A winter circuit of our Arctic coast; a narrative of a journey with dog-sleds around the entire Arctic coast of Alaska

Front matter

INTER CIRCl

UR ARCTIC CO

Ht

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface vii

I From Fort Yukon to Kotzebue Sound ... 3

Part I From Fort Yukon To Kotzebue Sound

Being 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 procurable 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 Fort 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 between, and the 1st May as the latest safe day for my return 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 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 closing indeed, eight days earlier than the previous year, seventeen days 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 accompanied by a sharp cold spell, which was, of course, 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 propitious.

Yet was the start deferred, and, for awhile, the whole enterprise in jeopardy. On the 14th October my companion, 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 longer. 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

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 understanding that his preparation should proceed. 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 him 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 before 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 completely 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, 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? Walter had been absent during the latter half of September on a moose hunt. He went up the Yukon about an hundred and fifty miles to the Charley river on a steamboat 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 triumphantly 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 he 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, it was impossible to determine. But where did the infection come from?

However it was, a load was lifted from my heart and from my spirits when it was decided that he could accompany 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 to accompany us for the first 200 miles that Walter might be relieved in every possible way, and had undertaken to see that our convalescent, only nine days out of bed, had hot soup from the thermos bottles every two hours. All preparations and dispositions had long since been made and only the actual loading of the sleds remained. It was one o'clock on Thursday 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 Eskimos, 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 white man with an unsuspected commission from a Fairbanks 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 Fairbanks to Nome, was telephoned across the Seward peninsula to Candle creek, appeared in the bulletin there, was carried by the mail to Kotzebue and thence all along the coast ; and almost 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 nuisance 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 often 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 was 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 opportunities for the despatch of letters I should have during the winter, but no opportunity whatever of receiving any. The anxieties of my affairs fell off me like a mantle as I realized this. What I could do to make provision for the hospital at Fort Yukon, which threatened to be in financial straits ere I returned, I had done by writing of a pamphlet to be printed and circulated. Such arrangement 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 me but the business of the journey and what thereto appertained. Not a letter in six months! 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 complete cessation, it did not trouble me at all. What an accumulation I should find upon my return ! 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 carried 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 mankind I had rather have, and he miraculously restored when it had seemed inevitable that he be left behind ! I ran over the work we would do together. In little India paper volumes we had all Shakespeare's plays, Macaulay's essays, the Decline and Fall (my own steady reading on the trail for years but this winter to be 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. Following 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 judge that his anticipations were as pleasant as mine, though of a different cast. Keen for the journey as I was, I think they centred 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. He 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 for me to think of him as a man, approaching the end of his twenty-fifth year as he was; he was always to me the boy that I 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 delightful 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 contemptible grasp of the great events of history by stringing together these narratives and hanging them on certain pegs of dates that I had driven home. Some time since I read a condemnation of these books on the score that they conveyed false views of history, but a false view or a true view of any history depends largely upon the standpoint and I suppose Henty was as much entitled to his as another. Beside, what do a boy's " views" matter? The thing is to get the information into his head, to fire and fan his imagination, 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 Henty than in the sordid and cynical school prevailing 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 boyhero, whose footsteps echo down all the corridors of time, "Cedric," and when a new story was begun, whether of ancient Egypt or of the Crusades or of the American Eevolution, Walter would say "Here comes Cedric," when the gallant and fortunate youth made a new reincarnation 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 form 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 perhaps the deliberation of the reading contributed. Walter was years past Henty, but he told me that in his history work at school the recollection of these stories had filled out the skeletons of text-books and had often given him a surprising advantage over his fellows. "Sometimes I knew what the teacher was talking about when none of the others did," he said. Geometry 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 more. 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 indicated, and I was up at five and soon had breakfast ready. Our course was a familiar one as far as the Allakaket; over the frozen lakes and swamps of the Yukon Flats to the Chandelar village, sixty miles or so away, up the Chandelar river for eighty or ninety miles, over another portage of twenty-five miles to the south fork of the Koyukuk, over a low pass and down a stream to Coldfoot on the middle fork of the latter river, and then down that river an hundred and twenty miles to the Allakaket mission. Thence we had some sixty miles up its tributary the 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 up the Arctic coast of about an hundred and seventy-five miles and we should be 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 than a few inches deep, which was a drawback on the rough portages, would be a great advantage on the smooth river surfaces, and we might hope to have that advantage not only on the Chandelar but on the Koyukuk, if we pressed on. Through scattered brush, and scrub spruce, and burned blackened trunks of a forest fire, over 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 we reached the point where the trail to it leaves the main trail, we found a great fire burning, 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 cutting 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 Eobert John's comfortable tworoomed 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; altogether 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 a great convenience, and the wrist, I think, is 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 watch had better be detached and put 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 was 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 become the normal dial. I had worn my watch on my wrist ever since I came to Alaska, but I was new to the luminous 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 because 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 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 through the woods year after year, but there is likely to be a different approach to a river every season. The Chandelar is notorious for "overflows" 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 descend to safe ice. This year the descent was particularly abrupt and there was open water close to the safe ice at the bottom. A toboggan can go over these headlong 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 descent 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 hospitality, to stand aside and let them unhitch the dogs, unload the sleds, pack the stuff into the cabin, put the empty vehicles and the harness high up on some cache-platform 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 salmon run, 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 dogsalmon 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 j 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 denounce 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 "camouflaged") it is in reality only one more instance of the way in which the people of Alaska are deprived of their country's resources by commercial greed. A government which permits the natives of the Yukon and its tributaries to be robbed of their natural supply must presently face the alternative of feeding them itself or letting them starve. Such fluctuation of the fishing from year to year as is due to the operations of nature may be expected and must be endured, but the cannery will cause a steady and increasing diminution until at last the natives 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 CIECUIT

minated because a greedy packing company, already grown rich on the coast, needs the fish of the inland rivers also 1 *

Should it hear 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 conditions but likely to be normal now. For the present we were provided. 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 Allakaket 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 Bettles.