Oct. 2, 1897.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
263 
middle of July. In the winter, tlie darkness is greatly modi- 
fled by the Northern lights, which are nearly always visible. 
The cold during these ^{nonths is intense, the thermometer 
Jrequently falling to 75° below zero. 
We hunted, prospected and explored up the Forty Mile 
Kiver from July 1 until Aug. 17, when we returned to Forty 
Mile Post, which is situated on a point of land between the 
river of that name, and the Yukon. The town contains 
about 175 log cabins, which are chinked with moss, and are 
practically airtight. In the top is a ventilator, by means of 
which the temperature can be regulated. The logs are hewed 
on top and bottom, and a thick laj'-er of long, fine moss is 
placea over each course of logs, forming a bed for the suc- 
ceeding course. A heavy layer is piled upon the roof, and 
then covered with dirt. Inside the cabin, a small rock fur- 
nace ip frequently built, with a piece of sheet iron over the 
top. Upon this the cooking is done, and just before retiring 
a good fire is started, heating the rocks of the furnace, which 
retain their warmth ail night. 
There are hundreds of half-starved dogs here so closely 
resembling the wolf that it is often difficult to detect the dif- 
ference, If a door is left open for an instant they will rush 
Inside and steal the first portable article they can lay hold of, 
whether it be a can of corned beef or a bag of nails. When 
they get it outside they will investigate it and if not edible it 
is abandoned. The howling of wolves is nothing to the dis- 
mal sounds they emit, and a stranger at first is unable to ob- 
tain much sleep. These dogs are used for freighting in 
winter and packing in summer. From eight to ten dogs 
are fastened to two Yukon sleds weighing from 30 to oOlbs. 
each, and together capable of carrying a load of 2,0001bs. 
When a steep hill is encountered one sled is hauled up at a 
time. A large dog will carry 501 bs. on his back. We left 
, the small boat at Forty Mile and taking the big one again 
continued on down the Yukon to Circle City, a distance of 
250 miles. Here we ended a cruise of 1,250 miles in a row- 
boat. 
Circle City is situated on the west bank of the river within 
the Yukon Flats, It contains about 150 log cabins, two 
stores, several saloons, two restaurants, a bakery, tin shop, 
etc. It derives its name from being close to the Arctic Cir- 
cle. At this place the river is seven miles in width and con- 
tains many islands. Here on Sept. 7 we went aboard the 
steamer bound for the mouth of the river. Eighty miles be- 
low we passed Fort Yukon, an old trading post situated at 
the junction of the Yukon and Porcupine rivers, and within 
the Arctic Circle. We were now passmg through the Yukon 
Flats, 400 miles in length and 200 in width. The river is 
from twelve to fifteen miles wide and studded with islands. 
Here is the breeding place of countless numbers of geese 
and ducks, and if a mess of young geese is wanted, all that 
is necessary is to take a club, go over to one of the islands 
and kill as manj'^ as are required. 
In the spring, when the ice is breaking up, great jams 
occur and the river overflows the flats for miles. 
The steamers which navigatethe Yukon are always piloted 
by Indians, as they are more familiar with the channels than 
the whites. 
About 450 miles below Fort Yukon the Tananna River 
enters from the west. It is a large stream, four miles wide 
at its mouth, and, like many others, its source is unknown. 
A man by the name of Battles has a trading post here and 
a small steamer, with which he navigates the river for 400 
or 500 miles and trades with the Indians, who are known as 
the Tanannas. About 200 miles balow Cockran has a trad- 
ing post, and just below this the Koiukuk River enters from 
the north. Here is an Indian village called Mulatta. 
The next large river is the Anvick, which comes in from 
the north, and here we saw the first Esquimaux— the most 
degraded class of people on the face of the earth. They are 
filthy and lazy beyond description. Their principal food is 
fish, for there is no game here in summer— the Arctic rein- 
deer being always back from the river. 
Just above here is a Catholic mission, where there are 
from sixty to seventy young Intiians attending school, most 
of whom can read, write and sing. This mission has done a 
great deal of good for the natives. 
Just below, on the Esquimaux side, is a Russian mission, 
established forty -three years ago, and which does not appear 
to have-accomplished much ; for it was here that we saw the 
lowest and filthiest Indians in all our travels. When they 
bury their dead they hew some slabs and make a box about 
3ft. long, 1ft. deep and 18in. wide, double up the bodies, 
cram them into the box, tie a slab of wood over the top with 
grass, and set the box up on four stakes about 2ft. above the 
ground. These graveyards are right among the villages, and 
as the custom is nearly universal among the Esquimaux, the 
smell in summer time can be better imagined than described. 
The Chilcats, Sticks, Yukons, Tanannas and other tribes 
burn the bodies of their dead and all that belonged to them, 
then gather up the bones, gun barrel, spoon, knife and what- 
ever is left, make a pile of them, cut a little bundle of wood, 
place a pair of blankets alongside and cover the whole with 
a piece of canvas or a moose skin, tent fashion, when the de- 
ceased is supposed to be properly equipped for the happy 
hunting grounds. Many of these graveyards can be seen on 
the little hills along the Yukon River. 
At the Russian mission we saw an old-fashioned Sin. 
smooth-bore cannon about 2ift. long, dated 1744. It was 
fastened into a log, and I suppose was used to bluff the 
Indians with forty-three years ago. 
From here lo the mouth of the river, northerly to Point 
Barrow and southeasterly to Cook's Inlet, there is no timber 
nor brush of any kind; nothing but grass and moss. The 
only fuel is the driftwood which comes down the Yukon 
and lodges on the shore. 
Just below here is the Indian village of Annaruska, where 
the Alaska Commercial Company winter their boats, the 
steamers Arctic and Yukon. They run them up a slough 
about three miles from the river in order to avoid the ice 
which comes down in the spring. 
At Annaruska the river begins to widen out again, and at 
its mouth, 200 miles below, it is from 80 to 100 miles wide 
Here we saw swan, geese, brant, duck and other water fowl 
by the millions. 
On Sept, 15 we lauded at St. Michael's Island in the 
Bering Sea, eighty miles north of the mouth of the Yukon 
River. The river boats have to run this eighty miles of open 
sea, as the water is too shallow to admit of the navigation of 
ocean steamers. 
The Alaska Commercial Co. and the Northern Trading 
Co. have their warehouses here, and the ocean steamers leave 
their supplies to be taken up the Yukon the following season 
i n the river boats. 
On the island are many lakes and sloughs, and good sport 
can be had with rod and gun. 
The trip of 1,500 miles from Circle City to St. Michael's 
Island can now he made in a rowboat in from twenty to 
twenty-five days. On Oct. 3 we went aboard the Alaska 
Commercial Co.'s steamer Bertha, the last one to leave for 
San Francisco. Nearly all boats that do not intend to winter 
in this country leave the Bering Sea before Oct. 1, On the 
8th we touched at Ounalaska Island, a beautiful little place, 
with a magnificent harbor. Unfortunately there is no tim- 
ber. All of the hills near the coast are covered with grass, 
and at an altitude exceeding 400 or .500ft. above sea level are 
capped with perpetual snow. There are numerous lakes 
abounding in beautiful trout, and on the coast is good cod- 
fishing. The United States Government has stocked the 
island with reindeer, which have become very tame. One of 
the principal features of the island is a large, active volcano, 
and just across Olga Pass is Ackatan, with smoke issuing 
from his crater and his base covered with a large glacier. 
Ounalaska is one of the Aleutian group of islands, and the 
natives are known as the Alleute Indians. Their principal 
occupation is fishine" and hunting sea otter. 
Both the Alaska Commercial Co. and the North American 
Commercial Co, have warehouses here. The Government 
has a coaling station and maintains a gunboat or two. After 
leaving the island we steamed through Olga Pass and entered 
the Pacific Ocean, bound for San Francisco. We made the 
entire distance without sighting land and reached our des- 
tination on Oct. 22, after a voyage of eighteen days on the 
Bertha. John Bakrett. 
Colorado, 1826. 
SHEEP AND SNOWSHOES.-XII. 
A Winter Hunt at the Summit of the Rockies. 
Luck and Faith. 
Behold the virtue of Boak's doctrine of faith! Or shall 
we rather say, behold yet another instance of the Forest 
AND Stream luck? The very first morning after our com- 
panions had left us the malignant storms all broke away, 
and the face of the sky shone forth, new washed and inno- 
cent as that of a babe, too young and sweet for guile. Tlie 
sun shone with untroubled beam upon the dazzling moun- 
tain tops, and all the world was fair. At last we had a 
hunting day, one of the few with which we were blessed 
during the trip. We turned out of our brush shanty and 
made a speedy breakfast of flour, water and tea, and 
though the fare was rude, we all felt a certaini lightness of 
heart at the change in the weather. The pain in my face, 
however, continued so bad that I had not much heart for 
a hunt; so I told Kearney to take my rifle and go up on 
the mountain above us to prospect a little for game. He 
was to shoot a goat if he got the chance, but in any case to 
come back to camp by noon and report what he found by 
way of sign, so that if I was then able to go out we could 
both go directly to the place where he thought we could 
start the game. Ordinarily this would be rather a poor 
arrangement, because it necessitated a double climb for 
Kearney and broke his day's hunt in the middle; but this 
was the best we could do, and at any rate all is well that 
ends well. 
After Kearney left for the climb to the upper regions, 
Boak and I made ourselves as comfortable as we could in 
camp. Boak kept me entertained with chapters out of his 
own long life in the wilder West, Boak's father, Theodore 
Boak, was a Forty-niner, and in 1850 discovered the 
famous Yankee tunnel, out of which free gold fairly by 
the bucketful was taken, the owner becoming wealthy in 
a short time, Theodore Boak eventually sold out and 
came back East to live, and his family now live at Adel, 
la.; the town, by the way, which was originally the home 
of Judge S. H. Greene, now of Portland, Ore., and a 
valued contributor to Forest and Stream. Crosby Boak, 
my whilom companion, had too much of the Western 
fever in his blood to remain in so quiet a country as that 
of Iowa, and the great strikes of the Alder Gulch diggings 
of Montana found him on hand. At that time he was 
assaulted and injured by a drunken desperado, and in 
return for a certain punishment which he took into his 
own hands to inflict upon the assailant, he was on the 
point of being lynched by a few enthusiastic disciples of 
law and order. The leader of this lynching bee was a 
man named Curly, and in proof of the fact that even the 
great West is a very small country, I may state that a few 
years ago this same man Curly, now posing as sheriff of a 
certain town in lower Montana, came up into the Black- 
foot country at the head of a posse in search of a party of 
train robbers (in whose arrest, further by the way, Billy 
Jackson figured prominently). During this little pursuit. 
Curly called at the cabin of Boak and made inquiry about 
the refugees, and so for the first time in many years these 
two men met again. Meantime times and customs had 
changed, but it is not of record that Boak was very hos- 
pitable or courteous to the man who once tried to hang 
him without process of law — and who came mighty near 
doing it. 
During our little visit together in camp, Boak farther 
continued my education in the diamond hitch and in the 
science of packing as it was once practiced by the old 
cargadores of California in the big pack trains of the old 
days. There are few more finished artists with the rope 
than he, and I consider that I have had a good tutor. We 
made little bundles of rags and manufactured a miniature 
saddle with cinch and lash, in default of the real thing 
and of a horse of proper size. Boak told me that I would 
get out of practice unless I kept it up, and that I ought to 
practice on a real horse; so afl;er I got back home I got me 
a real horse— a woolly one, about 1ft. long— and now from 
time to time I pack him with bags of smoking tobacco, 
just to keep my hand in in case I ever have to tackle the 
White Pass of the Klondike trail. This horse is always 
hitched at the top of my desk and is always ready to start. 
The Game is Located. 
But meantime we were wondering what luck Kearney 
was having up on the mountain, from which came no 
sound of rifle shot. The morning wore away, and at last, 
just about noon, we saw Kearney come slipping down the 
trail he had made going up. With a non-committal look 
on his face he came into camp, set down his rifle and 
kicked off" his shoes, presently saying; 
"Goats up there, all right. Half a dozen of them." 
We asked him if he had shot, and he said that he had, 
and had fixed twice at a goat he had seen low down in the 
timber, wounding it very badly, so that he thought it 
could not go fer. He had oiily followed this trail a short 
distance, seeing tiiat the crippled goat was bleeding very 
heavily, but had come on down to tell me about the state 
of things. He said that he had found the trail of two big 
goats going straight up the peak above the timber where 
he had hunted, and knew that they were standing around 
up there not far from where he was, and that they would 
not go far away, because he had not gone up on their traU 
to frighten them. He thought I could get a shot without 
a great deal of trouble, if I was feeling able to make the 
climb. 
_ At hearing this welcome news my malady seemed to 
lighten all at once and I no longer felt either pain or fa- 
tigue. Go? Of course I could go, and I told Kearney that 
had I but one leg, and that a wooden one, I should cer- ' 
tainly get up the mountain some way. 
We gulped down a few cups of hot tea, and made a hur- 
ried lunch of the staflf of hfe without anything else, Kear- 
ney not stopping in camp over half an hour, though he 
must have been tired after a climb so hard as that he had 
just made. We did our best going up the mountain, 
scrambling and wallowing where we could not walk, but 
hurrying on up breathlessly, lest we should lose what we 
thought to be an excellent opportunity. In a little over 
an hour and a half we got to where Kearney had shot 
his goat. He said he had fired at it as it faced him, about 
125yds. away, and hit it somewhere through the chest, 
though not full enough to stop it. It had gone ofi through the 
trees, and he did not get to see it again. This was the first 
time the little rifle had failed to stop within a short dis- 
tance any animal hit by it, but Kearney told me a goat 
was a very hard animal to stop. He said that it was their 
invariable practice to go out to the steepest rocks when 
once wounded, and there to lie down when they could go 
no further, sometimes plunging off over the rocks in their 
death struggle, apparently moved by the impulse to get as 
far away as possible from the pursuer. Precisely this 
course seemed to have been adopted by Kearney's goat. 
We followed the trail, red with regular spurts of blood, for 
over a quarter of a mile in all, finding spots where the ani- 
mal had struggled to get up over snowbanks, and where it 
had stopped to rest; yet though it seemed that it' must 
have dropped at any moment, we could see its trail wind- 
ing on below and beyond down to the ragged black jrocks, 
but nowhere could we see the shaggy heap of white which 
should have marked the trail's ending. 
I concluded that we should find this goat later just as 
well, and that it would be best to go on up at once after the 
others, whose trail, plain and deep as though dug out by 
a team of horses, lay before us, heading straight up to the 
most inaccessible }5art of the peak that lay still above us. 
This peak was, in its features, much like those on which 
our earlier hunting had been done. The timber grew 
densely about the base and sides, and the top rose up bare 
and rocky, swept by the full force of the winds and offer- 
ing a front part of icy snow, part of actual ice and part of 
naked and uninviting rocks. Kearney said that the goats 
would go on up to these rocks and there lie down in the 
sun to rest. He said that we must get above them, and 
showed me that he thought it was possible to do this by 
keeping well off to the right and coming up over the top 
of the peak above and back of them. He thought that if 
we got to the top we should be within sight of the game, 
for it was very likely that these white climbers would not 
stop till they got pretty well to the top, where the rocks 
were nearly bare and where the sun shone fhll. Thus we 
quickly determined upon our campaign. 
The Climbing of the Peak. 
Before us, after we had gone to the limit of our ability 
on the shoes, lay a long, sloping ridge of white and hard- 
packed snow, dazzlingly bright and almost as hard as ice^ 
We toiled on up this long reach of smooth footing for sev- 
eral hundred yards, keeping in view the trail of the goats 
somewhat to our left as we went up. At length the trail 
turned sharply off to the left and disappeared around the 
mountain in the direction of some jagged heaps of rocks 
which jutted out of the mountain side well up toward the 
summit. _ Here we could not follow without the certainty 
of alarming the game, so we kept on our course, now very 
cautiously and in silence so far as possible. We were now 
high up in the air above our camp and many hundred ♦ 
feet above the timber, only a few scattered cedars sticking 
out of the snow among the rocks. The face of the ascent 
became too icy to hold our feet, so we now began the slow 
and ticklish work of cutting footholds into the face of the 
ice-bed as we went up. It was so steep now that as we 
worked at the bank we were not standing up at all, but 
leaning against the face of the bank, hanging on with feet 
and hands and body the best we could, and progressing 
very slowly, a single upward step at the time, as we were 
able to secure the foothold. 
Kearney was on ahead, or rather above me, a few feet 
and was carrying my rifle, the only one in camp, after the 
usual fashion, slung over his shoulder with a thong, the 
gun being of course in its case so that it would not be ren- 
dered useless by the snow. I gave Kearney the gun to 
carry for the flrst and only time, as he was so much better 
than I was in this mountain work, and I was feeling rather 
badly that day. We did not yet think we were close 
enough to the game to require me to take the gun. I was 
worming my way on up carefully below Kearney, not 
looking up very much at the moment, but taking heed 
about my footing, when all at once I ran into view of 
Kearney's legs, which were stationary above me on the 
ice bank! Just at this instant, and without my ever lift- 
ing my eyes up to see what was the matter with his legs, I 
again cast my eyes off to the left, in the direction where 
we thought we should eventually see our game. Then I 
saw a very strange, curious sort of thing, such as never in 
my life had I seen before. 
The Finding of the Goat. 
Just in sight, and in full relief against the white carpet 
of icy snow which covered a rough projection of rock jut- 
ting out from the mountain side a few yards above us and 
about 60 or 75yds. to our left, there lay two odd-looking 
black sticks, curving back, and spreading apart but a little 
at the ends. Such sharp and shiny sticks I had never 
seen before, and knew that none such belonged up there 
upon the high mountain side. I have a notion that some- 
thing was about to flash across my mind, but didn't have 
time, for now a still more curious thing happened. The 
sticks moved! They disappeared. Then, just the instant 
afterward, there came into view the same sticks, attached 
to a big white shaggy head, which dragged a long beard 
across the snow as it turned sideyyiR© find lazily looked 
down the aaountain, 
