i8o THE WILDERNESS OF THE UPPER YUKON 



habits. I did not, therefore, get much reliable 

 about the dnii/rm of the northern wilder- 

 untfl, when thirty miles up the river, we picked 

 up a jovng FnftBrh trapper, J. F. Hosfall, with his wife 

 and fear children, who were tracking a long poling boat 

 loaded with a year's uippfai. They had started for 

 Kalzas Creek on the MacMillan River, where the}* in- 

 tended to pass die winter and trap in the country about 

 Kalzas Lake. Captain Taylor at once took them aboard 

 and I first made die acquaintance of Mrs. Hosfall that 

 remarkable woman who so appealed to Selous, when he 

 met her the fi >! year, that he incorporated a short 

 sketch of her, ioguhu with some incidents in her life, 

 in his book, Recent Hunting Trips in British North 

 America. 



My acquaintance with her was often renewed in after 

 years, and I have found her the most interesting char- 

 acter I have known in Alaska or Yukon Territory. Her 

 father, a sturdy, upright American, was one of the trad- 

 ers who had settled on die Yukon River in the early 

 days of the advent of the Alaska Commercial Company ; 

 and, like nearly all of these men, had taken to himself 

 an Indian woman as companion. Born about twenty-five 

 years before I met her, of a mother in the tribe of Indians 

 occupying hunting territory in the vicinity of the Porcu- 

 pine River, in carry youth she had been taken to the 

 misnomry established at Fort McPherson on the Peel 

 River. Ehiring the summers she was trained in reading, 

 writing, cooking, and domestic work. Fall, winter, and 

 spring she had joined her mother, and with her had fol- 



