130 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



miles of mudflats and shifting sandbars, with no landmarks to indicate 

 the channels of which only the salmon knew the secret. jSTo invader, 

 seeking a fairway for his vessel, might find comfort here. On the 

 south the mighty rock walls of the Alaskan and St. Elias ranges, 

 bristling with splintered crags, between which lurk the unconquered 

 remnants of the Glacier Age, confront the would-be intruder. Lastly, 

 on the east, mountains alternate with morasses for hundreds of miles; 

 with streams unnavigable even by canoes, except at the price of hourly 

 portages; tamarack thickets too dense to traverse, standing in bogs too 

 soft to afford foothold, *and so populated by black flies and mosquitoes 

 as to be abandoned in summer by all the larger animals. Here a little 

 band of Hudson Bay voyageurs, bent on reaching the great unknown 

 river, some sixty-six years ago, were driven, through desperate starva- 

 tion, to the last imaginable horror. Not till MacMurray flanked them 

 by descending the Mackenzie far beyond the Arctic circle and forcing 

 the Eat Eiver portage to the waters of the Porcupine, were the eastern 

 defenses of the valley carried by an explorer. 



Even then, a quarter of a century should pass before the white man 

 from the east met his fellow from the west, under the Arctic circle, at 

 Port Yukon, and the whole long river should know the stroke of their 

 paddles and smoke of their camp-fires. 



When the whites came they but followed on the trails of the Indian, 

 whose far progenitors, lost in the mists of time, had penetrated to the 

 valley, retreating, as legends tell, from massacre on the south at the 

 hands of stronger tribes ; or from starvation on the north, where, beyond 

 the fiats of frozen mud, lay only the barren floe. To them the Yukon 

 gave of her caribou and salmon, and among her clustered spruce trees 

 they found a safe refuge. There they prospered and begat other gen- 

 erations, who in the fulness of time came to call themselves Yukoni- 

 katana, Men of the Yukon. The ancient feud between Indian and 

 Eskimo kept them from the coasts. Thus in a very emphatic sense the 

 valley of the Yukon was their world. 



To enter into the Yukon Valley one must scale its watershed or 

 advance by the stream itself through the delta. The former was more 

 difficult, the latter longer and more monotonous. Creeping along the 

 coast in shallow water, one came finally to a branch where a loaded 

 sloop might enter, and, by hard pulling against the current, finally gain 

 the main channel. After leaving the sea one rowed between steep 

 banks, hour after hour, the traveler seeing nothing but muddy water 

 and scattered driftwood. If, in desperation, one scrambled to the level 

 of the land, one saw on every hand an apparently illimitable plain, 

 broken only far to the southeast by a single summit, the isolated peak 

 of Kusilvak Mountain, blue in the distance. 



Over the level surface lay scattered the worn and shattered trunks of 



