Chapter IX (2)

The Fortymile is a very picturesque but most tortuous river. In one place, called appropriately "The Kink," I was able to clamber over a ridge of rocks and reach another bend of the river in six or seven minutes, and then had to wait twenty-five minutes for the dog team, going at a good clip, to come around to me. At length we reached the spot where a vista cut through the timber that clothes both banks, marked the 141st meridian, the international boundary, and passed out of Alaska into British territory. A few miles more brought us to Moose Creek, where a little Canadian custom-house is situated, and there we spent the night.

The next day we reached the Yukon; passing gold dredges laid up for the winter and other signs of still-persisting mining activity, going through the narrow wild canon of the Fortymile, and so to the little town at its mouth of the same name, where there is a mission of the Church of England and a post of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. I never come into contact with this admirable body of men without wishing that we had a similar body charged with the enforcement of the law in Alaska.

Sunday was spent there officiating for the layman in charge of the mission and in interesting talk with the sergeant of police about the annual winter journey from Dawson to Fort McPherson on the McKenzie, from which he had just returned with a detail of men. The next winter he and his detail lost their way and starved and froze to death on the same journey.

Here at one time was a flourishing Indian mission and school, and here Bishop Bompas, the true "Apostle of the North," lived for some time. The story of this man's forty-five years' single-eyed devotion to the Indians of the Yukon and McKenzie Rivers is one of the brave chapters of missionary history. But the Church of England "does not advertise." Writers about Alaska, even writers about Alaskan missions, carefully collect all the data of the early Russian missions on the coast, but ignore altogether the equally influential and lasting work done along five hundred miles of what is now the American Yukon by the missionary clergy of the English Church before and after the Purchase. Bishop Bompas identified himself so closely with the natives as to become almost one of them in the eyes of the white men, and many curious stories linger amongst the old-timers as to his habits and appearance. It is interesting to know that the bishop was a son of that Sergeant Bompas of the English bar from whom Dickens drew the character of Sergeant Buzfuz, counsel for the plaintiff in the famous suit of "Bardell v. Pickwick."

But the natives have all left Fortymile, some to the large village of Moosehide just below Dawson, some to Eagle. The town, too, like all the upper Yukon towns, is much decayed; the custom-house, the police barracks, the company's store, the road-house, and the little mission embracing nearly all its activities and housing nearly all its population.

There is always some feeling of satisfaction in reaching the broad highway of the Yukon again, even though rough ice make bad going and one of the most notorious, dirty road-houses in the North hold its menace over one all day and amply fulfil it at night. There is indeed so little travel on the river now that it does not pay any one to keep a road-house save as incidental to a steamboat wood camp and summer fishing station. Two short days' travel brought us across the international boundary again to Eagle in Alaska, where at that time Fort Egbert was garrisoned with two companies of soldiers.

[Sidenote: EAGLE]

Eagle and Fort Egbert together, for the one begins where the other ends, have perhaps the finest and most commanding situation of any settlement on the Yukon River. The mountains rise with dignity just across the water and break pleasingly into the valley of Eagle Creek, a few miles up-stream. To the rear of the town an inconsiderable flat does but give space and setting before the mountains rise again; while just below the military post stands the bold and lofty bluff called the Eagle Rock, with Mission Creek winding into the Yukon at its foot. Robert Louis Stevenson said that Edinburgh has the finest situation of any capital in Europe and pays for it by having the worst climate of any city in the world. It would not be just to paraphrase this description with regard to Eagle, for while it is unsurpassed on the Yukon for site, there are spots on that river where still more disagreeable weather prevails; yet it cannot be denied that the position of the place subjects it to exceedingly bitter winds, or that the valley of Eagle Creek, which gives pleasing variety to the prospect, acts also as a channel to convey the full force of the blast. Climate everywhere is a very local thing; topographical considerations often altogether outweigh geographical; and nowhere is this truer than in Alaska. Commanding sites are necessarily exposed sites, and he who would dwell in comfort must build in seclusion.

A native village of eighty or ninety souls, with its church and school, lies three miles up-stream from the town, so that the relative positions of village, town, and military post exactly duplicate those at Tanana. It must at once be stated, however, that this situation has not led to anything like the demoralisation amongst the natives at Eagle that thrusts itself into notice at the other place. Whether it were the longer training in Christian morals that lay behind these people, or better hap in the matter of post commanders (certainly there was never such scandalous irregularity and indifference at Egbert as marked one administration at Gibbon), or the vigilance during a number of consecutive years of an especially active deputy marshal and the wisdom and concern through an even longer period of a commissioner much above the common stamp,[F] or all these causes combined, the natives at Eagle have not suffered from the proximity of soldiers and civilians in the same measure as the natives at Tanana. Drunkenness and debauchery there have been again and again, but they have been severely checked and restrained by both the civil and military authorities.

It was pleasant during Holy Week and Easter to see so many of the enlisted men of the garrison taking part in the services in town; pleasant, especially, to see officers and men singing together in the choir, a tribute to the tact and zeal of the earnest layman in charge of this mission; and it was pleasant at the village to hear the native liturgy again and to see old men and women following the lessons in the native Bible.

[Sidenote: FORT EGBERT ABANDONED]

Fort Egbert is abandoned now, another addition to the melancholy of the Yukon; its extensive buildings, barracks, and officers' quarters, post-exchange and commissariat, hospital, sawmill, and artisans' shops, a spacious, complete gymnasium only recently built, are all vacant and deserted. In the yards lie three thousand cords of dry wood, a year's supply; cut on the hills, awaiting the expected annual contracts, lie as many more--six thousand cords of wood left to rot! Some of us perverse "conservationists," upon whom the unanimous Alaskan press delights to pour scorn, lament the trees more than the troops.

One may write thus and yet have many pleasant personal associations with the post and those who have lived there. A large and varied military acquaintanceship is acquired by regular visits to these Alaskan forts, for the whole command changes every two years. If one stayed in the country long enough one would get to know the whole United States army, as regiment after regiment spent its brief term of "foreign service" in the North. Gazing upon the empty quarters, the occasion of my first visit came back vividly, when there was diphtheria amongst the natives at Circle and none to cope with it save the missionary nurse. The civil codes containing no provision for quarantine, the United States commissioner at Circle could not help, and the Indians grew restive and rebellious, and when Christmas came broke through the restrictions completely. Even some of the whites of the place defied her prohibition and attended native dances and encouraged the Indians in their self-willed folly.

[Sidenote: SOME ARMY OFFICERS]

So I went up the week's journey to Eagle and sought assistance from Major Plummer, the officer commanding the post, who, after telegraphing to Washington, promptly despatched a hospital steward and a couple of soldiers, and placed them entirely at the nurse's disposal. "I don't think we have any law for it," he said, "but we'll bluff it out." And bluff it out they did very effectively until the disease was stamped out, and then they thoroughly disinfected and whitewashed every cabin that had been occupied by the sick. I used to tell that nurse that, so far as I knew, she was the only woman who had ever had command of United States soldiers.

Then there was Captain Langdon of the same regiment, the scholarly soldier, with the account of every great campaign in history at his fingers' ends. I recollect one evening, when we had been talking of the Peninsular War, I ventured to spring on him the ancient schoolboy conundrum: "What lines are those, the most famous ever made by an Englishman, yet that are never quoted?" "Lines?" said he, "lines?" though I don't think he had ever heard the jest. "They must be the Lines of Torres Vedras." How well I remember the musical box that used to arouse me at seven in the morning, however late we had sat talking the night before!

And that young lieutenant, of wealthy New York people, just arrived from West Point, who was sent by another commandant to report upon the condition of the natives at the village and who came back and reported the whole population in utter destitution and recommended the issue of free rations to them all! As a matter of fact, during the administration of this commanding officer, some sixteen or eighteen persons were put upon the list for gratuitous grub, and it took a written protest to get them off. For no one who has the welfare of the natives at heart can tolerate the notion of making them paupers; these who have always fended abundantly for themselves, and can entirely do so yet. With free rations there would be no more hunting, no more trapping, no more fishing; and a hardy, self-supporting race would sink at once to sloth and beggary and forget all that made men of them. If it were designed to destroy the Indian at a blow, here is an easy way to do it. Yet there are some, obsessed with the craze about what is called education, regarding it as an end in itself and not as a means to any end, who recommend this pauperising because it would permit the execution of a compulsory school-attendance law. Or is it a personal delusion of mine that esteems an honest, industrious, self-supporting Indian who cannot read and write English above one who can read and write English--and can do nothing else--and so separates me from many who are working amongst the natives?

These days at the end of March, when the sun shines more than twelve hours in the twenty-four, are too long for the ordinary winter day's twenty-five miles or so, and yet not quite long enough, even if man and dogs could stand it, to double the stage; so that there is much daylight leisure at road-houses. One grows anxious, after four months on the trail, to be done with it; to draw as quickly as may be to one's "thawing-out" place. One even becomes a little impatient of the continual dog talk and mining talk of the road-houses, to which one has listened all the winter. On the other hand, the travelling is very pleasant and the going usually very good, so that one may often ride on the sled for long stretches.

By river and portage--one portage that comes so finely down to the Yukon from a bench that there is pleasure in anticipating the view it affords--in two days we reached the Nation road-house, just below the mouth of the Nation River, a name that has always puzzled me. Here all night long the wolves howling around the carcass of a horse kept our dogs awake, and the whimpering of the dogs kept us awake. The country beyond the Yukon to the northeast, the large area included between the Yukon and the Porcupine, into which the Nation River offers passage, is one of the wildest and least known portions of Alaska, abounding in game and beasts of prey.

[Sidenote: THE GLARE OF THE SUN]

At the Charley River we visited the native village and held service and instruction as well as inadequate interpretation permitted. Round Coal Creek and Woodchopper Creek the scenery becomes bold and attractive, but we found, as usual, that as we pushed farther and farther down the river the snow was deeper and the going not so good. The sun grows very bright upon the snow these days of late March and early April. Even through heavily tinted glasses it inflames the eyes more or less, and a couple of hours without protection would bring snow-blindness. Bright days at this season are the only days in all the year when the camera shutter may be used at its full speed. When the sun comes out after a flurry of new snow in April, the light is many times greater than in midsummer.

We reached Circle in a day and a half from Woodchopper Creek, in time to spend Sunday there. Circle had not changed much in the five years that had elapsed since the first visit to it mentioned in these pages. The slender trellis of the wireless telegraph had added a prominent feature to its river bank; a few more empty cabins had been torn down for fire-wood. Here it was necessary to shoot the Great Dane pup we got at the Salchaket. His feet were still very sore and he quite useless for the next winter, while Doc was returned to me from Fairbanks, not much the worse for his severe frost-bite. Indian after Indian begged for the dog, but I had more regard for him than to turn him over to the tender mercies of an Indian. There are exceptional Indians, but for my part I would rather be a dead dog than an ordinary Indian's dog--so he died.

There remained the seventy-five or eighty miles through the Yukon Flats to Fort Yukon--always the most dangerous stretch of the river, and at this season, when the winter's trail was beginning to break up, particularly so. It would be entirely practicable to cut a land trail that should not touch the river at all, or not at more than one point, between Circle and Fort Yukon, and such a portage besides removing all the danger would save perhaps twenty miles. In many places it was necessary for one of us to go ahead with an axe, constantly sounding and testing the ice. Here and there we made a circuit around open water into which the ice that bore the trail had collapsed bodily--one of them a particularly ugly place, with black water twenty feet deep running at six or seven miles an hour. I never pass this stretch of river without a feeling of gratitude that I am safely over it once more.

[Sidenote: CAPTAIN AMUNDSEN]

As we left the Halfway Island we passed an Indian from Fort Yukon going up the river with dogs and toboggan, and I chuckled, as I returned his very polite salutation and shook hands with him, at the success of the way he had been dealt with the previous fall, for he had been a particularly churlish fellow with an insolent manner. Six or seven years before he had been taken by Captain Amundsen, of the _Gjoa_, as guide along this stretch of the river. It will be remembered that when that skilful and fortunate navigator had reached Herschell Island from the east, he left his ship in winter quarters and made a rapid journey with Esquimaux across country to Fort Yukon expecting to find a telegraph station there from which he could send word of his success. But to his disappointment he found it necessary to go two hundred and thirty miles farther up the river to Eagle, before he could despatch his message. So he left his Esquimaux at Fort Yukon and took this Indian as guide. And in his modest and most interesting book he mentions the man's surliness and says he was glad to get rid of him at Circle.

Some new outbreak of insolence for which he had been flung out of a store decided that he must be dealt with, and I sent for him, for the chief, the native minister, and the interpreter. With these assessors beside me, and Captain Amundsen's book open on the table, I spoke to the man of his general conduct and reputation. I read the derogatory remark about him in the book "printed for all the world to read," and told him that of all the people, white and native, the captain had met on his journeys, only one was spoken of harshly and he was the one. It made a great impression on the man. The chief and the native minister followed it up with their harangues, and the net result was a thorough change in his whole attitude and demeanour. He told us he felt the shame of being held up to the world as rude and impudent and would try to amend. He has tried so successfully that he is now one of the politest and most courteous Indians in the village, for which, if this should ever chance to reach Captain Amundsen's eye, I trust he will accept our thanks.

Fort Yukon, where the headquarters of the archdeaconry of the Yukon are now fixed, grows in native population and importance. A new and sightly church, a new schoolhouse, a new two-story mission house, a medical missionary and a nurse in residence, as well as a native clergyman, mark the Indian metropolis of this region and perhaps of all interior Alaska. Self-government is fostered amongst the people by a village council elected annually, that settles native troubles and disputes and takes charge of movements for the general good, and of the relief of native poverty. The resident physician has been appointed justice of the peace and there is effort to enforce the law of the land at a place where every man has been a law unto himself. But it is a very slow and difficult matter to enforce law in this country at all, and more particularly at these remote points; and the class of white men who are to be found around native villages, many of whom "fear not God neither regard man," pursue their debauchery and deviltry long time unwhipped.

FOOTNOTE:

[F] I take pleasure in naming Mr. U. G. Myers as the United States commissioner in question and Mr. Jack Robinson as the deputy United States marshal, and I mention their names the more readily because Mr. Myers, after his long and excellent service, has just been removed for political reasons. (May, 1916.)