f.S ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



It is a country wholly different. It is a hill-country 

 prairie, for it is treeless and lies in a region known as 

 the "barren lands." These barrens extend from the 

 Aleutian Peninsula to the region of the McKenzie River 

 delta, the only point where trees border the Arctic Ocean. 

 In truth it is not a barren territory, but is, instead, cov- 

 ered by a most diverse and abundant flora with a hundred 

 or more species in a small area. In Seward Peninsula 

 the area is one of interminable hills gloriously colored 

 and rolling to infinite distances ; and often, as one watches 

 them, rainbows arch them over and touch the ground at 

 each end where pots of gold may lie in truth. More than 

 on the prairies does one have a feeling of immense spa- 

 ciousness and vision to remote places. It is said that on 

 a very clear day one may see from Kougarok Mountain 

 into Siberia, over a hundred miles away. And the ability 

 to see so far, yet the absence of any object of known size 

 in that view by which one may estimate distances, leads 

 the observer, as Steffanson explains, to make strange 

 errors in judgments. Captain Maclntyre of the Teddy 

 Bear told a story of mistaking an Arctic mouse for a 

 polar bear, and certainly one of our party mistook a 

 claim stake for our cabin, and was lost thereby. It is a 

 curious country of misleading seeming-familiarity, a fas- 

 cinating country which, in spite of all its dangers, com- 

 pels love even from those who most loudly condemn the 

 vagaries of climate and place. 



The tundra, as stated before, is not barren but is cov- 

 ered by a carpet of hummocking plants overlying in most 

 places centuries' accumulation of raw humus. Rock sur- 

 faces are exposed only on the highest mountains and 

 comparatively recent faults, and in the creek beds of 

 cutting streams. For the most part, it is a country of 

 swampy conditions everywhere, so that to the newcomer 

 "mush," used as it is in Alaska to mean "move on," 

 "travel," would seem to have come into use from the 

 suggestive character of the country rather than from its 

 authentic derivation as a corruption of "marchon." The 

 accumulation of humus which freezes and thus prevents 

 drainage causes the hydrophytic conditions which, to- 

 gether with the cold, are responsible for the universal 



