124 
BALL. 
the hard-headed fur traders in that remote and inhospitable 
region, and for years afterward bird skins, eggs, ethnological 
specimens, and collections in every branch of natural his¬ 
tory poured from the frozen north into the Smithsonian 
Museum by hundreds and thousands. 
When Ken-nicott, after traveling for months on snow- 
shoes, sledges, or bateaux, stood at last on the steep bluff at 
Fort Yukon, he saw the yellow flood of the great river surg¬ 
ing by the most remote outpost of civilization and disap¬ 
pearing to the westward in a vast and unknown region. 
An uninhabited gap of hundreds of miles lay between him 
and the nearest known native settlement to the west. Far 
in the north the midnight sun lighted up the snowy peaks 
of the Romanzoff mountains, whose further slope it was be¬ 
lieved gave on the Polar sea. No one knew where the 
Yukon met the ocean. On most maps of that day a large 
river called the Colvile, found by Simpson on the Arctic 
coast as he journeyed toward Point Barrow, was indicated 
as the outlet of the Yukon watershed. South of the Roman- 
zoff mountains for an unknown distance vast tundras, 
scantily wooded with larch and spruce, the breeding grounds 
of multitudes of water fowl, intersected by many streams, 
but level as a prairie, extended to the west. 
The native population of this region, as far as known, 
had always been scanty, and an epidemic of scarlet fever, 
introduced some years before through contact with other 
tribes trading to the coast, had swept them absolutely out of 
existence. Not an individual was left, and the nomadic 
natives who reached Fort Yukon from the east and south¬ 
east hesitated to approach the hunting grounds, where the 
mysterious pestilence might linger still. 
Obliged to terminate his explorations here, Kennicott 
returned, after months of weary travel, to the United States, 
but cherished the hope of some day penetrating the terra 
incognita on whose borders he had been obliged to pause 
and turn away. The dream of his life was thereafter the 
exploration of Russian America, the discovery of its fauna, 
