86 TWO HUNDRED MILES UP THE KUSKOKWIM 



(sixt} 7 miles wide at the entrance of the river), which are seamed 

 with countless shallow, dirty rivulets flowing seaward. Very- 

 different is its physical aspect when it is bank-full at flood. " It 

 shimmers then like an inland ocean studded with myriads of 

 mossy islands." The head of the tide is 100 miles upstream, at 

 a trading post called Mumtrekhlagamute. Boats ascending the 

 river must wait for the tide, whose flow is irresistible even by 

 steam-power, for it rises vertically over eight feet an hour, filling 

 up the vast chasm which forms its bed in the brief space of six 

 hours, though there is an entire absence of anything like a tidal 

 "bore" rolling in and overwhelming everything in its impet- 

 uous career. This phenomenal procedure is an old fable which 

 used to be current regarding the bay of Fundy, until people 

 learned differently, and graphic recitals were told of pigs which 

 had been foraging on the flats, scampering before the advancing 

 wave and being presently overtaken and engulfed. 



On the Kuskokwim there are no less than sixteen trading posts 

 and villages within the first 400 miles of its mouth. Messrs 

 Hartmann and Weinland, Moravian missionaries from Bethle- 

 hem, Pennsylvania, who are men of marked abilit}^ located a 

 school and mission at Kolmakovsky, 200 miles up, as long ago as 

 1885 ; and the description of the river which here follows, with 

 the accompanying illustrations, is from observations made by 

 them on their initial trip. They afford a very realistic picture 

 of summer life in the interior of Alaska and will serve to coun- 

 teract the popular impression that the country is wholly frigid 

 and barren. 



When these gentlemen first arrived at the mouth of the river, 

 in June, the salmon fishing was at its height, varying little, if 

 any, from the running season on the St Lawrence tributaries. 

 The eastern bank of the estuary was swarming with native fish- 

 ermen (Eskimos), whose huts were strung along the top of a 

 narrow dike at high-water mark in close continuity for miles, 

 crowding each other so closely that there was hardly room for 

 more. This dike was fringed with alders, willow, birch, and pop- 

 lar saplings interspersed, flanked by a vigorous growth of coarse 

 sedges and bulrushes. Back of the dike (or levee, as it would 

 be called in the southern states) the country is a flat waste, cov- 

 ered with a spongy bed of moss or "tundra" from six inches to 

 a foot deep and destitute even of shrubs. Great deposits of drift- 

 wood from above line the shore and afford fuel for the resident 

 inhabitants, who number several thousands, but whose ranks are 



