insides" of the provincial press of the United States.
FORT YUKON
The next Monday we started again, this time with a toboggan and with a man instead of a boy for guide, and in three days of only moderate difficulty we reached Fort Yukon.
Fort Yukon, though it holds no attraction for the ordinary visitor or the summer tourist on the river, is a place of much interest to those who know the history of Alaska. While it is purely a native village, with no white population save the traders and the usual sprinkling of men that hang around native villages, it is yet the oldest white man's post on the Yukon River, save the post established by the Russians at Nulato, five or six hundred miles lower down. The Hudson Bay Company established itself here in 1846, and that date serves as the year one in making calculations and determining ages to this day. It is a fixed point in time that every native knows of. Any old man can tell you whether he was born before or after that date, and, if before, can pick out some boy that is about the age he was when the event occurred. The massacre at Nulato in 1851 serves in a similar way for the lower river.
After the Purchase, and the determination of the longitude of Fort Yukon by Mr. Raymond in 1869—who made the first steamboat journey up the Yukon on that errand—the Hudson Bay Company moved three times before they succeeded in getting east of the 141st meridian, and at the point reached on the third move, the New Rampart House on the Porcupine River, only a few hundred yards beyond the boundary-line, they remained until the gold excitement on the Yukon and the journeying of the natives to new posts on that river rendered trading unprofitable; then they withdrew to the Mackenzie. The oldest white men's graves in Alaska, again with the exception of Nulato, are those in the little Hudson Bay cemetery near Fort Yukon.
ARCHDEACON MACDONALD
Fort Yukon is also the site of the oldest missionary station on the river, unless there were earlier visits of Russian priests to the lower river, of which there seems no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman of the Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald was a remarkable man. Married to a native wife, he translated the whole Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his translations are in general use on the upper river to this day. He reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar, taught the Indians to read and write their own tongue, and dignified it by the gift of the great literature of the sacred books. The language is, of course, a dying one—English is slowly superseding it—but it seems safe to say that for a generation or two yet to come it will be the basis of the common speech of the people and the language of worship. It is chiefly in matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking its place, though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit of the civilised race that blackguard English is the first English that is learned.
There seems ground to question whether the substitution of a smattering of broken English for the flexibility and picturesque expressiveness of an indigenous tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable that the world will be the better or the happier. The advance of civilisation would be a great thing to work for if we were quite sure what we meant by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions, it seems to mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. and teaching the women to wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude toward the native language and all native customs. The less intelligent grade of missionary sometimes falls into the same easy rut. So letters pass through the post-offices addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs. Monkey Bill," "Miss Sally Shortandirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on a steamer, of a native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat and a blood-stained parkee gutting salmon on the river bank.
The nobler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to labour for God-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather than imitation white men and white women. An Indian who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in hunting and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy, even though he be entirely ignorant of English and have acquired no taste for canned fruit and know not when Columbus discovered America, may be very much of a man in that station of life in which it has pleased God to call him.
Christmas and the Fourth of July are the Indian's great holidays, the one just after the best moose hunting and the other just before the salmon run. It may be supposed that there were always great feasts at the winter and summer solstices, though now he is sufficiently devout at the one and patriotic at the other. At these seasons, and for weeks before and after, Fort Yukon gathers a large number of Indians. It is the native metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred miles, and what may be termed its permanent population of one hundred and fifty is doubled and sometimes trebled by contingents from the Chandalar, the Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country. Many families of the "uncivilised," self-respecting kind, to which reference has been made, come in from outlying points, and the contrast between them and their more sophisticated kinfolk of the town is all in their favour.
JIMMY
Such a gathering had already taken place in preparation for the Christmas holidays when we reached Fort Yukon on the 15th of December. It would have been pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were due two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that feast, if by any means we could get there. So we lingered but the two days necessary to equip ourselves. Jimmy had torn our bedding to pieces on the night of the mishap; it was lashed on the outside of the load, and he had scratched and clawed it to make a nest for himself until fur from the robe and feathers from the quilts were all over the trail. The other dogs, not so warmly coated as he, had been content to sleep in the snow. Jimmy's character was gradually revealing itself. A well-bred trail dog will not commit the canine sacrilege of invading the sled. That is a "Siwash" dog's trick. So there was fresh bedding to manufacture, as well as supplies for two hundred miles to get together.
A mail once a month went at that time from Fort Yukon to the Koyukuk, and there was little other travel. The course lay fifty or sixty miles across country to the Chandalar River, about one hundred miles up that stream, and then across a divide to the South Fork of the Koyukuk, and across another to the Middle Fork, on which Coldfoot is situated. It is not possible to procure any supplies, save sometimes a little fish for dog food and that not certainly, between Fort Yukon and Coldfoot, so that provision for the whole journey must be taken.
THE CHANDALAR
A new Indian guide had been engaged as far as Coldfoot, and we set out—three men, two toboggans, and seven dogs; four on the larger vehicle and three on the smaller, one of the dogs brought by our guide. Three miles from Fort Yukon we crossed the Porcupine River and then plunged into the wilderness of lake and swamp and forest that stretches north of the Yukon. A portage trail, as such a track across country is called to distinguish it from a river trail, has the advantage of such protection from storm as its timbered stretches afford. For miles and miles the route passes through scrub spruce that has been burned over, with no prospect but a maze of charred poles against the snow, some upright, others at every angle of inclination. Then comes a lake, with difficulty in finding the trail on its wind-swept surface and sometimes much casting about to discover where it leaves the lake again, and then more small burned timber. Wherever the route is through woods, living or dead, it is blazed; when it strikes the open, one is often at a loss. After three or four days of such travel, sometimes reaching an old cabin for the night, sometimes pitching the tent, one is rejoiced at the sight of distant mountains and at the intimation they bring that the inexpressible dreariness of the Yukon Flats is nearly past; and presently the trail opens suddenly upon the broad Chandalar.
