The shameless diary of an explorer

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Master Motive . . . . i

II Geographical ii

Chapter I The Master Motive

This is the story of a failure. I think that success would have made it no more worth telling. It is about an exploring party, the sort that so often fails. . . .

Fountains of youth, or eldorados, or wider realms for cross and conscience — these seemed to lure a younger world to unknown regions. To-day men explore for the iron crown of science; they say that they do, at least.

But I believe that neither biology to-day, nor gold nor the creeds of old, have ever been the explorer's master motive. His real ardor is more profound. It has revealed and civilized our sphere. It stirs the thirst to discover and subdue which vests the very fiber of our race ; makes us ache for tumult and change, for strife for its own sake against big odds.

The true spirit of the explorer is a primordial restlessness. It is spurred by instincts of pre-natal being and a cloudy hereafter, to search the glamour of unknown peaks and seas and forests for assurance of man's imperfect faith in immortality. It is a creative instinct.

The explorer seldom speaks of it openly; he is not unwilling, but he cannot. He is inarticulate, like the victim of a passion. Few but he can understand his inspiration. The world asks of him purposes more obvious. He cites a widespread fervor ; of old, perhaps religion ; to-day, he will name science. And these are or have been his impulses, in part ; and the world can grasp them. Science is the natural heir to the cross as the public avatar of exploration. Each is sponsor for the Unknowable; one was, one is now, the Aladdin lamp of the Improbable.

But science is a cold ambition, remoter from our master motive than the world's old notions of exploration, vain as they would seem to-day were they not dead in us. Maybe no peaks remain, flushed with the light that forswears mortality; no unknown seas to shatter doubt with wonder. That I do not believe. For men still roam over a world too wide for any map, and when restlessness and action for its own sake inspire us no more, our race will deserve to die.

All reverence to science! Yet I know this: The elder explorers related what quickened the life and visions of their time, and quickens ours, rousing men to ever harder ventures. Few who seek the iron crown stir us so now. Few men in the street see the " use " of exploration, in the North, especially. To many, explorers seem vain men seeking short cuts to fame, or persons who waste time, energy, and wealth, to win the Impossible, to learn the Unprofitable. And this cynicism appears to be not all the fault of laymen's apathy, or of explorers' dumbness.

If the earth is smaller and tamer than in the old days, our sympathies are warmer and the whole world's heart is more alert. It craves, above all, knowledge of itself, for it is a more complex and interesting old world. The life of man as it is, naked and unshadowed, brutal maybe, life under every stress of fortune — that wins the hungry ear and the deeper charity of these present hours. And life has thus been searched and exploited almost everywhere all lands over, except: Among us who seek on enchanted rivers an answer to those underthoughts that make life at once a tragic and an ecstatic thing, who dare for nothing but the cause of daring, who follow the long trails.

Men with the masks of civilization torn off, and struggling through magic regions ruled over by the Spirit of the North or of the South ; human beings tamed by the centuries, then cast out to shift for themselves Hke the first victims of existence — they must offer the best field of all to help this knowledge of ourselves. He knows life best who has seen it nakedest, and most exotic. So he that goes plainspoken from the city to the outer waste should become indeed quite wise. He might tell how the weakling's eyes blazed with courage and reproach when his leader turned back disheartened, or in what words the athlete of the avenue may be the first to whimper at starvation; and men would sit up and see some of their children in a very, very large perspective. And in telling the truth about others, a man might reveal it about himself, which would be best of all.

The passions of the long trail bring out the best in men and the worst, and all in scarlet ; and while the law of compensation, which keeps life livable, provides that in the after-memories which form existence, only what is pleasant survives, I hold that it is unfair to nature and the blessed weaknesses which make us human to divert by one hair's breadth in any record of the trail from facts as you saw them, emotions as you felt them at their time. To distort or hide, in deference to any custom, or socalled sense of pride or honor, simply is to lie. The tragic moments in the heat of the trail's struggle, the event as it aifected you as you then were— to note that with all the passion or heroism, the beastliness or triumph, of the moment — must not such a record in the end turn out all fair? And true as can be ?

Exactly this honesty explorers to-day do not attempt. From their stories I get in my mouth a horrid taste of varnish. Modestly they derogate all heroism or cowardice in the outer places, and dryly, oh, how dryly! Whatever may beget that big perspective, that in particular is hidden — the while from the borders of beyond you hear rumors of quarrels on the floe, of heroic forbearance, of trivial impatience. But never a living man or human act ! And little science, either. A conclusion relates : The real results of this expedition will appear during the next ten years, one volume a year, printed in Latin by the society that financed us.

I do not accuse science directly of this concealment; only, science is the link between the world and the explorer, the key to what he gives it in answer to its encouragement and its instinctive interest in him. But it surely seems to me that the modem explorer deliberately avoids illuminating the world in a corner which is very dark, which he knows best. Wherein, after and beyond all others, he has chance to tell the greatest human truths, he has to all intents — deceived. If he is pledged to exactitude about his diptera, is he not obliged, in relating human deeds at all, to record as truthfully and in full how the outer waste and the ego of each companion uplifted or scarred his own? Is not this human obligation the greater one, in justice to the explorer's self as stirred by his master motive, and to the world whose encouragement unwittingly has the same source? If such a record be not as direct, as full, as frank, as his registry in science, by what hypocrisy under the sun has he right to state at all the words or acts of any fellow?

But when I proposed to reveal life as I saw it in the back of beyond, in order to realize something of that large perspective, I was met with silence, or cant. It was against the custom of exploration; it would harm the business, destroy order and discipline. It wasn't loyal to one's companions in the battle of the trail to record words and acts for which their saner selves were not responsible ; and besides, much happened in the outer places which the world had better not know, said some explorers. Everywhere I encountered the inhuman repression which one associates with science; not with that experimental science of the daring and uplifting imagination, but with that jealous sort that disputes and differentiates — a justification for deeds of inspiration, not their honest end. Loyalty to truth was gaped at. Apart from malice, such an idea was inconceivable to these persons.

Disloyal? To be insincere is disloyalty. Human nature in the large is concrete ; men are responsible beings, wherever in the world, at whatever task — else we have no need of law, and the insane expert must rule us. It is insincere to deny a man responsibility for his acts, dishonorable to pervert by gloss or omission the significance of any of his deeds,- noble or ignoble.

Custom and false standards of honor have stultified exploration. To-day the world dwells mostly on the sensational fact of winning pole or peak, oblivious that the long human struggle, inspired by that master motive which mitigates endurance and suffering, are to the explorer his real end, consciously or not. Although it needs aid from a liberal world, exploration in the true sense never was or can be a business; and order and discipline are primarily vested in the force of honest and inspired personalities. Viewed thus, it is hypocrisy to accuse outspokenness with malice. And what, to-day, I ask had the world better not know?

This Diary is an attempt to give, perhaps for the first time, a glimpse of that large perspective. Yet I went on this expedition through Alaska with no such idea in mind. I started and maintained my record with the sole idea of stating facts as I saw them, emotions as I felt them at their time. Onlv after the job was all done did its meaning show clear.

Maybe it has been a shameless task. I know that it is without malice. For heaven's sake do not read these pages with charity. Its words as they appear here were so written at the time that the events and feelings which they represent occurred; if not always in present order, or exact form of sentence, immediately from notes, and on the trail. Only clearness demanded the few insertions, public taste insignificant omissions.

I know that the whole truth is always beyond reach. Sometimes you think that there cannot be such a thing. Utter self-detachment is impossible, and the greater the human strain, the more remote. The tension of the trail casts a shadow over life, could we dispel which we should be gods. To tell the truth about other people is hardest of all. But if you are honest at it, you may reach at least one end: You will have told the truth about yourself. It is beyond the power of words or art to make any one feel exactly as I have felt a^crossing the Alaskan tundra. Afterwards, you seem to have written of stage rivers, stage swamps, property horses; of unreal acts, and words, and shifts of human feature. Under that tension, the human ego, with its warring equations, instincts, race traits, will seem to have distorted brain and hand; added futility to injustice. In the after-comforts of home, you may seem to have Hbeled companions whom in the field (under that uncontrollable restraint that all men feel beside a fellow with his mask off) you felt sure you gave less than their due. But the vision of which life, afield or by fireside, is the more searching? That in the outer waste, I think.

The journey was no polar dash, no battle with a tropic jungle. It involved no heroic struggle for life, though we were always in utter wilderness. Yet no explorer, knowing the peculiar scourges of summer travel in Alaska, as we had to undertake it, would afford to smile at us. Perhaps we were ill-equipped, incompetent. We did -the best we could with the resources at hand. At any rate, our masks of civilization again and again were torn off, and — nakedness is nakedness; and — all in all we tried our hardest. Therein lies fitness enough for an inkling of the large perspective. I know that I am an explorer only potentially, in spirit. I would not presume to try a task harder than this Diary relates.

We failed. Failure is more than the average lot of any venture. It is typical, and through its dark glass human nature appears more colorful and more complex than in the raw light of achievement. So I think that failure, more than less, helps the significance of this record. That our task may since have been accomplished bears not at all upon it. The fiascos could reveal more of the big perspective than the successes of exploration, and give it more honest touch and a brighter future vv^ith all men.

We of this journey had no mutual obligations, except those that bind laborers in the same shop. I am under no debt of sentiment or gratitude, subjective or material, to the men of this Diary. How to do each day's work with least friction of limb and soul — that was our one problem. Restraint was imperative overtly on the trail, and there alone was exigent for physical reasons. How each of us helped or hindered the day's work is all my story. We were not friends in any sense admitting sentiment. Yet I believe that I have given, and now give, the men with whom I traveled no reason to be my enemies. I believe that no motives of any sort distort my written record, except the elements of my own temperament and heritages. And I hope that in reporting any inherent vanity in my fellows, I have hit off hardest my own insufferable egotism.

Chapter II Geographical

Our aim was to reach the top of Mt. McKinley, the highest point of North America, which Hfts 20,300 feet of ice over the wastes of west Alaska. This was really a double task. With the means at hand, we knew that to gain the base of the mountain might be hardly easier than to climb it.

A dozen other lands, a dozen other ventures, could have served the purport of this Diary as well. Mt. McKinley and Alaska, as such, are not vital to it. Yet since it does deal with them, their geography must be understood.

Alaska, physically, is more Asiatic than American. Its three main mountain chains run west and east, like all big uplifts in the old world. No northwest-southeast, or northeast-southwest ranges ( Cordilleras), which are typical of the New World, go west of Lynn Canal, where the Cascade Mountains die and end our systems. The Alaskan alpine region lies entirely south of the Yukon River (which cuts the country in half from east to west), north of which the ranges are lower and chaotic. Alaska is a thumb of Asia, deceivingly detached from it by shallow Behring Sea, which is not a continental boundary. Alaska appears to stick out west from us, while really it hangs eastward from Siberia.

Think of these three ranges as half circles, and you may see alpine Alaska by arranging them thus : To the right, east on the map, place the first segment, so that it bulges to the north. This is the St. Elias-Chugach range, which borders the Pacific Ocean for five hundred miles, from Lynn Canal to the east shore of Cook Inlet, where it ends. To the left, west, place the second, in line with the first segment, but bow it south. This is the Peninsula-Aleutian range, which starts on the west shore of Cook Inlet, and, ridging the Alaskan Peninsula as it points southwest, is submerged to become the Aleutian Islands, which for six hundred miles separate Behring Sea from the Pacific, and all but touch Siberia, Between them runs an arm of the Sea — Cook Inlet — continued north as the valley of a river. But the third arc place thus : To the right, and parallel to the Chugach range, bulging north, but generally two hundred miles inland, and so that it reaches around the sea arm and river valley to touch the Peninsula range at its start. These are the Alaskan Mountains, the greatest sub-arctic chain in the world, and McKinley is its apex. The Sushitna River drains the valley north of the Inlet, forming thus the nearest tidewater route to the great mountain.

McKinley lies at the northernmost point of its range's arc, a few miles west. Approaching from the east, peaks of 10,000 to 12,000 feet touch the big southern tributary of the Yukon, the Tanana. They reach no further toward the Arctic Circle. Here the heights break a little, and Cantwell River eats into them, south from the Tanana. On its west bank, the peaks tower again, quickly lifting McKinley from a 12,000 foot ridge. Now they bear off southwest, with Mount Hunter, 15,000 feet; Mount Foraker, 17,100 feet; Mount Russell, 11,350 feet. And imperceptibly the chain is joined to the Peninsula heights, about the head of the south fork of Kuskokwim River.

Thus, more than fancifully, McKinley is the pivot of the world. By latitude its topmost high mountain, McKinley rises at the middle of that bar of land, Alaska, connecting the two dry masses that form our earth. Southeast it scatters alps toward the Wrangel volcano and our dwarfed cordilleras; southwest strews volcanoes — Iliamna, Pavloff, the new-bom Bogosloff isles — till the smoke of Seguam and many another sinks slowly under the sea off Kamchatka.

Cook Inlet is one hundred and fifty miles from McKinley, as the raven flies. From the trading store at Tyonek, on its west shore, the mountain is visible sometimes as a ghostly cap of snow over the Sushitna swamps, and on clear days from far south at sea, on the hill behind the Russian church at Kodiak Island, a tiny golden exhalation. The old explorers, Vancouver, Captain Cook, La Perouse, saw McKinley six score years ago; so did Baron Wrangel, Baranoff, and many a Byzantine Archimandrite. Native Aleut and Kenaitze, with proper awe, called it *'Bulshaia" (Russian "bulshoi" — "great") and adventurers, in the first enchanting struggles with gold and death, shrouded it with all camp-fire romance.

Yet none guessed that Bulshaia dwarfed Chimborazo, St. Elias, Orizaba, till Mr. W. A. Dickey, common prospector and Princeton graduate, gave proofs, renaming it McKinley from the Sushitna Valley in 1896. And it was Robert Muldrow of the Geological Survey, following Dickey, who measured the peak in 1898. Captain Herron, lost in the Kuskokwim tundras the next year, approached McKinley and Foraker from the west. But it remained for Alfred H. Brooks of the Geological Survey to reach its base, in 1902. He climbed to about 7,000 feet the outlying range, 10,000 feet high, which separates it from the Yukon-Kusokwim watershed. I had seen McKinley twice in 1900, from the flank of the Wrangel volcano, and from the Ketchumstock Hills on Forty-mile River in early winter.

Where McKinley rises on the outer periphery of their arc, the Alaskan Mountains are more than forty miles broad, leaping abruptly from the low swamps on either side. The range is ramified like the outspread arms of an octopus by probably the greatest inland glaciers of the world outside the Antarctic continent.

Between actual climbing-base and summit, Mt. McKinley has a greater relief than any other of the world's mountains. It has also the longest snow and ice slope. The real base of McKinley is only 2,600 feet above the sea; perpetual snow line, to which horses can be taken, is at 5,000 feet. Most high mountains give you 7,000 feet, at most, of snow and ice work; McKinley demands 15,000. Excessive glaciation has quickly eroded the uplift into steep amphitheaters with sheer ridges. All glaciers are "hanging" in their upper parts, leaving nowhere a cliff unclothed. Snow slides, snow and rain, are almost incessant. In Alaska, weather conditions are sub-artic. Excepting Mt. St. Elias, all big ascents heretofore have been made in temperate, or warmer, regions, from high base camps, reached by pack beasts over solid trails. (Mt. Ruwenzori, too, may be an exception.) Aconcagua, 223,080 feet, was climbed without a foot being placed in snow, from a 14,000- foot base, to which mules were taken. Mustaghata, 25,600 feet, was ascended to 20,600 feet with yaks. Effective height in the Himalayas is even less.

And almost as baffling was the route which we had to take to the base of McKinley. We planned to travel by pack-train from Tyonek, on Cook Inlet, up the western tributaries of the Sushitna, across the Alaskan range to the head of the south fork of the Kuskokwim, and follow along its face northeast to the mountain foot ; i. e., to follow the sides of a right angle pointed west, in order to reach a point almost due north of Cook Inlet. This was, in the main. Brook's route, and Herron had followed it in part, although we knew that most traces of their trails would be obliterated. The distance was about 450 miles, and Brooks had covered it with horses in seven weeks from Tyonek. The first half was to be over the tundras of the Sushitna Valley, the remainder across higher ground on the west side of the Alaskan range.

We were forced to travel thus in order to reach the northwest face of the mountain. Brooks had proved it accessible, and It was the side least surrounded by peaks and glaciers. It seemed from every point of view the best from which to ascend. Following up tributaries of the Kuskokwim and Yukon (Tanana) Rivers would have landed us of a7i Explorer 17

within a hundred miles of this northwest face; but we had neither time nor money to take a packtrain, which was necessary anyhow, to their heads of navigation. By ascending the Sushitna River, we could have reached the southeast side of Mc- Kinley, that most thickly insulated by ice and mountains, and worst in climate. Over Brooks' route we might gain the foot of McKinley in the single summer at hand, with a month for reconnoitering and ascents.

I dreaded that first half, the Sushitna tundra. Tundra, strictly speaking, is the coastal marshland of Siberia, yet any vast, low, and ill-drained country in the North, forested or no, is called tundra. It was considered almost madness to venture into the interior overland from Tyonek. Stories were told of men who had set out from there to be driven back crazed by mosquitoes. I had traveled over tundra in Alaska, and knew its hateful yellow moss bordered by white skeleton spruces, its treacherous ponds sprinkled with white flowers, its willow thickets concealing abysses of red muck. The buzz of bull-dog flies, the hot anger and desperation of burdened cayuses kicking helplessly in a mire, were familiar enough. But I believed that to reach our mountain was just the old, old act of hitting the trail, hitting very, very hard, and staying with it.

The ascent seemed to be more doubtful. Ours must be a dash to the top, taking long chances, I thought, on success. Our time for reconnoitering in uncertain weather was too short. McKinley was a very large mountain, quite unexplored, deeply bedded in a great range. St. Elias was not conquered until the fifth try, and then by trained alpine men, at a cost of $50,000. Ours was to be a first attempt, by men of no alpine experience, who had hardly $5,000. But the men who had failed on St. Elias declared that alpinists would have succeeded there no better; and I believe that Prof. Russell would have climbed St. Elias if he had had the exceptionally fine weather which brought the Italian Duke of the Abruzzi success there.

But our limitations made me no less eager for the adventure. I longed, at any cost, to return to Alaska, whose hard freedom I have always loved better than anything else on earth.

Chapter III The Outfit, Human And Material

Who we of this expedition were, our measure of fitness for this job — that the Diary should tell. Here is no place to be personal, except on the surface, which is necessary.

The Professor, our leader, was a man of polar experience, hardly versed in the craft of trail or woods, or packing horses. He was our topographer and meteorologist; but the top of McKinley, not science, was our prime object, he told me; and that once we were at the foot, he was certain that the summit would be ours, at the rate of 5,000 feet a day. I believe in looking hardest at the uncertainties of a struggle, not letting the glamour of its sure victories dazzle you. The Professor was more than forty years old ; married ; of German descent ; fairhaired, large- featured.

He chose me as geologist, and to be second in command. I have that fervor for geology, backed by small book knowledge, which blesses all habitual wanderers in the chaotic North. I had been an adventurer on the Edmonton trail to the Klondike in 1898, where a fifth of us died, and two years later had explored the Wrangel volcano, two hundred miles east of McKinley. I was unmarried, twentysix, Yankee.

Of the four other members of our party, the Professor picked two, and two were casually included on the way to Cook Inlet.

^^..wr^^H The first I call Simon. He was a Jew. The Professor asked me if I objected on that score to his joining us. I said that I did not. I have the racial, not the religious, repugnance to Jews. I had never relished their race-selfishness, and scouted their tenacity under physical and mental stress. The Diary shows how wrong I was here in one regard, at least. But in my ardor to get North, I persuaded myself that such natural instincts were prejudices, and unworthy. Simon's only adventuring had been with the summer session of a North Polar fiasco, on which he made a collection of flowers. So he was to be our botanist. He was small, dark, rotund, and twenty-one.

c^t. Next, was Fred King, of Montana. He had packed the Government horses on Brooks' Geological Survey trip to McKinley. He joined the Professor in eastern Washington, where our leader had picked and bought from Indians fifteen packhorses, some broken, some unbroken. I first saw him in Seattle. He was a small man, with a fragile forehead and clear eyes; unmarried; in the midthirties. He had spent his Hfe packing and trapping in the Bitter Root Mountains. "Would you know about horses?" he asked me when we met. I asked his opinion of our beasts. ''Does the Professor know a lot about horses?" he asked again. I said that I did not know. He went on: ''I think they'll make the trip, but they're not just the animals I'd have picked."

Though discredited for Alaska, I thought it best to take an alpine guide. We had neither time nor money to send to Europe for one, but we knew that Swiss guides, although with second-class certificates, had been imported into Canada by a railroad. I went to Banff and found that they were not for rent ; failed to get one. And the horse-rustlers there said: ''You don't want no Swiss guides. They're handy high up on rocks and ice, but lose themselves in the woods. Six weeks across Alasky swamps? They'd die or quit you the first day."

In Seattle we outfitted. I hate it — lists of grub, clothing, saddlery, pots ; musing on how neatly this new poncho buckle will free your arm, that cheese-cloth lining make your tent mosquito-proof. We clicked and condemned each neat, new, folding device that will not last a minute on the tundra. We bought, briefly, for grub: Eighty-six pounds per month per man, the government Alaskan ration; mos.ly flour, beans, bacon, and sugar, with tea, which the dimate makes you crave, and little coffee — food least in bulk, greatest in nourishment; sixteen hundred pounds in all, for six men for three months, the least time that we could be on the trail. This is the pioneer-prospectors' fare, taught by experience. We let alone all tinned food, except to pamper ourselves with a few cans of milk and butter; tins give least sustenance in proportion to weight and bulk, pack abominably through soft ground and rough, and we had to travel fast and light. We had no use for patent or condensed grub, except some erbswurst pea-soup — an experiment, though it is German army emergency ration. We counted on killing sheep, moose, and caribou on the north side of the Alaskan range, where King said that they were thick. We took arctic pemmican, two cheeses, and a box of biscuits to eat on the mountain; primus stove, two spirit lamps, wood alcohol and kerosene to cook with above snow line ; no stimulant at all — I have never seen and cannot imagine a case in the North where it would be of use — some drugs, I forget which, as we never used them.

Clothing: Boot-rubbers and heavy asbestostanned boots for the trail, light boots for the mountain; wool underwear, overalls, jumpers, German socks, rubber sheeting. For the mountain: Four real eiderdown bag-quilts, and much st re-enough arctic dress, hair ropes, ice-axes. For horses : twelve saw-buck saddles, three Abercrombies, hobbles, cinch-rope, sling rope, oiled pack-covers, a cowbell, and a double blanket and a half for each brute — we slept in these on the trail, taking but one real sleeping-bag. A canvas tent for four; for the mountain, a conical Shantung silk thing, designed by the Professor. Guns : A Savage .3033, the Professor's Greenland .44 Winchester relic, and Simon's arsenal — a Winchester .22 and Colt automatic .38. Instruments: Aneroids, thermometers, Abeny level, but, I think, no sextant or artificial horizon; no mercurial barometer, anyhow, though the Professor filled two huge boxes to torture their pack beast in the name of science.