast afforded.
It would be but another stretch of five or six hundred
miles and the pleasant season of travel yet to come.
There was a Hudson's Bay post in the Bailie Islands
off Cape Bathurst and all the way certainly more human
habitation than we had from Point Barrow to Plaxman
Island. My money was all gone, but that did not matter.
The Hudson's Bay would give me credit for anything
I wanted. One of the advantages of long residence and
wide acquaintance in the north is that one can travel all
the winter without money if necessary. Walter would
go with me, I knew, if I put it up to him— although I had
already divined that he had new and important interests
at Fort Yukon and was eager to return— and we could
328
A WINTER CIRCUIT
II
m
:»*
'{•'
get a native gaide from place to place. And the getting
back!— well, of course, there was the getting back. It
would be impoRiible to get back over the snow, we were
pushing that to the limit already. It would bo along in
the summer at the earliest, and perhaps not till the nest
winter ; but we would get back sooner or later, please (Jod.
I have often wished that I had a spice of recklessness
in my composition and were not of so ingrained and
docile a conscientionsness ; if I had I think I should have
(fono on to see Messrs. Hester and Qcrling. Once before
I had turned back when the Arctic coast lay temptingly
before me, twelve years ago at Kotzebue Sound : but then
I had reasonable expectation of another opportunity, of
which expectation this present journey was the fulfil-
ment: this time I knew that in all probability there would
never be another chance.
But— (and, as Abraham Cowley says, "but" is "the
rust that spoils the good metal it grows upon") a hos-
pital that is always in need of funds— and where is the
hospital that is not!— is a great clog upon one's freedom
of movement. I was weary with more than five months'
travel, yet I think I would have given my ears to have been
free to go on to the Copper EsEmos and the men whose
work for them I admire so greatly. Well, there was
naught for it save the same author's remedy in the same
essay — ^which I like to read over occasionally. "If a man
cannot attain unto the length of his wishes, he has his
remedy in cutting them shorter," and I turned from that
tempting goal in the east and addressed myself to the
preparations for the journey to the south.
Before leaving Fort Yukon I had arranged with the
trader at the Rampart House to send across a native as
a guide for us from Herschel Island to the Porcupine.
He was to be here on the 5th and was to await ns until
the 15th. But he was not come : as I learned later the
man who had undertaken the job fell sick, and another
conld not then be procured.
There were two routes that we might follow: one by
JOriBNEY TO POBT TUKON S3B
tt» Old Crow river and the Rampart Uoue-by whioh
Mr. 8tefan.ioii'i party had jugt gone: the other by the
Herechel Island or Firth river and the Colleen, of which
the latter would bring u8 to the Porcupine river neariy
an hundred mile, below the Rampart House. I had no
business at the Rampart House, especially as 1 learned
that there was neither grub nor dog-fced there, and I
deoided we would attempt the other.
Our plan, therefore, was to go up the Herschel Island
river to its head, where we were well assured we should
find a little band of Eskimos j procure one of them to
conduct us over the divide to the headwaters of the Col-
loen, pursue that stream to its confluence with the Porcu-
pine, and then that river to its confluence with the Yukon
at which point Fort Yukon is situated. "Simple as fall-
ing off a log": as one of our Herschel Island advisers
remarked. But falling off a log may be painful too.
Several seals purchased to cut up for dog-feed, and a
supply of rolled oats and blubber to cook together for
them when the fresh meat was done, our grub box re-
plenished, and all preparations made, we were fortunate
enough to find an old Eskimo who went by the name of
BiUy Bump from a wen on his forehead, and his daugh
ter, who were returning to the head of the Herschel
Island river. We carried a great many letters and tele-
grams to despatch from Fort Yukon, for this place has
only two regular mails in ♦he year, one in the winter by
police patrol from Dawson, and one in the summer by the
supply ship; and ve had a number of commissions to
execute upon the Yukon.
We started out on Wedi.-'sday, the 10th April, quite a
little company, Walter and I and Billy Bump and his
daughter, George returning to Point Barrow and one of
Mr. Stefansson's men going with George as far as Barter
Island; and our path lay together for about six miles,
until it came time for us to strike south at the west end
of the island.
It gave me pleasure to be able to send a letter to Mr.
I
'*l
it J
SM
A WINTER CIRCUIT
Brower, telling him that Ooorge had been entirely latU-
factory, and to realize that, if he haateued, ho wonld yet,
be back in time for the whaling and to would have mieaed
nothing by accompanying us. Both Walter and I had
grown attached to him; he wag ol'.vayi cheerful, always
willing, always helpful. Wc> bade him a cordial good-bye,
and I told him that when next he had to build snow-
houses I hoped he would have his wife along to help him ;
to which bo replied with a twiiiklo, "I hope so too." We
gavo him everything of our equipment that we could
spare, and I saw to it that he was amply provided for
his return.
A calm, bright, warm day attended our departure for
the South: as though the Arctic coast were taking the
lest opportunity of informing us that its weather could
be pleasant. The previous night's minimum temperature
had been —5°; today's maximum was 20°. There was a
long flat to cross before we reached the month of the river
and our course was slow, for the old man's sled was
heavily loaded and he was continually stopping to smoke
and rest, but almost as soou as i e came to the hollow
scooped out in the sand which marked the river's bed and
had dropped into it and pursued it a turn or two, we came
to willows, the first growth of any kind that we had seen
for four months.
This river, known locally as the Herschel Island river,
and on the map^" as the Firth river (from an old Hud-
son's Bay trader still in charge at Fort Macpherson),
was named by Franklin the Mountain Indian river, be-
cause it was by this river, as the Eskimos told him, that
the Indians came down to the coast from the interior to
trade. Franklin did not see any of these Indians, though
his retreat to the Mackenzie mouth was hastened by Es-
kimo rumours of their approach, but the Eskimos de-
scribed them as "tall, stout men, clothed in deerskinsf,
speaking a language very dissimilar to their own."
Now these Indians and their intercourse with the Es-
kimos have great interest for me because they are, so to
i:t
JOURNEY TO FORT YUKON
331
spepk, my own people; the Gens de large, or, as it is
'ijaiiru tuday, Chandalars; and I have found, or think I
iiave found, lingering traditions amongst them of this
lery visit ol Franklin. They are still, many of them,
"tfc'V stout men" notably superior in stature and
physique to the Yukon river people and they roam the
country north of the Yukon in small bands following the
caribou, rarely gathered in any fixed habitations, though
of late they build log houses and have two or three small
villages. The most interesting and puzzling thing about
this, their earliest appearance in history, is that they
were provided with iron implements and firearms which
did not come from Hudson's Bay posts. Franklin ex-
amined knives, etc., which the Eskimos had obtained from
them, and found them not of English manufacture and
very different from the articles brought into the country
by the English. He concludes that they came from the
Russian settlements, and, indeed, there is nowhere else
that they could have come from. Yet at that time the
only Bussian establishment north of the Alaska peninsula
and the Aleutian Islands was at Nushagak on Bristol
Bay, and I think a glance at the map will make it seem
much more probable that these articles camo by barter
from the Siberian coast than that they crossed the im-
mense stretches of inland country from the southern to
the northern shores of Alaska.
Yet I am puzzled to trace the trade route by which
such articles came into the hands of the Oens de large at
that early date. Had the Indians received them from the
Eskimos, it would be much more easily explicable, and I
am even disposed to think that such was the case : that
bands of this or another Indian tribe visiting the coast
near the mouth of the Colville, or at Kotzebue Sound,
traded with the western Eskimos for these European
manufactures and afterwards traded them to the Eskimos
further to the east. I think it most probable that by some
successive intermediations, these goods came from Kotze-
bue Sound, by the immemorial trade route therefrom.
332
A WINTER CIRCUIT
I:'
,:!■'
iM
Frequent opportunities of questioning the oldest
Indians of the middle Yukon have satisfied me that
prior to the establishment of the Hudson's Bay post
at Fort Yukon, firearms, thovgh not unknown, were
exceedingly rare, but that iron implements such as ixes
and knives were already in fairly general use, and that
they came from two main directions, from the east, in
trade with those who procured them at the Canadian
posts : and from the south in trade with those who pro-
cured them from the Chilkat Indians of the Pacific coast
around the Lynn canal. They also speak of goods that
came in smaller quantity from the west; and Murray at
Fort Yukon in 1847 is burdened with the constant thought
of the close presence of the Russians, though they were
not within 500 miles of him at Nulato, or within 800 on
the southeastern coast. "Guns and beads, beads and
guns, is all the cry in our country," he writes, and ''the
Indians all prefer our guns to those of the Russians."
It is amusing to note, in connection with Murray's
conviction of the proximity of the Russians to Fort
Yukon, that Kotzebue in 1815 is equally convinced of the
proximity of the English to the western coast: "They
possess colonies in the interior of the country at a very
short distance from the newly-discovered sound" (i.e.,
Kotzebue Sound), he writes at a time when the nearest
English posts were on the Mackenzie river. The mutual
commercial dread of these rival trading peoples is not
much elevated above the mutual dread of Indians and
Eskimos; it credited almost any native fable. Muiray
believed that the Russians were bringing a cannon against
him, at a time when the latter conld have no knowledge of
the existence of his post: and Murray was an unusually
intelligent trader, as his very valuable Journal of the
Yukon • proves. I wish that the subsequent diaries of
traders at this post, until its abandonment in 1869, might
be published.
The Gens de large, or Mountain river Indians, or
• FnblicatioM of tie Canidiui AfcUtm No. 4, Ottawa, 1910.
JOURNEY TO FOET YUKON 333
Cariboo Indians, or Cariboo Mountain Indians, as they
are variously termed by the early writers, stUl maintain
trade relations with the Eskimos, but, instead of proceed-
ing to the coast, nowadays they await the Eskimos at a
great lake m the Chandalar country at which the trading
takes place; and polar bear and white lox skins until
recently reached the Fort Yukon traders by this means
With the Mountain Indian river cutting through the
Buokland mountains we leave Sir John Franklin, and I
am not wUlmg to leave him without again expressing my
admiration of his character and his achievements. A
^eat gentleman as well as a great explorer, he carried
his standards of conduct with him unchanged wherever
he went. He left no native mistresses, no half-breed
children behind him; no smart of high-handed oppres-
sion, or resentment of trickery or fraud. He was just
gentle and patient; the knight "sans peur et sans re^
proche" of Arctic exploration. Says John Richardson,
Having served under Captain Franklin for nearly seven
years in two successive voyages of discovery, I trust I
may be allowed to say that however high his brother
officers may rate his courage and talents either in the
ordinary line of his professional duty, or in the field of
(hscovery, the hold he acquires upon the affections of
those under his command, by a continued series of the
most conciliating attentions to their feelings, and uni-
form and unremitting regard to their best interests, is
not less conspicuous. Gratitude and attachment to our
late commanding officer, will animate our breasts to the
latest period of our lives." There are few in the his-
tory of exploration who have accomplished so much;
fewer still, who have accomplished so much so gently.
He measured no heads, I think, and I am sure he brought
back no boiled skulls: he made no contribution to a
knowledge of Eskimo psychology— indeed, it was in those
happy, pre-psychological days when, as Bret Harte says,
"No effort of will could beat four of a kind; When the
thing that yon held in your hand, pards. Was worth more
334
A WINTER CIRCUIT
'H
,t
:li
hi
than the thing in your mind." Maps were his quest and
maps he brought back. Taking him all in all, there have
been few Arctic explorers jince worthy to unloose the
latchet of bis shoe, and it is mere evidence of littleness
to seek to belittle him, as some have done.
Billy Bump and his daughter stopped early to tamp,
but we went on for an hour or so further and pitched our
tent amongst some willows. The next day was a really
warm day. Parkees and mitts and sweaters and fur
boots were cast off, and we went bare-handed most of
the day. While yet our tent was standing, the laborious
old man and his daughter passed us, having made an
early start that more than compensated for their early
stop. The river bed was now narrowly hemmed in by
rocks, a sort of shattering shale which weathers down
upon the icfl and interferes with the passage of the sleds,
and about eleven in the morning we saw our first spruce,
a dwarf tree, little more than a shrub, crowning one of
the points of rock, but an unmistakable spruce; and
presently there were more. It was a joy to see even
such stunted growth, and we hailed these most northerly
outposts of the vast spruce forests of the interior. When
we stopped to eat at noon a camp robber (Canada jay)
appeared, and then his mate, and our hearts were glad of
them and we fed them full. That noon stop will always
linger in my memory. While we ate, and fed the birds, a
mass of dazzling white cloud, such as we had not seen all
the winter, veritable cummer cloud, gathered itself in the
blue sky, and slowly divided and draped itself into a most
graceful and almost perfect Prinee-of-Wales feathers,
and for awhilo hung thus over the tree-crowned rocky
bluff; one of the most singular and beautiful sights I
have ever seen in the sky.
Then we saw crows, a hawk, some snowbirds, tracks of
ptarmigan, and then pussy willowy i successive delight-
ful indications that we were returning to the land of life
after the blank sterility of the winter coast. By night
when we had made perhaps twenty-five miles on the river
1 ;
1
■■t il
'jftil
1
r
JOURNEY TO FOBT YUKON 335
bed, sometimes in loose snow but more often beside ice
that had sunk and collapsed, with a void below, as the
«nlw!. '"nter had staunched the flow of the stream,
so that there was difficulty in creeping alon,- the edge tha
remained, we were amongst timber, and found plenty of
dry wood for the httle tin can stove with which we had
provided ourselves. The river began to assume a roman-
tic character, jagged rock rising in lofty bluffs, dotted
here and there with graceful trees.
*?u'".fii?''"'I'*^ '^'*'' "■* ^"'■^'«=« culminated next day
at the 'Blow Hole." a place of which we had been told on
the coast All the morning we were on glare ice, swept
and polished by the wind, and growing more and more
uneven ; heaped up into mounds the sides of which gave
no footing to man or beast. The Blow Hole is a wild
gorge with precipitous rocks rising more than a thou-
sand feet that shatter down in a way that is not only
a arming but dangerous. There is a deep pool immedi-
ately below a sharp drop in the river bed, and the ice
smooth as glass, was all caved in and smashed up, and
a really hazardous passage had to be painfully made
around the narrow, uneven edge and then the sleds
noisted up the terraced ice.
Here again Billy Bump and his daughter overtook us:
although we travelled much faster than they, we never
shook them off, and Walter said, "We've got to hand it
to that old chap for a steady goer." Had it been a
straightaway course we should have left them long be-
fore, but we were really mountain climbing at times as
well as travelling and our progress was slow, and while
the old man and his girl had five dogs to attend to at
night, we had thirteen.
We had now traced the river back through the first
range of the coast mountains, the Buckland mountains
ot Franklin. It is, I think, no inconsiderable tribute
to the professor of geology at Oxford that Beechey and
franklin should independently have named natural fea-
tures after him, the one, the river that flows into Esch-
336
A WINTEB CIRCUIT
M?
I ■
loholtz Bay of Kotzebae Sound, the other this monntain
range. Beechey waa indeed indebted to him f( r the de-
scription of the fossil bones of extinct elephants which he
procured from Kotzebue's famous ice cliffs, with plates of
which he disfigures his book. Anyone would have taken
his word for his bones, and there would have been room
for the reproduction of more of Smythe's spirited
sketches ; though it must of course be remembered that
at that day evidence of the previous existence of a non-
Arctic fauna in the Arctic regions aroused great interest
and even excitement in the scientific world.
Dr. William Buckland was a man of varied attain-
ments and of eminence along several lines. I suppose it
is impossible today that a man should be at once Dean
of Westminster and professor of geology at Oxford as
Buckland was, or Dean of Ely and professor of astron-
omy at Cambridge as Peacock was, but I do not know
that science is the better off, now that it has scarcely a
bowing acquaintance with letters. To put knowledge into
water-tight compartments is to make stagnant pools of it ;
hence the joy to cultivated minds of a man like Henri
Fabre, who lets his letters ripple into his science, mak-
ing it sweet and palatable thereby, so that all at once
entomology becomes surprisingly attractive: — which is
a very different thing from desperate but ever futile at-
tempts at the "popularization" of science.
Having passed the first mountain range we found the
river spreading itself out into more of a valley, with
banks instead of precipitous bluffs, as it issned from the
greater elevations of the main range. The glare ice pres-
ently gave place to hard snow and that to soft snow, and
before the day was done I was on snowshoes for the
first time in the whole winter journey save, 1 think, one
day on the Koyukuk. Our three pairs of snowshoes,
lashed un the top of the sled, had several times aroused
amusement on the coast, but we should never have got
home at all without them. Indeed it is my rule never to
make any winter journey, however short, without them.
JOURNEY TO FORT YUKON
337
One day spent wallowing through deep, new snow involves
greater labour than carrying snowshoes for the whole
winter. Of all "cxtra-corporaneous limbs" as Samuel
Butler calls them, the suowshoe is the most indispensable
in the Ar.tic.
I look back upon the few days when wo were ascending
the Herscliel Island river with an especial pleasure,
partly no doubt from the contrast their ease and com-
fort afford in the retrospect to the fatigues that were yet
to come; partly from the contrast which their scenery
afforded to the flatness aud emptiness of the great
Arctic littoral along the edge of which we had passed.
Not without a certain sober dignity of their own, not
without a certain appealing mystery of expanse and in-
definiteness, there was ncvertlieless a sameness, a tedium,
about these coastal plains, that engendered a straining
longing of the eye for some break, some arresting feature,
some variety. The Herschel Island river is a picturesque
mountain stream. Every bend brought a new combina-
tion of rocks and trees, some fresh shapes of pinnacles,
with bristling spruce springing from crannies and ledges.
I suppose that to the accustomed eye the middle of April
would disclose some sign of approaching spring on the
Arctic coast, but to us it showed a still dominant winter
that, save for the promise of the climbing sun, might be
perpetually dominant. The river already teemed with
signs of reviving nature.
The chief pleasure which those days on the little Arctio
river held for me, however, was the renewed, unrestricted
intercourse with my companion. \fe had never been
alone together since we left Point Barrow, and things
had happened in Walter's mind since then. It was not
merely that we resumed our readings with fresh ardour,
it was that an affectionate intimacy of many years' stand-
ing was deepened by confidences touching very closely
personal feelings and desires. He began by giving me
his little diary to read, and I went through it from the
first to the last. It gratified me to find that it was well
338
A WINTER CIRCTIT
"J
i'.'l
II'
written evon in tlie unavoidable haste of iti writing;
that it was free from grammatical errors; that it had a
simple directness and even at times vigour of expres-
sion. English was not his mother tongue; at sixteen
years of age ho knew very little of it; but he had long
since mastered its syntax and had a sufficient vocabulary.
Indeed, when I had sent him out to school and the com-
plaint was made that he knew no grammar I was able
to ask with confidence if what he spoke and wrote were
not entirely grammatical t That he could not recite rules
mattered very little, as I look at it, if ho never broke
them. Laws are for law-breakers : rules of grammar are
for the ungrammatical; Walter learned the language
grammatically from one who continually watched his
lips; and he never had faults in English to correct; al-
though he had come back to me sufSoiently provided
with current slang.
I wish I had that diary now, but I know that she of
whom it had much to say treasured it, and doubtless had
it with her on that fatal day some eight months later. I
had known that there was sentiment between them since
she had nursed him through his fever, but not that there
wap an engagement for marriage. This, and the resolve
to offer himself for the war, were the two chief confi-
dences which he gave me. Both of them broke sadly into
my plans and ambitions for him, but he assured me
that if he came safely through the war he would immedi-
ately resume his preparation for medicine, and I know
that they did not then contemplate an early marriage.
So I swallowed my disappointment and accepted the situ-
ation. Indeed, so far as the enlistment was concerned,
I was proud that without any urging he saw it as his
duty, and as soon as he saw it, resolved upon it. I was
proud, too, that he had won the heart of a cultivated
gentlewoman. The summer's cruise of visitation to the
Yukon missions ended, he would go outside to enter what-
ever branch of the army would receive him:— the avia-
tion corps by preference. Walter had long ago become
ing;
id a
irei-
teen
long
ary.
!om-
ablo
vere
iiles
roke
are
lage
his
;al-
ided
e of
had
r. I
lince
here
lolve
onfi-
into
me
ledi-
now
iage.
sitn-
■ned,
I his
was
ated
(the
rhat-
ivia-
some
1)
!,*
JOURNEY TO PORT TUKON 889
almost a ion to mo, and regarded mo nlmom ai a father—
the only father ho had over known— and I think the rela-
tion wai citabliibed as closely as it can exist without the
actual cement of blood, upon this stage of our journey.
The next day I was ahead of the dogs breaking trail
all the morning, and by noon we were at the tent of an
Eskimo trapper como down a day's journey from his
cabin above, to look at his trops. Wo stnyt-d and ate,
and while eating were again overtaken by that indcfati-
gable Billy Bump and his daughter. This new Kskimo
man, Titus, gave ns to understand thiit ho could take
us, in two days from his house, over the mountains to a
tributary of the Colleen or Sucker river, and we started
with him up to his place, hoping to reach it that night;
counting ourselves fortunate to have fallen in with him.
Three or four hours' more travel brought us to a long,
narrow lake, in process of overflow, the water invading
the snow and covering the ice everywhere. The dogs
needed some urging to take to it at first, but after a little
we went along mile after mile at a good clip, for nearly
ten miles, until we were almost at the home camp of
Billy Bump. Here, in deep, saturated snow, the teams
stalled. Walter, ahead, seated on his sled— for we had
neither of us taken the precaution to stop and put on our
waterboots— was able with the leverage of the tent polo
to get his team started again and to reach the bank, but
having no such implement to my hand I had to got off the
sled and push, and my feet were immediately wetted.
Billy Bump's wife was kind in removing my wet gear
and preparing my long-unused water boots, and we pres-
ently proceeded for another hour to Titus's cabin, hav-
ing been twelve hours on the trail that day.
Here, at Oo-iia-ke-vik, we lay over Sunday, glad of
the rest, and much interested in our situation and in our
company. Titus's home was a large house of split logs
built around growing trees which supported the roof,
the walls inclining towards the centre. We were almost
on the international boundary, the line passing through
340
A WINTER CIRCUIT
the lakes we crossed the day before, and were near the
headwaters and divide »t the Yukon and Arctic Ocean
streams, at an elevation of something between 1,000 and
1,500 feet, as I judged it. Standing outside the house,
Titus pointed out to us the heads of the Old Crow and
Colleen rivers, or rather, the mountains on the other
side of which these streams arise, and far to the west
showed us another mountain from which rises a branch
of the Skeenjik or Salmon, a tributary of the Porcupine
which joins that stream within fifty miles of Fort Yukon.
We felt that we were almost home again; a little prema-
turely.
The people were full of interest to me also. Here, as
I discovered with delight, were some of the Eskimos
wont to visit the Big Lake (Vun Gi-i't-ti) and trade with
Christian's people (Christian is chief of the Chandalars)
and here were actually some who had been baptized by
our Fort Yukon native clergyman, William Loola, upon
one of his visits to this rendezvous. I had no interpreter
and could not even attempt instruction, so Walter and
I said Morning and Evening Prayer in English, and we
all joined in some Eskimo hymns out of a Herschel Island
book we found here. Although Titus had never received
instruction at a mission, he had learned from others the
rudiments of reading his own tongue, and seemed fa-
miliar with the chief teachings of Christianity.
After much bargaining we succeeded in securing the
services of Titus as guide for the next two days, and
after still more in purchasing from an old woman, the
mother of his wife, a small supply of meat for dog-feed.
Then it appeared that the old man, her husband, also
had a little that he would sell, but wanted tobacco in
exchange, and when we were agreed as to quantity, was
not satisfied with the quality, but wanted the can of
special Hudson's Bay mixture which I had bought for
my own smoking. So it was a long time before we got
away on Monday morning, the 15th April, once more
three sleds and three teams in our party.
JOURNEY TO FORT YUKON 341
Onr way lay along the length of another lake, and then
across wide flats, still following the Herscherisland river.
An old trail of the early winter was very hard to find,
but worth finding, for it had bottom. At times we were
at fault, off the trail in deep snow, and then the progress
was laborious, with many upsets. The day was warm,
and in the afternoon even sultry, the sky overcast; and
our advance was slow.
At length we drew near to a cleft or saddle in the
mountains, which would lead us, Titus said, out of Her-
schcl Island river water into Colleen river water. We
made our toilsome way towards it, and camped close to
it, amongst the last willows, not quite within the jaws of
the pass.
In three hours the next morning we had wound our way
up the gradual steep ascent to the summit of the pass, an
easy pass compared to many among the mountains of the
interior, but disappointing to us who had looked for-
ward to the view it would afford, since rapidly gathering
clouds denied any; and after a short rest we plunged
into the helter-skelter slide of the descent on the other
side, thankful to be in Yukon waters once more, but dis-
mayed already at the depth of loose snow we found. We
were no sooner at the bottom than the clouds that had
been gathering discharged themselves in a great addi-
tion thereto; thick, heavy, wet snow, that saturated our
parkees and sled-covers as it fell.
Here Titus demanded to return, and although we were
entitled to another half day of his services, yet since we
were without doubt in Yukon water and had but to pursue
the creek bed to reach the Colleen, I consented and paid
him the agreed price and he left. In a couple of hours
more, following the windings of the divide, we reached
another camp, where an Eskimo named Charley, whom
I had seen a year before at the Bampart House, was liv-
ing, with his family and an aged couple, and a young man.
Charley was most cordial, and I had been there but a few
minutes when he asked me to marry the young man to
342
A WINTER CIRCUIT
i h
H
«l
1\
rii
his eldest daughter. Now here was another instanoe of
the folly of an all-inclusive marriage law that takes no
account of the situation of many of the Alaskan natives.
The nearest United States commissioner was at Fort
Yukon, 250 miles away, and it is certain that if this
young man made the journey thither so late in the sea-
son he could not return until the summer, and doubtful if
he could return then ; for we were not on navigable water,
and only with the utmost diSSculty could this place be
reached from the Yukon in the summer. But I need not
labour the point; it must be evident that those who made
this law either did not intend it to apply to the natives,
or else forgot all about the natives when they made it.
There was only one thing for me to do ; and I laid myself
liable to another year in goal and another fine of $500
in doing it. They were already married by the native
custom which consists simply in the father and mother
giving the girl to the boy, and already cohabiting. No
Christian minister of any sort would, I think, have passed
by and refused the sanction of the Church to the union;
certainly not one who had long laboured to implant the
institution of Christian marriage and foster respect for it.
Joseph was about seventeen and the girl about sixteen
years old. I know that there is strong feeling in some
quarters against such early marriages. When I came
to the country I shared it ; now I do not ; now I am in gen-
eral in favour of the early marriage of the natives, and
not at all sure that it would be an ill thing to return in
civilized life to a custom more nearly satisfying natural
demands. My experience amongst the Indians is that
these early marriages are commonly happiest, and I know
that the alternative is a period of adolescent promiscuity,
wherein all the physiological disadvantages of early mar-
riage are involved, with the addition of the moral deg-
radation of clandestine indulgence.
Joseph had a little rough, beach-combers' English, and
he presently dug amongst his belongings and produced a
tin box, from which he took a couple of dollars and
ill. I
JOURNEY TO POET YUKON 343
offered them to me, saying: "You marry me; me pay
yon." But I bade the boy put up his money, which he
was nothing loath to do, and told him that if he liked he
might help us down the creek for the rest of the day, to
which he was quite willing.
Then Charley, who had slow, hesitating, but careful
English that showed a little mission instruction, asked
of me that I baptize the old couple. That, however, was
a more difficult thing, for I must be satisfied that the old
people knew what was doing and had at least rudimen-
tary instruction. The trouble with these Caribou Es-
kimos is that they are unable, except in rare irstances,
to make more than birried visits to a mission station;
their livelihood depends on following the game; and if
I refused to baptize this aged couple they might die
before another opportunity occurred. So I sent off Wal-
ter and Joseph to break out the trail and sat down with
Charley's aid to find out what the old folks knew and
whether I could instruct them sufficiently to justify my
anxious desire to comply with their anxious desire. Over
and over again I reiterated the statement of the funda-
mentals of the Christian religion, and at last, never
doubting that the Divine mercy would accept their simple
faith and overlook their ignorance, I took water and bap-
tized them, by name Ky-now-rok and Kup-run-na, adding
the Christian names James and Mary.
Joseph had supper with us that night and returned
to his bride, and Joseph was the last human being we saw
for a week. For there began the next day the hardest
labour of the whole journey, the descent of the Colleen
river in the deep, soft, unbroken snow of all the winter.
We recalled the disparaging remarks about the interior
made by a Herschel Island native, "No seals, no whales,
all deep snow." We had suffered exposure to every
stress of fierce weather on the coast, but there had been
nothing comparable to the exhausting labour and fatigue
of this river, for we had always a hard surface to travel
npon. Now the weather was mild and warm enough, too
844
A WINTER CIRCUIT
warm most of the time, but from morning to night was
one ceaseless, laborious grind. I went ahead on snow-
shoes and broke out the trail, back and forth, two or three
times; Walter, with the little sled trailed behind the big
sled and all the dogs in one team, strained at the gee-pole
with a rope around his shoulders.
Lifting two or three pounds of moist snow at each step
all day long is most exhausting work, and my shoulder
began to trouble me that had scarce made itself remem-
bered since that hard day on the Koyukuk at the begin-
ning of the journey. Towards evening, day after day,
the sharp, lancinating pains would strike across the back
of my neck, followed by a dull ache that kept me from
sleep at night, and I wished with all my heart that I had
engaged Joseph or Charley to accompany us. Walter
had much the harder of the two jobs, however, swinging
that heavy sled continually and adding his tractive power
to that of the dogs. It was under just sucli circumstances
that heavy sled continually and adding his tractive power
Mark Tapley "come out strong." He was never irri-
table or impatient, always cheerful though with not much
to say. Stress of any kind added to his customary taci-
turnity. We were too utterly weary at night for any
study and our book work lapsea. Walter would fall
asleep the moment he had eaten his supper, and I would
go and dis'i out the dog-feed he had cooked.
The poor beasts suffered also. On the 5th April I was
sorry for them that they had to struggle against a wind
at 40° below zero; on the 25th April I was sympathizing
with their panting protests at a temperature of 40 ° above.
We could throw off our parkees and mitts, fur caps and
scarves ; they had still to wear their heavy winter coats.
The blubber cooked with oatmeal was siill more unsuit-
able than had been the food cooked along the coast, and
as it grew warmer they refused it or ate very sparingly,
and often after they had eaten their stomachs rejected it
again. So with the incessant toil and insufficient food
they grew gaunt. One, who had fallen lame, was cut out
JOURNEY TO FOBT YUKON
345
and limped along behind. One night we missed him and
he did not turn up at all, and we were both too tired
to go back and look for him, and saw him no more. I
think that when he was rested he probably made his way
back to the Eskimo encampment. That is the first dog
I have ever "lost" on the trail.
It would be mere tediousness to record that river
journey day by day. Again and again we wished we had
taken the longer route by the Rampart House, on which
we should at least have had a trail. Sometimes we had
stretches of miles of "overflow" water, and -..e went
through it with great relief and ease, only to resume our
ploughing through the snow when it was done; some-
times we had to drag our sleds over blown sandbars
where scarcely enough snow was left for passage; some-
times we had a little glare overflow ice, and that was
quickly overpassed; but in the main our way lay through
deep soft snow. One habitation only we passed in that
week, a white trapper's, but it was unoccupied and care-
fully padlocked, with what seemed superfluous precau-
tion.
On the 23rd, when we thought we were surely approach-
ing the mouth of the river, but were yet in reality forty
miles therefrom, an hour after we had started in the
morning we came to a cabin sitting some distance back
from the right bank, and heard dogs! How that sound
delighted us I So many tunes in these Alaskan vears has
that sound brought grateful news of the proximity of
mankind, of shelter and warmth and guidance, that I
think I shall never hear distant dogs as long as I live
without my heart leaping up. It proved to be an Indian
named Gabriel, and never was the archangel himself
more welcome. He had come across a portage from the
Porcupine to gather up his traps and was returning by
the same way that day. He told us that in tHrty miles
the portage would take us to John Herbert's place on the
Porcupine river below the lower ramparts, and also
that the ice on the Colleen near its mouth was so badly
346
A WINTEB cntcniT
broken up, with «o muoh open water, that he donbted if
we coTild have paued over it. I knew of this portage
but not of its location, and it hag ao little mark that bat
for tluB Indian track I think we should surely have
passed it unnoticed; indeed I had supposed that we had
already passed it.
It must have been at this cabin that Captain Amundsen,
on his journey from Herschel Island to a telegraph Bta>
tion on the Yukon in 1906 to let the world know that ha
hiid accompUshed the Northwest Passage, saw his first
Indians; and I recall his naive excitement— he that had
been amongst Eskimos for two years— at the approach-
ing realization of his boyhood's dreams. He expected to
see copper-coloured felloes with feathers in their hair
and tomahawks in their hands, and was much disap-
pointed when people in ordinary clothes came out speak-
ing English. He complains that they might have been
common Norwegian peasants. I have always been sorry
that I missed Captain Amundsen at Circle, by two or
three hours, when he was making this land journey. We
had followed his route exactly from Herschel Island,
and he also was fortunate enough to find direction for
the portage here.
The portage was rough and narrow, the weather very
warm and the snow soft and mushy. When we had strug-
gled along till noon we decided to camp and endeavour to
cover the rest of it at nigh^-«o we tried as best we coulC
to sleep in the sunshine. By five o'clock we were moving
again, and a long journey of thirteen hours— the dogi
doing much better than in the daytime— brought us out
not only to John Herbert's place but to the combined
parties of Mr. Stefinsson and Dr. Burke, who had met
at the Bampart House and were thus far on their way to
Fort Yukon. . ■■ «
It was a very happy reunion for Dr. Burke and myself,
and I was greatly pleased to meet Mr. Stefinsson and to
find him so much improved. The folks at Herschel Island
doubted if he would reach Fort Yukon alive, but I was not
m
M
JOUBNET TO FOET TUKON
847
nirpriied to find him mended. I think that had he stayed
in the little cahin where he lay so long sick, with several
cealous amateur practitioners doing their rival hest for
him, he would very likely have died. I brought from
Demarcation Point to Herschel Island for him the bulki-
est Book of Household Medicine I ever saw, and I think
that by the time its contents and its remedies had been
digested there would have been little left to do for the
patient but bury him. Many a time have I known a long
sled journey do, not merely no harm, but amazing good
to desperately sick people, and that not only in pul-
monary affections but in intestinal complaints and pro-
foundly septic conditions, and I have never yet known
any harm to result, even when taken in the most severe
weather. There is a wonderful tonic, germicidal power
in the Arctic air. Moreover Dr. Burke had at once set
aside all the rigid restrictions that had been placed upon
his diet and had fed him full.
Three days of soft mushy weather— almost as bad at
night as in the day— brought us down the Porcnpine river
to Fort Yukon. We reached that place in the evening of
the 27th April, and, word of our approach having gone
ahead from our last stop, we had to run the gauntlet of a
village most gratifyingly rejoiced at our safe return.
So, three days before the limit of time that I had set
when we started, ended this winter journey of six months
lacking ten days; and, a year later to a day, ends the
writing of this narrative of it.
• or
.ROTIO COAST
SKA
— LtAngwill
. a«eloglesl Burv«7
"^O^
7:^:^
h
111 ;
!■■
I
r:
1 1
II
AN OUTLINE MAP OF NORTHERN ALASKA TO IL
Fram tlw V. S. Govtramcnt publi
ALASKA TO ILLUSTRATE THE JOURNEY DESCRIBED IN THIS BOOK.
Govtramcnt publicatiooi, with corTecttoai u^ addi'iou.
II
h
§';
INDEX
Abniui, Daka o( the, ISO
Aeroplane, will it euperBede don
aad iledaT 30S
Ah kl-lu rak River, 1S6, 168, 164
Ahtenowrah (Eakiino chief I, 129
^liMto and Itt Retourcci, Dall, 288
Alaskan conetabulary, need for 284
Alatna River, II, 3|), 48
Aleutian Islands, 101, 331
Alexander Archipelago, 06, 101
Alexander of Tolovana, 22
Allakaket, the mlBgion:
arrival at, 34
departure from, 39
also 8, 11, 27, 76
Allen, Jim (veteran whaler), 81,
145
Allen, Lieut., 63, M
A-mahk-too-sook (last) Mountain,
Ambler River, 64
Amundsen, Cant. (Srst to make
complete Northern Fassaffc ) .
243 ^
also i7e, 243, 320, 326, 346
Andy (Eskimo mail carrier), 178
Anglo-American Polar Expedition,
Anxiety Point, 283, 296
Architecture (only type for Arctic
regions), 110 e<«ej,, 222 etseo.
Arctic coast:
aeroplane, will it supersede sled?
30a
beauty of Arctic nights, 144, 187
charts inaccurate, 91, 274, 280
281
clothing suitable for, 89
first missions on coast, 106
germicidal property of air, 347
ealth of natives neglected, 218
et »eq,
hospitality, 283
is It unfit for occupation! 251
lagoons characteristic feature of.
97, 181
mapped by LeIBngweU, 292
non-Arctic fauna, 336
paleocrystic ice, 244
power of the wind, 108, 107, 173
et wq,
340
Arctic coast («m(.):
scenery monotonous, 267
sledding until June, 327
threshold of the unknown. 244
weather dominates travel, 193
Arctic Ocean, arrival at, 478
Arey, Ned (trapper), 301, 309
Argo (dean of dogs), 160, 161
Ar-ki-li-nik (in Greenland legends),
132
Aurora Borealis:
at Coldfoot, 27
at Point Lay, 187
auroral photography, 57 et aeq.
is there resultant sound! 60
notable vivacity of, 41
Athlanuk (Eskimo lad), 47, 48, 50,
62, 66
Augustus (Eskimo interpreter for
Sir John Franklin), 283
B
Babbage, Charles, 319
Babbage River, 319
Back, Sir George, 267
Baffin's Bay, 88, 306
Bailie Islands, 327
Baker, Marcus, Qtographic Dictitm'
ary of Alatha, 300
Baldy of Nome (book about dog-
racing), 148
Banks Land, 233, 244, 253, 281.
295, 309
Baptism of aged couple, 34^^
Barge of tha Blouom, 87, •, 204,
241, 242
Barren Lands, the, 325
Barrow, Sir John, "father of ;tll
modern Arctic enterprise," 242
Barrow (post office), 204
see Point Barrow
Barter Island:
arrival at, 304
base camp of Steftnsson, 296
departure from, 307
aim 300, 314, 329
Barter River, 311
Bartlett, Last Foyooe of the Kar-
luk, 226
also 314
Bathurst Cape, 327
Bathurst Inlet, 276
sso
IMOEX
1 1
Bathunt Iiluid, MI
Bm:
itOn't, 83, 3M
Buufort, 308, 3M
Brlltol, 331
Cunden, 301
DlMnchantment, 241
Ellon, 243, 283
Eicbolti, 335
Ooodhoiw, 241
Gwjdyr, 281, 2«T
Hirriaon, 177, 272, 274, 27S
Pnidhoe, 283, 297
St. Lmwrence, 63
Smith, 268
Beadwork, Indiui, 44 et t«q.
Bear, the (revenue cutter), 04
Beaufort, Admiral Sir Francii,
hydrographer Britiih Admiral-
ty. 174. 308
Beaufort Bay, 308, 300
Biuufort Cape, 174, 221
Beaufort flcale, 174
Beaufort Sea, 244, 308
Beechey, Capt. of Btottom:
arrives at Point Hope, 104, 106,
248
aa a miisionary, 188
dlKovera coal at Cape Beaufort,
186, 166
narrative a model, 70, 206
place-names given by, 76, 87, 190,
alto 46, 63, 01, 94, 96, 166, 187,
174, 236, 247
Beechey and Franklin determine the
N. W. limiU, 282
Beechey Point:
arrival at, 280
farthest point reached fay Sir
John Franklin, 280
alM 272, 276, 277, 281
Belcher Point, 201
Belcher, Sir Edward, 87, 88
Last of the Arotio Voyage*, 88
Berena Point, 280, 281
Bering's Sea, 32
Bering Bea route, 308
Bering Straits:
passage on foot, 106
route to North Pole, 308
also 103, 138
Bering, Vitus, 101
Berry, 304, 306
Bettfes, 16, 27 et teq.
Big Lake, 140, 340
Billy, Eskimo chevalier of indui-
try, 200 et teq.
Bishop of AlaaU (St. Bev. P. T.
Howe, DJ>.), 128, 138, 303,
SIS
Bishop of Yukon TerritoiT (Rt.
Bev. I. 0. Stringer, D.D.), 213,
313
"Black Jack "'a Place, 39
" Blond " Eskimos, 102
Bloody Falls, 81, 199
Blossom, Cape, 86
Bloeeom, the, 186, 100, 241, 242, 281
"Blow Hole" (Firth Biver), 336
Bob (guide), 200 et <<«.
Books of Arctic exploration, 88
Boothia Felix, 209, 246
Boulder Creek, 26
Boundary between American and
British territory reached, 313
Bristol Bay, ^6, 381
British Admiralty, eicellsnt charts,
32S
British Hydrograpbers, 96
British Hydrographieal Offlca, 94
British Museum, 274
Brower, Charles:
mine of information, 213, 236
alto 205, 210 et eeq., 226 et eeq.,
240, 250, 209 et teq., 310, 330
Brown, Belmore, 284
Bryce, George, Remarkable Bietorjf
of the Hvdeon'e Bay Company,
273
Bnckland, Dr. William, Dean and
scientist, 338
Buckland Mountains, 333, 336, 338
Buckland River, 336
Bump, Billy (guide), 329, 334, 335,
339
Bureau of Education, 85, 68, 70,
105, 132, 107
Bureau of Geographical Names, 209
Burke, Dr. Grafton:
goes to the relief of Btefflnsson,
321
met on the trail, 846, 347
also preface, 4, 8
Camden Bay, 301
Canada jays, 334
Candle, 85, 136
Canning River. 298, 297, SII
Capes: (and Points)
Anxiety, 283, 296
Beaufort, 174, 221
Beechey, 280
Belcher, 201
Berens, 280, 281
Blossom, 85
Cbelyudcin, 244
Collie, 104
Collinson, 300
INDEX
(hpMi (ud Folati) (cont.):
SMeptloii, 841
DontrcaUon, 308, 310, 111, 347
Bart, 300 • t 1 »»i
Eliabrtk, «41
ElliM, 272
FrukliB, 281
Oriffln, 308
Hilkett, 2M, 272, 274, 302
HwM (Herald), 298
Bumplmya, 308
to, 124, 12S, 134, 189, 190, 283
Knuenrtern, 86
Lay, 188, 188
Llabunie, 108, 130, IM, 221, 202.
306
MaDDlng, 299, 308
Marab, 194
Murchiaon Promontorr. 209
Oliktok, 280
Prince Alfred, 309
Prince of VValei, 106, 109, 238, 243
Sabine, 108, 197, 188
Shingle, 324
Bimpeon, 207
Sir Henry Martin, 308
Smythe, 204, 209
Tangent, 284
Thomson, 82, 84, 88, 106. 134
148, 168 ' '
•ee otao Point Barrow and Point
Hope
Cape Smythe Whaling and Trading
Company, 206
Capes wrongly marked on map, 91
Cariboo Indians, 331 et tnT^
Caribou:
increaalng, 19
olto 311, 331
Caro, loat on the traU, 19 et un.
Champlain Society, 81, 274
Chandalar Country, 333
Chandalar Gap, 10
^andalar Indians, 331 tt uq., 340
Chandalar River: 11
East Fork, 19, 23
Middle Fork, 26
Wert Fork, 24
overflow, 14
Chandalar Village, 11, 13 «t «m.
Chandler Lake, 64
Charley (Eskimo), 341
Charley River, 6
Chart of coart unreliable, 274, 280
Chester (Eskimo guide), 93, 98
Chelyuskin, Cape, 244
Chilkat Indianii, 332
3S1
Christian, Chief of Chaadalars, 340
Christian River, 12
Christmas at Point Hope, 112
Circumpolar stations, 238, 283
Clarence River, 313
Cloud formation, beautUul, 334
Coal:
at Cape Beaufort, 211
at Point Hope, 221
at Wainwright, 194, 221
below Salmon River. 68, 87
Corwin mine, 166 et ttq.
Thetis mine, 167
"Coal Mine" (dog), 186
Coldfoot, II, 29, 28, 108
Colleen River, 329
hard descent of, 343, 344
Collie, Alexander, surgeon AIohoki,
Collie Point, 104
Collinson (of the Entenriee), 88.
103, 242 et teq., 296, 301
Ckillinson Point, 300 et eeo.
Colville, Andrew, (Jovernor Hud-
son's Bay Company, 278, 250
Colville River:
delta of, 272
prehistoric trade route, 277. 278
331 '
olao 20, 76, 149, 229, 309
Colville River people, 270
Columbia River, 76
Company of Adventuren, (Jowie.
326
Congregational missions, 106
(7o«9uerin; tte Aretie loe, Mikkel-
son, 167
Cook, Capt. James, 76, 87, 80, 91,
„ 96, 101, 167, 189, 190, 241, 283
Cook's Inlet, 6
Copper (Blond) Eskimos, 328, 328
Copper River, mapped by army of-
ficers, 62
(Joppermine River, 60, 189, 199
Coronation Gulf, 91, 276, 328
Coronation Gull Country, 271
Corwin coal mine, 165, 166
Corwin, V. 8. revenue cutter, 63.
102, 168
Co^e. Company of Aieenttmn,
Crabs, In Arctic Ocean, 121
"Cram," U. 8. eonunissioner at
Point Barrow, 179
Cross Island, 296, 301
Chipewyan Indians, 199
Chipp, Lieut., 263
Chipp River, 64, 263
Ohoris Fanlamla, 76, 88
Dall, W. H., 64, 278
Alaeka and It§ Ketoureet,
Dancing, native, 112, 113
8SS
INDEX
DftDiih gonnmiciit, cart of Eaki-
moi, 2IR
DwH (Britlth hjdrognpber), M,
242, 297, 272
Dmm hbA SimpMii't Eiptdltiou,
273
D«lM Inlet, 242, 2U
Deception CAp«, 241
Deerlng (Eeklmo vllltge), 68
DeLong, Commander Jeannttte, 03,
>1, 232, 263, 306
DelU of Kobuk RlTcr, 74
Demarcation Point:
advleablHty of million, 812
resort of Eiklmoa, 312
alia 308, 310, 347
Denali (Mt. McKlnley), 161, 284
Denali'a wife, 284
Department of Juatice, U. 8., 186
Diienchantment Bay, 241
" DiTce," an Elklmo, 2fiB
Don:
Argo, dean of doga, ISO, 161
bad treatment by Eikimoi, 192
"Coal Mine," 165
difficulty In procuring, 147
expoeure to weather, 00
food aupply a problem, 16, 230,
276, 282
Fox, a leader, 77
hard to keep on courie, 77
Kerawak, a pernnality, 120, 149,
160, 266, 302
Ualamutea, 147
Mooie, death of, 60
our teami, 140 et »eq.
racing at Nome hurts breed, 148
■enie of smell acute, 266, 266
"Bkookum," 166
lore feet, 276
sudden death of one, 166
suffering from extremea in tern*
perature, 344
their bark a delight, 346
Dog-TRcing at Nome, 148
Dolphin Straits, 326
Driggs, Dr. John B., founder of
Pt. Hope miuion, 106, 108, 128
et teq.
DmUu o/ Bedford, the, 200, 201,
206
"Dynamite Dutchman," the, 28
Eagle, 117
East Cape, 306
Easter, a poor, 302
East India Company, 186
Elirabeth, Cape, 241
Ellesmere Land, 263
ElllM, Rt. Ron. Edward, M.F.,
272
Ellice Point, 272
Elson Bar, 243, 268
Eiion, lliomas (officer BIossom),
88, 1«0, 204, 206, 20«, 241 tt
Kg., 263, 282
Endlcott Mountains, 27, 106
EatirpriM, the, 103, 241, 243,
801
Episcopal millloni, 70, 106, 220
Eicholtz Bay, 336
Eskimo Ice cream, 112
Biklmo, The (Publication of Bu-
reau of Education), 132
Eskimos:
antiquities, 104
attachment to their country, 263
at peace with Indiane, 34
baptism of old couple, 343
characteristic traits, 248, 266
ColTille River people, 270, 311
communal system, 204
content their normal state, 266
Copper ("Blond") E., 326, 328
courage and cheerfulness, 246, 247
dancing, expert, 112
development along natural linea,
264
" Direa," an Eskimo, 266
experiment Id concentration, 68
exposure of the old and Infanta,
240, 260
fuel problem preesing, 143
health conserved in Greenland,
219
hospitality, 03, 308
■Mce cream," 112
Improvement in morals, 162
Inoustry and cheerfulness, 163
Ipanee Eskimos, 104, 184, 200
KupOwra iwople, 311
mastery over adverse conditlona,
247
migrations of, 63
missions should train In wilder-
ness arts, 38
no "double standard" of morals,
161
no self-consciousness, 231
panics among, 100
plane of civilization, 250
policy of concentration, 214
roving Inland bands, 311
•imple piety, 232
Fairlanks, 270
First birds, 334
First vegetation, 829, 384
Firth Rirer, SM
"Blow Hol«," 335
ritw-wluUlli^:
dMcriptlon o(, 234. 235
^»lm Ua. 104, 224
Flmuiu laUndi
"rlv«l at, 28a
OKP'ture from, 300
EKtt«r At, 300
Jor whom mmcd, 288, 320
Oood Friday at, 203
«»o 229, 208, 311
Foggy Iiland, 282, 283
Footprlnti, laiting, 284
To'sef;,,"'*'"' '»"' "«•
Fort Conooa, ff4
Fort YuIcod:
Amuodaen at, 34g
Chang, made by n|„ion, |«i
chief fur market, 324
hoipital at, 321
return to, 347
•tart from, g
when built, 278
o/TO 226, 332, 340, 342
««(» dog), a leader, 77
'™*n, the, 244
Franklin, Sir John:
• knight "ians peur et aana re.
proche," 333, 334
•enrch for. 103, 241, 325
■ervcd at Trafalgar, 280
2°67'V„°' f- ""■ "^' '»». 232.
J0(, 280 el tea., 200, : ,1 ans
300, 313, 310, 330 ' ' ""'
det.'J',"'' •'■^•^■"•y- '"'"re to
detemino northweet limit,,
Fr"°i;li^ St'lSr '"• ^^- 302
Prani Jogef Land, 57
Frawir River, 78
Frobiiher, Martin, 247
Fuf;:""' "'• ""* *•"•• 310, 321
Fort Vukon chief market, 324
increaie m price, 323, 324
in hiatory, 48
S^ff'y 'or coMt travel, 84
' "m •""' >»«rket, 187,
principal commodity at Herachel
W.nd and Point^B.rriw'l2lI
"lSild'er.,'"/„3""- ^■™"'»
"■eZ-"o7.X.'3''„r" «'•»■
INDEX
863
Fura {conl.),
trading lUtiona, 310, 324
wandering fur buyer. 123
Funiton, Oan., 310
Oabriel'i cabin. 345, 34«
&CM de (orje, 331 et tea.
a,-o,raphic DieKomr^ of Alatkt.
Baker, 300 "•"••«,
°""mo,'mo''°*' ^*'^- ^'^- ""• "'•
Geriing, miMionary among "Blond"
Eskimo., 320 c< ,ea.
O;"". the. Ural ,hip to maka
complete ourthirn pasaaiie 243
Glacier, UuJilrow, 161 '^"^'- "''*
Goodbope Bay, 241
Ooo«e,fom (E.kimo), 178
3T2' "'"'°"' """^ "• 3"'
Gordon, Tom, fur trader. 310
'"""mo "'°''«'""" "P'<"-
Governor, of Alaaka appeal for
OreaTpuk 5-'' '" ■"UveaTSM
ureal Fl«h finer, 267
Oreely, Lieut , 108, 305
Greenland: 119, 202
Griffln Pjjnt, 308
Gwydyr Bay, 281, 287
g"f '"J; Capt., 304 ot ,eq.
Halkett, Cape: '
'f'"?!^ '"" temperature, 272
oiao 268. 274, 302
Halkett, director of Hudwn'a Bay
Company, 272 '
Hanbury, David, 326
"Happy Jack " 'a place, 65
Hardly, agent at Herachel Wand,
Harper. Arthur (pioneer), 20
Harper, Walter:
and the old woman. 182 e( «».
IJirlhday celebration, 113
conndencea, 337
diary, 338
early recollections, 42
marriage and death, Pnfam
preparation for college, s
SS4
INDEX
tUnwr, WtltM (to»«.)i
proflcifBcT in wlldtriMM uU, 9,
tl, 111, lU, ttl, 2«7
moumfulnna, 227, 229
Sluknimre on the trail, 9, 30,
M, 94, 114, IM, 297
tTphold fvver and riTovcrj, 26
TolnatMra for war, Prefact, 338
alto 91, 149, 161, IIM rl teq., 187
Barrlaon Bajr, 177, 272, 274, 2711
MarriMoii, Benjamin. Depiity-novrr-
nor Hudion'a Bay Company,
S78
Hiadwatira of Arctic Ocean and
Yukon RiTcr atrcama. 340
Heald (Hrriildl Point, 29f)
Haamc, Samuel, M, 180, 199
Henty, educational value of hll
boolla, 1) rt Mtq.
Herald laland. 33, 304
fferafd, the, 243, 304
Herbert, John, 34S
Herendean, Capt., 249
Herachel laland;
arrWal at, .IIS
departure from, 329, 330
for whom named, 319, 320
former lawleianeaa, 320
hoapiullty at, 321
Buaeon'a Bay Company poet,
S22
only two malla a year, 320
ienrlcea In the vernacular, 320
Rteflnaaon 111 ,it, 20S
•Ita 3, 83, 102, 119, 229, 243,
230, 278, 310, 311, 313, 315,
340, 347
Herachel Island (Firth) River, 329,
337 34 1
Henchei, Sir .lohn F. W.. ecientist
and man of lettera, 319
Heater, mieeionsry among " Blond "
EflklmoR, 326 et Beg.
Hlnehinbrook Inland, 241
Bittory of nhaling, 103
Hontutiiii River, 49
Holy CroBB Miiision, 130
Hooper, Capt., 186
Hope, Sir Wllllara Johnaton, 90
Ropion, Fred, 212
Holham Inlet:
for whom named, 77
alao 63, 75, 89
Howard, Eniiign W. L., 243. 263
Hudaon'a Bay Company: 267
buaineaa nethoda, 322
Metory needed, 273
original charter, 273
rivalry with N. W. Co., 272
a<aa 242, 268, 312, 322
Hudion'B B*y House, 274
BttdaoB. Henry. 245
Hula-Hula River, 302. Ill
Humphrey's Point, 30(
Hunt River, 6«
"ice cream" (Eeklmo), 112
ley Cape, 124, 125, 134, 189, 190, 2(3
ley RiTl, 309
Ik'plkpuk (ChippI River, 2(3
Indiana:
Cariboo Indiana. 331 et uq.
Chandalar Ini^inna, 331 et aeg.
Chiikat Indiana, 332
Chipewyan Indiana, 199
communal Hyetem. 264
Oene de large, 331 et a«ff.
belpfulneaa, 12
Ketchumatocka, 117
panic among, 199
plane of civilization, 250
reBourrefufneSB of women, 16
trade in flrearma, 332
Interpreter, limitationa of, 201
Inveetigator, the. rounda Point Bar-
row, 243
Ipanee Eakimoa, 104, 184, 250
lalanda;
Aleutian lelanda, 101, 331
Barter, 20S, 304, 300, 314, Stt
Bathurit. 201
Croaa, 20.'i, 301
Foggy. 282. 283
Herald (Heald I, 63, 304
Hlnehinbrook, 241
LooChoo lelanda, 186
Lyttleton, 108
New Siberian lalanda, 808
Sea-horae. 202
St. Lawrence, 102
St. Matthew, 102
Victoria. 233. 263. 307, S2(
Wrangell. 304. 314
aee oJeo Flazman laland, Her*
Bchel Island
I-yag'ga.Uk River, 166, 158, 169, 164
Jabbertown, 97, 108
Jackson. Frederick, 67
Jackson, Sheldon. 103. 106, IM,
142. 219, 253
Jarvis, Ueut., 236
Jtanttette, the, 53, 304 et saf.
John River, 30
John, Robert, 12
Joeeph (Eskimo), 342
JoMmal of Ihe Yukon, Murray, IM
Jtmean, 136, 181
(25
INDEX
* Uku («•«.)■
„ . . .^ . Mmliw. «l
promjrdilmtki,- 101, 8«|bT. 62. M
885
Karlulc. l,atl r»j,ij. o/ Ikt, Birt
t'>tt, 304
Ktrluk. the:
•nrvlron of th<, 914
alto 234, 243, 304
K«en*n T«nd, .106
Kelli'tt (nimmiiDdcr Herald), 243.
304. 300
Karnwak (fnalnmutp dog). 120
141), ISO. 2(l«, 302
^.etchuinitock Indiann, 117
Aintf and Wing, thr, :104
Kiralinn, 01 el m,., 1.14 ,t ws.,
140, 143, 144, 146, 162
Knlghti lit the Arctic, 87
Kobuk River:
claimed by Quakera, 70
drita of, 74
mapiMd by naval olBcera, S2
moutha of, 70
a«ctlon noted fi>r wind, 66
alK II, 40, ni, 80, 263, 278
Kotiehue :
arrival «t, 77
departure frt>ni, 81!
mail lietwecn K. and Pt. Barrow.
120
Sunday at miaaion. 83
ol«o 01. 136, 140. a4l, 246, 302
Kotzebue. Otto von- 75
fear of Rntiliah. 332
Kotzebue Sound: 331
immemorinl trade route, 332
ol«o II. 86, 241, 278, 282, 283,
328, 336
Koyukuk. eanon of. 28
Koyukuk River:
mapped by army ofScers, 62
South Fork, 11, 33
upper river, 260
alio 278
Kruaenstern, Cape, 86
Kukpuk River, 166
Ku-pou-ruk River, 18£
KuaKokwin Rit>-r:
mapped by army olficera, 62
Moravian mivalona. 70
Kyana (Thank youl, 67
L*bret {lip ornament), 46
Lagoona (characteristic of coast).
07
Lakes;
Big, 140, 340
Chandler, 64
Helby, 6!
Waller, 64
f'amont, C'onstmble, 321
lApIand, 130
l»ppa (herders of reindeer), ISO
l,a»l of Ihe Arctic Voyaan, Bel*
eher, H8
Latt Voyate o/ IKe Karink, Bart-
lelt, 226, 304, 314
Uughing Joe's Place, 914
'.aut, Agnea, 273
Uy. f!e.irt;i! I.. 186
J-«y. Point, 186, 188
Leovitt, Oeorge (guide), 230, 264
266, 276, 2S.I, 286, 207, 300
320, 330 ' ■
Lemngwell. Erneat deKoven:
report and mapa, 202, 203, 207 <t
eef.
alK 200, 201, 206, 302, 310
Legends, Indian and Eskimo, 132
Lemmings:
migration of, 227
self-destruction, 228
Lisburne, Cape, 106, 130, 160 221
202, 306
"Little Pete" (guide), 84, 02
Loo-Chou lalands, 186
l-oola. Rev. William, 340
Upp, W. T., 105. Hi. 230
"Liip sticks" (to mark a site),
61
Lutheran (Swediah) Mission, 70
Lynn Canal, 332
Lyt<;eton Island, 108
Mackenzie River, 76. 326
Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, 326
Malamute dogs, 147
Malaspina, 241
Manning P^int, 209, 308
Maps of -ist, inaccuracy of, 281
Maps mu«« strange bedfellows, 298
Marro Polo, 46
Marriage law of Alaska:
compliano.' impugsible, 135 et tea
folly of, 342
Marryat Cove ( r Inlet), 166, 166
Marsh, Dr.. 218
Marsh. George (officer Alo«oml,
88, 184
Marsh Point, 104
Mawson, Sir Douglas, 186
Mayo (pioneer), 29
Meade River. 263
" Meta Incognita." 247
Methodist Misaiona, 70
>86
INDEX
Mctropolttan UnMiiflB of Kstiinil
inilarr, iU
McCllnlnrk. NIr lipoid. KT, t4«, t45
MrClun. NIr KoIhtI, 7<I. «7,'24J. n4l
McClurr't Di»cov*ry of Ikt Sorlk-
H!Mf Pauaft, Otborn, SM
UeOuIn, 243
UelntTTf, Sftin, Inttntting emrwr,
9M
McOuMton (ptoBMr), n
MIcble, Dr. R. R., 21*
MIdntiht nin, 60, 61
MlkktlHn. C<mqutTi»f tlu Ardit
In. 1B7 _ V
Uiuioi»r]r, tlu (hli mnlrlbutloii
to world'! knowledgv), 320
UlMioni:
EpiKopal, 3, 70. 105, 220
m alto AlUkmkit, Tort Yukon,
Point Hopt
Luthrrmn, 70
PrMb;terl>n. 70, lOA. 216, 221
tee mlio Point Bnrrow
Qurikrr, 68
Ronnn CathoUr, 139, 220
UooM (dog), death of, 00
Moravian mlttlonarlaa in Gran-
land, 70, 86
Hountalna :
A-mahk-too-aook, 177
Buckland, 333. 333, 336
Danall (Mt. McKlnlryl, 151, 284
Drnaira Wife, 284
Endlrott, 27, 106
Franklin. 177, 283. 302
Mulirave Illlla. 8»
Mt. »t. EUaa. 180, 241
Mt. St. EUaa, 180, 241
Mountiln Indian (Ftrth) RlTcr,
33), 333
Mnlr, John, 102
Muldrow Olader, 151
Mulgrave Hllla. 89
Murchlaon Promontojn, 209
Hurray, Alexander Hunter:
builder of Ft. Yukon, 278
tear of Ruaaiana, 332
N
UTOHoy Daunon, the (flrat ahip to
round Ft. Barrow), 243
Nanaen, 244
Nelaon. Horatio. 89
New Siberinn lelanda, 802
New Year'a Day at Pt. Hope, 115
Kewa of the war. 26. 65
yigalik, the (miBeion launchl. 166
Noatuk (the Inland) RlTpr, 75
mapped by naval oflleera, 52
«I«|2T8
dog-r^^lnff at, 148
•l<c >, r32. 139, 148, 149
Noorvlk (Quaker mlaaloni ;
a darinn experiment, 68 ef M.
hoapltallly at, 72
departure from, 74
aim 6.1, 200
Northern Kxtreme, the, 230
Northern Paaean:
aeareh fur, 241
wratorn nateway of, 240, 241
Korthwnt I'awige, 302. 346
North Weat Company, rivalry with
Hudaon'a Bay Cumpany, 872
Nnrthweat Mounted PoUce: 271
I'nute of, 102, 315
Norton Sound, 260
Noaea, freezlns. 158
Nulato. 72. 221. 332
Nuahagnk (Ruenlan poet), 331
NDwuk (Eaklmo aattlenent at
Point Barrow), 209, 239, 248,
270
OgllrU, 29
Old Crow River. 329
Oliktok Point, 280
()ola (Eaklmo ludl, 35, 36, 60, 62,
05, 66. 76
Oahorn, Admiral Sherrard, 76
McClunr't Diteoverjt of fhe
Northicnt Pauaft, 307
Oxenatiem, 106
Paleooryatic Ice, 244
Parker, Prof., 284
Parry, Sir Edward. 86, 244, 24*
Paul (Indian), 7. 18, 25, 26
Peard (Pearl) Bay, 204, 221
Peard (Pearl) Cape. 208
Peard, George (offlcer ffloetom),
88
Peary, Admiral Robert:
eyatem of aupportlng parties, 290
aleo 108, 246
People of tke Polar Vortk, n»,
Raamuaaen, 248
Petennann, Dr., 304
Phllllpa Bay, 289
Fhllllpa, Prof. R. A., 289
Phlppa. Capt. Conatantina (Lord
Mul(;Tave), 89
Fira, Capt. bedford, 62
Pipe Spit, 77
Pitt Point, 268, 274
Placer mining, 271
Plover Land, 306
INDEX
««w, tk., Ml
rolal Barrow I
mini at, (04, tog, igf „
■rrlral at «rM whlt« oaa, Ml
••partun fnn, i99. i«.1
(Ml problta prrvlna, tU, Bl
fur laduitrj, IM, |«ii, 310
laterMtlaf klitorjr ?3», 2M
to 0»r. Gi«l to ... lortM (44,
140
■all bMw«« I' 1) ,uil Kot»»l..-
■asHd bT P>r. I. .( I"
Mad lor h'." 1 »i, n^
PrMbjrtarii it tuiMion, /O 105
ralndfar «t '"^
roatral tutuun ■;., 243
aoelal riiiVitIok. i. ?'*
tkrHhoM of ih« ui...t.,.ra. 2.i«
whaling ^1 ut >>i, : .? .
alao I, 20, \.vi, i.i\ 8«:
Point Ropat
a bad night at, 130, ■ 1I
arrival at, 112
CkriatnuM at, lU
coal aupplf inadequata, lit
coal aupplx, IM, IS7
dapartura from, US
diitanu from Kotlabue, 84
Drilga, Dr. John B., at, 108, lot,
128 tt ttq.
InproranMnt In, IM, Itl
library at. 121
N«w Yrar'« Day at, 115
no comoilMiunur at. 138
only Epiioopal miuion on Arctic
coait, 3, 70
our Ant objective, 11
rcaaon for location. 107
•cbool under difflcultlaa, IK
atory of, 104 e> an.
Tillage council, 102
whaUng leaion, 234
0J.0 06, 147, 182, 24S
Point .Sir Henry Martin, 308
Polar Star, the, 304
Pontine, Herbart. iVe/aea
Porcupine River. 3, 4, 310, 328, 320
340, 345, 347
Portaga (between Alatna and Ko-
buk Rivera). 48 «» .M.
Poat Offlce Dept.. IM M ^.
"ca^tarian miniona, 70, 105. 218,
Primitive paoplea prey of dlaioluta
white men. 102
Prlmui atoTe. 175
Prince Alfred Point. 300
Prince of Walea Cape, 106, lOB, 236,
367
Prlaaa WIIII*B-a Sood, », Ml
PH.MH tophi,, 8.8., lata ,|,
PrrfoM
Pmdhoa Bay, «M, W7
Putnam, Charlaa rtlat, H
Putnam RIvar, l«a
Quaker Biaaloa (Koofrlk), 68
R
■apart Rouae. 321, 328, 329, 341
1 muaaen (old trapper), 307
i niua«.n. Knuil, fl,, Pnpl, ,/
<»• Polar Norllt. 248
> f. Lieut., 236, 263
• i.-ading und.r difflcultlaa, 284
lied River. 270
l<<d River EnUrprlae, 280
Heed River, 84
Baeae, Mr. and Mra, 136, 141. 143.
146, 162
Rafuga Inlet, 221
Reindeer:
brought from Upland, I3«
communal meat cellar, 200
fain. 142
Eovcrnment relief eipadltlon, 236
•rdera, 93
Introduction by Sheldon Jackaon
138 et ttq.
Point Hope herd, 164
Walnwrlght herd, 104, 108
al«o 219, 260
Rtmarkablt HUtory of tkt Hud-
aow'a Bay Oompoiiy, Bryca, 273
Return Reaf, 282 / . ■•
RIchardion, Sir John:
hooka by, 86
aearching expedition, 278
tribute to Sir John Franklin, 393
Rivera:
Ak-ka-lu-rak, 156, 168, 164
Alatna, II, 30, 48
Ambler, 64
Babbage, 319
Barter, 311
Buckland, 336
Canning, 200, 297, 311
ChandaTar, II, 14
Raat Fork, 19, 23
Middle Fork, 25
Weit Fork, 24
Charley, 6
Chlnp (Ikplkpuk), 54, 26*
Chrlatian, 12
Clarence, 313
Colleen. 320. 343. 344
Columbia. 76
858
INDEX
CoItIIIi, 20. 76, 149, 2», tn,
277, 278. 309. 331
Copper. 62
Coppcrmim, 00, 189, 190
Firth, 329. 336
Fraser, 76
Ornt FMb. 267
Henchel llluid. 329, 337, 341
Bosmtzatnt, 4U
Hula-Bula, 302, 311
Hunt. SO
Ik-plk'puk (Cbipp), 263
I-yaggatak, 160, 168, 159, 164
John, 30
Kobllk. 11, 49. 61, 62, «0, 70, 89,
263, 278
Koyukuk, 62, 269, 278
South Fork, 11, 33
Kukpuk, 155
Ku-pounik, 182
Kuikokwim, 62, 70
Kwikpak. 278
Mackentie, 78, 326
Meade, 203
Mountain Indian (Firth;, 330,
NoaUk, 62. 76, 278
Porcupine, 3, 4, 310, 328, 329,
340. 345, 347
Putnam. 203
Red. 279
Reed. 64
Salmon (Skeenjik). 66. 340
Relawik. 52. 76
Slate Creek. 26
Sushitna, 52
Tanana, 52
Turner, 311
Yukon, 27, 32, 70, 76, 223, 228,
278
Rod^ert. the, U.S.8... 63, 244, 304,
306
Roman Catholic Mistioni, 220
Romanzolf, Count Nicholai, 302
Rosa. Sir Jamei Clark, 241
Boaa, Sir John, 80, 246. 248
Rom, Rt. Rev. P T.:
characteriatic atory of, 303
offera to make teat caae of mar-
riage law, 130
obo 128, 313
Royal Geographical Soc., 219, 842
Rupert's Ii«nd, 274
Ruaaian Jew (a degenerate), 307,
320, 327
8
Sabine. Cape:
GreelT'a canp. 108
al» 1*7, IM
St. Andrew'! Day at Sonoko Billj'a,
43
St. lAwrence hny, 53
St. Lawrence leliind, 1G2
St. Matthew lelind. 102
St. Michael (tulierculoaia at), 218
St. Thomas's Mission. 108
Salmon, necessity for native life.
16
Salmon cannery causes famine. 15,
16
Salmon (Skeenjik) River, 06, 340
SiUtrugi (windrows). 186. 180
Sea-horse Islands, 202
Seal, skinning a. 123
Sealing, 107
Seal me«t as food, 170
SecrtU of Polar Travtl, The, Peary,
108
Selawik River:
mapped by naval officers, 62
aUo 75
Selby Lake, 62, 64
Selkirk, Lord, 278
Bella. Vittoria, PnfMt
« Seward Peninsula, 05, 136, 138.
V 303
Sheddon (first to round Point Bar-
row), 243
SheWm Jackton, Life of, 226
Shields, W. H., 141, 142
Shingle Point, 324
Shrimps in Arctic Ocean, 121
Shungnak, 56 et 9eg.
departure from, 05, 09
Siberia, coast of. 139. 166, 278,
314. 331
Sickler, Mr. (superintendent at
Shungnak ) , auroral photogra-
pher, 67 et aeq.
Signal corps, 169
Simpson, Cape, 207
Simpson, Governor Hudson's Bay
Company, 207
Simpson, Thomas, yarrative of the
Dimovery of the North Ooaat
of America, 61
also 95, 242, 243, 244, 278
Simpson, Sir George, (3ovemor of
Rupert's Land, 280
Skookum (dog), 165
Skull Cliff, 204
Slate Oeek, 25
Sled-bells (an illusion), 21
Smith Bay, 268
Smith Sound, 306
Smithsonian Institution, Preftee,
68, 63
Smythe Cape, 204, 200
Smythe, William (officer Blosson),
88. 190. 204, 206
Snow«ho«» indispennble, 338, 337
Society of Friends:
attitude towards war, 70
intolerance, 71
Sonolio Billy, 43
South Forkg Flats, 26
Spence, Dr.. 179, 196, 210, 214 et
„ «?., 231, 233
Spitzbergen, 89, 2.19, 240
apart a„d Travel in (A, XorlhvxM,
Hanbury, 325
Squirrel River, gold on, 67
Blambtml, the, 306
Starflsh in Arctic Ocean, 121
Stcen, Paul, 303
SteffinsBoQ, v.:
base camp, 295, 304
III with typhoid. 321 et ua.
meeting with, 346. 347
Mn Life trilh the K,Hmo, 276
""o.'MtsT- ==«■ ^»'. 3»«.
^'''m'"^ m»gi"trate«, need for,
Stockton. Lieut. Commandor, U 8
N., 103, 129, 243, 250, 295
Stoncy, Lieut., 62 et ,c,., 263
Storkerwn Storkcr. 244, 206, 306
Stringer, Rt. Rev. I. o DD
Bishop of Yukon Territoiy!
Strong, Governor. 220
Sun, first appearance, 120
Sunshine, perpetual, 210
Surveys, recent. 274
Swineford, Governor, 220
INDEX
359
' ™'"?r^' ."?• ^- •*■• mWonary at
Point Hope, 112, 113, 123, 126.
Thomson, Cape:
dangerous to pasi, «2
lores of wind at, 04
pictnresqueness of, 96
also 84, 105, 134, 146, IM
ihornton, Harrison:
murder of, 100
oiso 105, 120
Tiga-ra (Point Hope), 105
Titus (Eskimo guiie), 339 et uq.
Tobacco, prohibition at mlsaioM
unwise, 216
Toboggan Drrsus sled, 24. 28
Trapping:
cruelty of, 47
necessity for, 47
will eiterminate animals. 5S
also 224, 225
Turnagain Arm, 241
Turner River, 310, 311
Twelve-mile creek, 27
Typhoid fever nt Fort Yukon and
Herschel Island, 4, 321
Tyrrell, J. B., 61
U
Unalaklik, 269
Unalaska, 139
Union Straits, 326
Upernavik, 209
Utkiavik (Eskimo village at Point
Barrow), 209
Tanana, 149, 221, 284
Tanana Crossing, 117
^"Zr"' 5"' '^'^^^ '^ '™y "'-
Tangent Point, 264
Temperature:
61 below, April BthI 314. 315
68^below at Black Jack's Pl,c«,
one of the lowest on record, 39
native thermometer, 39
Thank,giving Day at Black Jack's
Place, 42
Thetis coal mine, 167
TArtM, the:
at Point Hope, 103
visits Point Barrow, 240
aUo 243
Vancouver, 75, 96, 101. 108
Venisminoff (missionary), 101
Victoria Island, 23.'., 253. 307. 32S
I ircennes. D.S.S.. 304, 306
»oy^e. T-lirouj* the ConfMwil 0/
north America, Markeniis, 32S
W
Wair aright:
arrival at, 194
departure from, 201
fur industry, 196. 197
reindeer at. 186. 194
alto 124. 101. 193. 200, 203, 2M,
Wainwrighl, John (oBlcer Alot-
aoi«|,88, 194
880
INDEX
Wainwiiglit Islet, 1C«, 1*4
Wklkn Lake, M
Wslnu, 203
Wtlnu hniitliic, IM
WMtcni Union Telegraph Company
Exploration, 278
Wlinling:
lUlTwlialing, 145, IM, 224, 2S4,
23S
kletorr of vluling, 103
loea of fleet. 235
no market lor whalebone, 211
whalea wonderful creaturei, 23S
whalebone curie of Ediimol, 103
Wllion, BecklM, r*« Ontt Com-
Windowa,' eeal-gnt better than
glaH, 111
" Whiakey Jack," 74
Whittaker, Archdeacon of Yukon
Territory, 218, 321, 82«
" WooIUm," »7
Wont day of the Joaraey, MS,
288
Wrangell Iliand, 63, 304, 314
Wrangeli Land, 306
Wright, W. H., MitUiformmig a »*•
(Km, 88
Tarboroogh Inlet, 288, 287, 2*8
Yukon Plata, 11, 14
Yukon River;
cloaee early, 27
compared to Danube, 32
discovered piecemeal, 278
EpiBcopai miaeione on, 70
migration of lemmings, 228
•In 79, 223
Z
Zau Fau, 84
;0
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