238 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



I have never seen a man who could work as Linklater 

 did. He was over six feet in height, powerfully built 

 and used to the roughest kind of work. For years he had 

 been a member of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police 

 at Dawson, at which time he had gained a reputation as 

 a traveler. He had never been a sailor, but he must have 

 done a good deal of rowing in his time, for he kept stead- 

 ily at the oars something like sixteen hours a day. The 

 current was sluggish and we had little help from it, so 

 that with all our hard work we did not get to Fort Yukon 

 until the evening of September 3rd. It turned out, how- 

 ever, that somewhat greater speed would not have helped 

 particularly, for there was only one logical way of pro- 

 ceeding upstream from Fort Yukon to the telegraph sta- 

 tion at Eagle and that was by the river streamer Hantm, 

 which was due about noon of the 4th. She came some 

 ten hours earlier than that and I was awakened from a 

 sound sleep to scramble aboard in the early morning. 

 Then everything went well for a while. 



The Hanna was carrying a huge cargo, a part of which 

 consisted of several hundred tons of oats in bags. She 

 was loaded deeper than usual and the river had been 

 dropping rapidly, so that I found soon after getting 

 aboard that there was great concern as to whether we 

 should be able to get through the Yukon flats. This is a 

 long stretch where the river, normally about a mile or 

 two in width, spreads out to six or eight miles and winds 

 its way through a maze of low islands. We soon began 

 to have trouble with shoal water and eventually came to 

 a channel not deep enough for passage. There was noth- 

 ing to do but pull up to the bank and unload some of our 

 freight so as to lighten the draught of the steamer. 



There were on board the boat about a hundred laborers 



