Chapter IX: The Land of the Yeehats

On the various trips they had made from their base of supplies on the Big Black River the boys had kept a sharp lookout for marks or signs or other visual evidence which might indicate in some way the location of the treasure they sought. Jack’s _hunch_ was responsible for his belief that so great a store of gold would not, in fact could not, have been abandoned without some clew which would serve as a key to its recovery.

They often dug off the snow from a pile of dirt which they thought might cover the sacks of gold; as wood was frequently hard to get, they couldn’t thaw it out and, consequently, had to work like “niggers” with their picks and shovels to penetrate it. And to what purpose?--usually only to find it was the dump of some discarded mine. But a gold seeker wots not of either hardship or work if his efforts give promise of bringing about the desired result. And they hoped great hopes.

Again they would find a _cache_ (pronounced _cash_) but it was not of the kind that is formed of a hole in the ground, or a cavity under a pile of stones, but a box-like structure erected on poles set in the ground. Some of the better ones had notched logs which served as steps and these were set up at an angle on one side so that access to the cache could be made with greater ease and lesser agility. These caches were used by prospectors and miners who transported their outfits on their backs, or hauled them on sleds, and who had to double back on the trail time and time again before they got to their journey’s end.

In nearly all of these caches the stores were of ancient vintage, a few of them dating back to the pioneers of ’94 or perhaps a little later, and those who made the caches never returned to claim their contents either because they found they could get along without them, or were killed or died, or grew disheartened and made their way back to the river towns of the Yukon. In only a couple of them did they find fresh stores and in one of these, curiously enough, there was a _poke_[5] of gold nuggets. Its owner, in all probability, had laid it down when he was stocking the cache and forgot to take it with him when he went.

[5] A poke is a small bag usually of deerskin.

Neither did the boys take it, nor disturb the stores in any of the caches they found, for it is an unwritten law in the barren north that no man shall touch anything cached which belongs to another.

On the fifth trip out they drove east, or more accurately east by south, crossed the International boundary line and headed straight for Mount Burgess forty miles away. As Jack had said, they cared not whether they found the gold in Alaska, in the Yukon Territory or on top of the North Pole, as long as they found it. After they had covered about thirty miles they ran into a scrub forest and the first thing Jack spied was a pair of moose antlers lashed to a tree.

Both he and Bill thought this a very strange circumstance but they presently concluded that it had been put there by some hunter though for what purpose they could not guess. After going half-a-mile farther into the woods they came to another pair of moose antlers likewise lashed to a tree; this interested them in dead earnest and they began to investigate accordingly. Ordinarily when a trail is blazed through the woods a bit of the bark of the trees is chipped off at short intervals so that those who go or come cannot go astray but must find their way there and back, let come whatever may.

But here was a trail blazed differently from any they had ever seen or heard of, in that at considerable distances apart the antlers of a moose lashed to a tree pointed the way, but what that way led to neither Jack nor Bill had the remotest idea. Sometimes the antlers were so far apart, or led off at such angles, that they had to hunt for an hour or more for the next one.

“What, I’m askin’ you as man to man, does it mean? Are we gettin’ near it?” questioned Bill, blinking his blue eyes.

“I don’t know,” replied Jack soberly, though hoping against hope that it was the sign they sought; “but it is queer, isn’t it?”

“Let’s keep right on,” was Bill’s solemn advice.

“Mush on there, you huskies!” yelled Jack; “double rations of fish for you if we find it.”

“Ten rations of fish, three times a day fer life if we finds it, says I,” came from Bill.

It is not known positively whether Sate could count up to ten or not but he gave Bill an awful look which in husky language meant “cut out that loose talk and maybe each of us will get a piece of fish for supper anyway,” and with that he and his mates mushed on as fast as their masters could pick out the trail.

They kept this up the best part of the day when their quest ended at a log cabin not unlike their own, and over whose door was the largest pair of bull-moose antlers the boys had ever seen. The boys, who had been building high their hopes on something far less tangible than a clew, were disappointed to the quick but they had the right kind of stuff in them and so never batted an eye.

They were greeted by the barking and howling of many dogs and what with the noise their own teams made it sounded as if pandemonium had broken loose. Then Joseph Cook, hunter, trapper, Indian Agent and sometime gold seeker, otherwise familiarly known as Bull Moose Joe, for he had brought down more moose than any other living man, appeared at the door and gave them a warm welcome.

“But why all the antlers lashed to the trees?” Jack queried after they had established comrade-like relations.

“I have blazed the trail to my cabin with antlers so that he who chances this way with his eyes open can find me.”

Bull Moose Joe was a man who stood six foot in his moccasins, was of medium build and as straight as an Indian. He looked as if he might have stepped out of the great West in the days of the fifties for he wore his hair long, had a mustache and a goatee. As usual with white men up there he must needs have the news from _down under_, no matter how stale it was, and then, also as usual, the conversation just naturally drifted over to the channel of gold. It was then that Bull Moose Joe gave the boys the greatest jolt they had had in all their varied but brief career in the gold fields.

“I take it you boys are looking for the same thing I came up to look for ten years ago,” he said in an off-hand way.

“Yes, it’s gold we’re after,” replied Jack.

“Gold in moosehide sacks piled up like cordwood!” he added, watching the effect of his words on the boys.

And the effect was truly electrical for their faces became rigid, their eyes glassed over and they felt the very blood in their arteries congeal into water-ice.

“And--and--did you find it?” asked Jack when he had recovered his powers of speech a little.

“Yes, that’s what we want to know,” Bill gurgled as if his gullet was choked up.

Bull Moose Joe pulled a couple of times on his pipe, watched the hot smoke ascend and dissolve away just as had his dreams of gold. He laughed softly. He was in no hurry to answer but to the boys the moments seemed like an age.

“No,” he said finally, “I never found it though I searched diligently for it winter and summer for the first five years I was here. I speak the _Hupa_ tongue which is the tongue of the _Athapascans_ and I learned to talk it so that I could find out what the Indians knew about it.

“There was once a tribe of Indians, who lived hereabouts and they were different from any of the Indians that are living in the Yukon or Alaska to-day, for they were as fierce and bloodthirsty as the Apaches _down under_. Among our natives here there is a legend about a pocket of gold that was found by these Indians long before the gold seekers came on to it.

“Then hunters and trappers from the _Hudson Bay Company_ pushed their way across the desolate wastes of upper Canada and coming upon this tribe they killed them and took the gold from them. Before they could get the metal out of the country they were attacked by the Yeehats, another band of Indians, and, in turn, lost their lives. These latter Indians _cached_ the gold in a pile of stones but how long it remained there it is hard to say for the Indians now living seem not to know.

“Many years after, when men swarmed over Chilcoot Pass and White Pass like so many black flies, floated down the Yukon River and on to the Klondike, a miner named John Thornton and a couple of _pards_, left the others and pushed farther north. And then, like the fools for luck they were, they discovered the _cache_ and in it the pile of nuggets that is worth millions.

“How to get it over to the Yukon River and down under in safety were their only worries but they were big ones. They were rich beyond the dreams of the wildest stampeder and so to lessen the chances of loss by any means they took their time and laid the most painstaking plans.

“First they hunted the moose and made sacks of the hides; into these they packed the gold nuggets fifty pounds to the sack, and there were five hundred sacks which were worth millions. No sooner had they started than the Yeehats swooped down on them and although Thornton and his men put up a desperate fight they fell before the larger number of Indians and the moosehide sacks of gold stayed right where they found them.

“In a few years the Yeehats as a tribe were practically exterminated by starvation and disease and so the gold is still here, but exactly where, no one knows. But sometime it will be found again and if those who strike it are luckier than the others they will get it out; but that time has not yet come. To keep me going I began to trap and hunt and a year or so ago the _Minister of the Interior_ made me Indian Agent for this part of the Yukon.”

“How did you come to take up moose-hunting?” Jack asked him.

“I calculated that when I found the gold I wouldn’t want to wait until I killed the moose needed to make the new sacks I should need, so I began to hunt them long ago and there they are,” and he pointed to a pile of finished sacks over in the corner. “You see I took time by the forelock.

“There’s only one other man up here that has any kind of a reputation as a moose-hunter other than myself and that’s Moosehide Mike who lives somewhere over in the Klondike River district. I met him a few years ago at a potlatch but as soon as we found out that each was looking for the same pot of gold we didn’t hit it up very well together.”

When the boys left Bull Moose Joe’s cabin they were on pins and needles, for their thoughts were of the most conflicting nature. Their belief that the gold was there was now for the first time fixed to a certainty; on the other hand what ghost of a chance had they of finding it when an old timer like Bull Moose Joe who had lived there for years and covered the ground in winter and summer had not unearthed it?

“We won’t be quitters anyway,” announced Jack, “we’ll keep right on as per schedule.”

“You said it,” affirmed his partner.

As they had met with quite a few Indians during their sojourn at Circle and had since run into several Indian villages, the boys had acquired a fair vocabulary of the _Chinook jargon_; which is a simple universal language formed of a lot of heterogeneous words which every Indian and white man understands and by which they are able to hold intelligible though limited conversation.

For instance, in the Chinook jargon the word _English_ is called _Boston_; to go toward the shore is called _Friday_; a big lot of anything is expressed by saying _hi-ya_; a vile native alcoholic drink is known as _hootchenoo_, and from this latter word comes the word _hootch_ which is used by the frontiersmen everywhere. _Do you understand_, or _you do understand_, is _kum-tux_; anything to eat is _muck-a-muck_; a strong person or animal is _skookum_; a friend, _tillacum_, and so on.

With a vocabulary of a couple of dozen words of Chinook the boys were able to get along fairly well with any of the Indian tribes they happened to meet. In all of the Indian villages they came to everything was quiet and peaceful excepting the fiendish howling and barking of the half-starved dogs. There was nothing to indicate the cruelty and ferociousness that marked the Yeehats and the Indians who lived in these parts before them.

Jack and Bill easily made friends with the Indians they came in contact with for they bought dried fish of them for their teams, gave them a few provisions where the need was great and Jack always carried his medicine case and treated the sick for such ailments as were not beyond his poor ability. These latter he had to leave for the _medicine man_, or _Shamen_, as he is called, to kill or cure.

One afternoon as they neared an Indian village of considerable size near the head waters of the Tatonduk River they met with whole families of Indians and on scraping up an acquaintance with some of them the boys gathered the information that they were going to a _potlatch_.

Now about all that the Indians of this region of Alaska do, outside of trapping and hunting, is to eat, drink and be merry, provided of course, they have the food and hootchenoo to do it with, for lacking these integers the resultant product, that is, unalloyed joy, could not be had. Among the Indians who were going to the _potlatch_ was a half-breed boy who spoke English a little having learned it from Bull Moose Joe and other white hunters and trappers, and Jack promptly annexed him with the gift of a knife.

When Jack asked the lad his name he said that the white men called him _Kloshsky_, but that his right name was _Montegnard_. Now _Klosh_ in Chinook means _good_ but where the _sky_ came from was not so easy to guess, unless he was nicknamed by some one of Semitic persuasion.

Kloshsky told the boys that the _potlatch_ was a _hi-yu_ feast with _hyas_ fun, and that it was going to be given by a big man of the _Yikyak_ tribe who wanted to be chief. The word _potlatch_, he explained, really means _gift_ and that after much feasting, drinking, dancing and wrestling the man-who-would-be-chief and whose name was _Montegnais_, would give away everything he owned to his guests.

“Let’s declare ourselves in on this _potlatch_ thing,” said Bill.

“Not a bad idea at all,” admitted Jack. And so they followed the crowd.

Friends and relatives of the man-who-would-be-chief came from miles and miles around and the journey finally ended at an Indian village in the center of which was a big log house nearly as large as that of the Grand Palace Hotel back at Circle. Into it the visitors made their way and Jack and Bill went with them.

Talk about the decorations for a Halloween party! why, boy, nothing a white mind ever conceived of could begin to come up to the embellishments of this great hall. In the middle there was a wonderful bird that reached from the floor to the ceiling, nearly, and the like of which nature had never made in all her seven million years of experience. From the ceiling there hung curiously shapen birds, beasts and human beings that for fearsomeness outdid anything the boys had ever seen. As Bill said, “it was enough to scare a fellow half-to-death.”

On poles, which were arranged in a circle around the giant bird, the finest blankets, the costliest furs and other articles prized by the Indians were displayed and these, Kloshsky told the boys, were the presents which the man-who-would-be-chief was to give away.

When all had assembled the _potlatch_ came to order. The big man was gorgeously dressed in ceremonial clothes and carried a long wand. Around him gathered his lieutenants (they would be so called down under) and they were also outfitted in ceremonial clothes.

Then came the orchestra which consisted of half-a-dozen men with their tom-toms. Finally followed the guests who moved about talking among themselves like society folks at a church fair. From the man-who-would-be-chief on down to the poorest Indian, all wore the richest kind of furs, some of them made of the silver fox, and they were ornamented with various decorations and natural jewelry. Many of the men and women wore necklaces and belts formed of gold nuggets as large as hickory nuts and these at once caught the eyes of the boys. Lo! the poor Indian!

Of all those present there were only two poorly dressed ones and these were a couple of rank outsiders who had come from down under and now saw for the first time what Indian high-life really meant. Jack and Bill felt like a couple of hobos who had tumbled out of a box-car and landed in the midst of a fancy dress hall in progress on Fifth Avenue.

When all were assembled the man-who-would-be-chief opened the _potlatch_ with a recital of the wonderful deeds his ancestors had done, that his family had done, and especially those that he had done.

“It’s the same old stuff the politician who wants to be mayor, or governor, or president pulls in the States,” Bill pointed out.

Then the players began to beat their tom-toms and when the rhythm of this bombastic music had stirred the souls of the guests to their very depths, it got them going and they danced for all they were worth. Most of them carried huge wooden masks that were a nightmare to look at. Different from our dances their movements were not regulated by art but by the simple history of their lives and of those of their ancestors; in other words they were folk-dances.

“I could do that dance as good as any of them if I only had a false-face,” spoke up Bill, who could see nothing whatever in the energetic but solemn performance.

“What do you want a false-face for? What’s the matter with the one you have on?” said Jack, laughing heartily.

“I knew it was purtty bad but I didn’t know it was as bad as all that,” retorted his partner.

The dance over, the man-who-would-be-chief began to talk to the spirits of his ancestors. Getting no immediate response he called upon his guests to wake them up that they might hear what he had to say to them. He started them off with a large assortment of terrifying yells and this was augmented by cries, shrieks and screams of the others until it sounded like a band of renegade savages rushing to the first onslaught of battle.

Bill wasn’t the least bit afraid of anything happening, because Jack had told him all of the people in Alaska and the Yukon country, whatever the color of their exteriors might be, were _white_ at heart. But his excess of caution just naturally led him to fold his arms so that his hand wouldn’t be more than half-a-second away from his six-gun should he need it.

The yelling kept up at a pitch so that a white man could not have heard himself think and it lasted for fifteen or twenty minutes. Neither Jack nor Bill took very much stock in what they were yelling for but (it is sad to relate and hard to believe) the primitive instinct in these boys overpowered the civilizing influences to which they had been subjected and time and again they both let loose the awful and heartrending _yi-yi_, _yi-yi_, of the cowboy.

“Oh, Harlem flat, where is thy sting?” said Jack when the yelling was over.

“You’d think they was a lot o’ cliff-dwellers in Noo York tellin’ the janitor in soothin’ tones down the dumb-waiter to put on a little more coal,” commented Bill.

Then came the wrestling matches between those who had been enemies and, without regard to which one won, when the bout was over they were good friends again.

“I could throw the two o’ them with me right hand tied back o’ me, see?” Bill sneered with evident disgust. “Let’s you and me show these Injuns what a real wrestling bout is, what say, Jack?”

“Don’t get peeved, Bill. This is their game. If you saw a bout in the _New York Athletic Club_, or back of the gas-house, you wouldn’t want to jump in and show the onlookers how it ought to be done, would you? Just remember that we are only innocent bystanders.”

Next came the big feast and although there were caribou and rabbit, geese and ptarmigan, still that old standby without which no Indian feast would be complete had the place of honor.

There was a team of ten roast dogs all hitched up and going to fill the great void in the principal organ of digestion which existed under the belt of each redskin. They were _hot-dogs_ in very truth.

“I think I’d better go an’ find out if all our dogs says ‘here’ when I calls the roll,” said Bill, and not withstanding Jack’s assurances that these edible dogs were not their sled dogs, Bill went out and counted up the members of their teams just the same.

After every one had gorged himself, or herself, the man-who-would-be-chief began to distribute the presents. One of his lieutenants would call out a name, another would hold the gift before the person who answered to it, Montegnais would strike the floor with his wand indicating his pleasure and the gift would be made.

The boys came last and the man-who-would-be-chief asked them their names. Kloshsky interpreted his wishes to the boys and through the linguistic ability of this half-breed lad they made known that they answered to the cognomens of Jack and Bill, the latter from “Noo” York. Then it was they knew the man-who-would-be-chief for a gentleman, even if he was a red-skin, for he gave them each a most wonderful blanket.

When he had given away all of his possessions the _potlatch_ was over; it was then very near morning but as the boys were tired they stayed over at the village until the following day.

“Old hatchet face can have my vote, anytime,” proclaimed Bill, as he admired his trophy.

“You’re a nice American, you are,” said Jack; “selling your vote for a blanket, eh!”

“There’s a big difference,” proclaimed Bill; “this man-who-wants-to-be-chief is a heathen savage politician while down in the States the politicians are civilized Christians. An’ besides they’ve got jails down there. Get me?”

Just as they were ready to start back Kloshsky, the half-breed boy, told them it is the custom to return all gifts to the man-who-would-be-chief within a month and that they must bring his blankets back by the next moon.

Jack and Bill reluctantly handed over their presents to Kloshsky and told him to give them back to the man-who-would-be-chief with their best wishes and kindest personal regards and other nice felicitations that are usually found on the ends of business letters.

“Mush, you huskies!” yelled Jack and Bill simultaneously while the Indians, less cheerful than on the night of the _potlatch_, waved them their adieus.

“Indian giver,” said Jack when they were beyond earshot.

“I wouldn’t vote for that stingy guy now if he gave me all the blankets he owns,” groused Bill.

But while they soon forgot the blankets they could not forget the necklaces and belts of nuggets the Indians wore and they had more reason than ever to believe they were at the rainbow’s end where it dipped into pots of pure gold.