396 CONQUERING THE ARCTIC ICE 



But whatever the influence of the lust of gold has been upon 

 the individual, the country is now habitable for man ; it is 

 producing much wealth, business is brisk, and more than 

 60,000 men and women are living where some few years ago 

 the native hunted cariboo and moose, travelling days without 

 seeing a soul, and where a white man was looked on as a 

 zoological curiosity, a kind of freak of the Indian tribe. What 

 a change a few years have wrought in the history of Alaska ! 



We had two more days of overland travelling, then we 

 reached Kaltag, on the banks of the large Yukon River. At 

 last I thought my prospects looked brighter, that my hardships 

 were a thing of the past, and travelling a pleasure compared to 

 what it had been, for numbers of houses lined my path, and the 

 weather so I thought was unusually fine, calm, and cold. 



But my experience did not realize these hopes. It was at least 

 as windy inland as on the coast ; the only advantage of the 

 Yukon being that a traveller could enter the woods and thus 

 get out of the wind. At Kaltag we stayed for one day to give 

 our dogs a rest, and I wired to the superintendent of the 

 telegraph line, Captain Clifton, U.S. Army, for permission 

 to use the telegraph stations and cabins along the line of 

 march. I got a very courteous reply with the desired permis- 

 sion, and afterwards we stopped almost every night at the 

 stations. It was a great help to me, as I could get dog-feed 

 all along the route and have it cooked and ready before I 

 arrived; lunch or dinner was always prepared and ready when 

 we came in, while the agreeable inhabitants of the various 

 stations shortened many an otherwise tedious hour with 

 interesting talk. 



It was on Monday, February 3, that we had our first day's 

 run over the splendid level ice of the Yukon River ; the trail 

 was a little soft, but not enough to cause us any inconvenience, 

 the weather was fine, and the sun was shining. Four dog 

 sledges were going the same way, enough to form a small 

 caravan, and as Nulato our destination was forty miles 

 distant, we agreed to distribute our loads so that all the sledges 

 had about the same weight and could go equally fast. It was 

 a splendid day ; the bracing air of the Yukon seemed to 

 stimulate the dogs ; they pulled as never before, frisked along, 

 barking with joy, their tails high in the air, while the many 



