458 LIFE ON A YUKON TRAIL 



as three hours. On one of these outings it happened that the 

 line lay along a sunny slope of the mountain. Every one's moc- 

 easined feet got thoroughly soaked. After leaving this genial 

 spot the wet moccasins became frozen. The back-chainman and 

 the rodman were the first to exhibit signs of human weakness. 

 They halted, sat down on a log, and wept with pain and vex- 

 ation. A fire was kindled and the tearful rodman and weeping 

 back-chainman were thawed out. This circumstance was re- 

 garded as a singularly felicitous one during the remainder of 

 our stay in the wilderness from the standpoint of such men as 

 Dan the axman, whose sense of humor, it seems, had been 

 exquisitely developed. 



There was always a period of reviving spirits after the mid- 

 day lunches of bacon and beans which " Calgary " carried on the 

 line in his old lard can ; but after four or five hours more of work 

 the men would drag into camp about dark, one at a time, tired 

 and bedraggled. So the days went hy, one much like another. 

 Toward the first of May it was possible to leave the cumbersome 

 snow-shoes in camp. Plunging through the rapidly sinking 

 snow with low rubber shoes and '' Dutch socks " was much less 

 fatiguing, although it involved wet garments to the knees. Our 

 survey line was completed to the Big Tahltan. We ascended 

 this valley to the source of the stream in the second divide. 

 Here, at an altitude of about 2,600 feet, we crossed the frozen sur- 

 face of two beautiful lakes— Upper and Lower Coketsie. Cross- 

 ing the summit, the general direction of the watercourses lay to 

 the northwest. Launching on the Doo-de-don-Tooya one might 

 float to the Inklin, and thence down the Taku to its mouth near 

 Juneau, Alaska. Indians who professed to be familiar with -the 

 voyage down the Taku to the coast lived in forlorn hovels near 

 the Shesley river. They were not of the Tahltan tribe and had 

 no dealings with them. All the young bucks of the settlement 

 were off on a caribou chase. A withered old man, who was 

 crouching over some dying embers in his wickiup with some 

 grimy Klooches, gave us to understand that the winter had been 

 a hard one, and that salmon were expected soon in the Shesle}\ 



These Shesley Indians are anthropologically of a Mongolian 

 type, with Ioav foreheads, flat noses, and brachycephalic skulls. 

 Theprincipal occupation of theborn-to-drudgery women is to col- 

 lect fuel for the fires which smoulder in the wretchedly clamp and 

 chilly wickiups. No one could complain that laundry work was a 

 burden in such a settlement. Like the inhabitants of a Thlingit 



