IN THE ALASKA-YUKON GAMELANDS 



lor, who was frozen to death while necking a 

 hand sleigh across Nizina Glacier in February, 

 1914. 



Cap related the tragic death of a musher three 

 years ago: "Two-Much" Johnson and Fred 

 Youngs were freighters between McCarthy and 

 Shushanna, the gold camp. Returning to Mc- 

 Carthy with their big Yukon River sled pulled 

 by sixteen dogs, they came to the Shushanna 

 Glacier. This ice field was a very dangerous one 

 to cross in the spring owing to its great number 

 of crevasses. When covered with snow a foot or 

 two deep a man has to be very careful. The 

 snow bridges over the crevasses and makes some 

 of the narrow ones hard to see. The men had 

 stopped their sled to go ahead and "sound" out 

 the snow-covered crevasses with alpenstocks, 

 when the dogs began fighting. A dog fight out of 

 the harness is ordinarily a very much mixed-up 

 affair, but when these fighting "wolves" of the 

 North tangle up in a tooth battle with the har- 

 ness on, the mix-up is about as hard to straighten 

 out as a string puzzle. Finally after they got 

 cleared, they were started; but, wrought up by 

 their late fighting, the dogs were very nervous 

 and erratic, and at one point tried to jump over 

 a crevasse before their masters were ready for 

 them. These crevasses in many places had to be 

 bridged over by the men chopping off the ice of 

 the sides with picks until the crack filled, thereby 

 making a safe trail over the opening. However, 



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