Part 12 (1/2)
Add to the trouble given by the soldiers the constant operation of the slinking bootleggers of the town, a score or more of whom are known to make money by this liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for a living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing to the c.u.mbrous machinery of the law and the att.i.tude of juries, and it will be seen that the hands of those who are fighting for the native race are tied.
What has been said about the military does not by any means apply to all, either officers or men. Some of the officers have been decent, G.o.d-fearing men, conscious of the evil and zealous to suppress it; some of the men, indeed in all probability most of the men, quite free from such offence; some commanding officers have kept such a well-disciplined post that offences of all kinds have been greatly reduced. But the commanding officer is changed every year, and the whole force is changed every two years, so that there is no continuity of policy at the post, and an administration that has grown familiar with conditions and that stands so far as it can for clean living and sobriety and decency and the protection of the native people, may be followed by one that is loftily ignorant of the situation, careless about offences against morality, and impatient of any complaint.
Off by himself, separate from the demoralising influence of the low-down white, there is every hope and encouragement in the effort to elevate and educate the Indian; set down cheek by jowl with the riffraff of towns and barracks, his fate seems sealed.
[Sidenote: DEATH-RATE AND BIRTH-RATE]
Let these two mission stations, the Allakaket and Tanana, one hundred and fifty miles or so apart by the winter trail, represent the two conditions. In six years' time there has been manifest advance at the one and decay at the other. The birth-rate is greatly in excess of the death-rate at the Allakaket, the death-rate greatly in excess of the birth-rate at Tanana. In the year in which this journey was made there were thirty-four deaths and fourteen births at Tanana, and while the difference was an unusually large one, yet in the six years referred to there has not been one year in which the number of births exceeded the number of deaths. One does not have to be a prophet to foresee the inevitable result, if the process be not stopped.
A tribute should be paid to the zeal, now of one, now of another army surgeon at Fort Gibbon in tending the native sick, three miles away, when we have been unable to procure a physician of our own for the place. The missionary nurse, for five years last past Miss Florence Langdon, has been greatly helped in her almost desperate efforts here by the willing co-operation of these medical officers of the army.
FOOTNOTE:
[B] See ill.u.s.tration, p. 374.
CHAPTER VIII
UP THE YUKON TO RAMPART AND ACROSS COUNTRY TO THE TANANA--ALASKAN AGRICULTURE--THE GOOD DOG NANOOK--MISS FARTHING'S BOYS AT NENANA--CHENA AND FAIRBANKS
OUR course from Tanana did not lie directly up the Tanana River, but up the Yukon to Rampart and then across country to the Hot Springs on the Tanana River. The seventy-five miles up the Yukon was through the Lower Ramparts, one of the most picturesque portions of this great river. The stream is confined in one deep channel by lofty mountains on both banks, and the scenery at times is very bold and wild. But its topography makes it the natural wind course of the country--a down-river wind in winter, an up-river wind in summer blows almost continually. It was no colder than 5 below zero when we started on the trip, but the wind made the travelling unpleasant. The second day it had increased to a gale, and every mile we travelled it grew stronger. We travelled three hours, and the last hour we made scarcely a mile. So thickly charged with flying snow was the wind and so dead ahead that despite parkee hoods it blinded us, and the dogs could hardly be forced to keep their heads towards it.
Their faces were so coated with crusted snow that they looked curiously like the face of harlequin in the pantomime. It did become literally intolerable, and when Arthur said that he knew there was a cabin right across the river, we made our way thither and shortly found it and lay there the rest of the day, the gale blowing incessantly. This was disappointing, because it meant that I could not reach Rampart for the Sunday I had appointed.
Next day the wind had ceased and the thermometer went down to 30 below zero. In places the ice was blown clear of snow; in other places it was heavily drifted. By midday we had reached the lonely telegraph station at ”The Rapids,” and were very kindly received by the signal-corps men in charge. They gave us to eat and to drink and would take no money.
There is little travel on this part of the river nowadays, and the telegraph men are glad to see any one who may chance to pa.s.s by. We pushed on heavily again, and had to stop and cut a gee pole presently, for it was hard to handle the sled without it; but the gee pole always means laborious travel. The cold was welcome; it meant no wind; and we were glad to see the thermometer drop lower than 50 below zero that night at the old mail cabin. The mail goes no longer on the Yukon River from Fort Yukon to Tanana, and, barring this point, Rampart, towards which we were travelling, which is supplied across country from the Hot Springs, over the route we should traverse, no spot on that three hundred and fifty miles of river receives any mail at all. The population is small and scattered, it is true; on the same grounds Alaska might be denied any mail at all. There has been much resentment at this abandonment of the Yukon River by the post-office and several pet.i.tions for its restoration, but it has not been restored.
[Sidenote: THE WIND-SWEPT YUKON]
We travelled all the next day at 50 below zero, and it was one of the pleasantest days of the winter. There was not a breath of wind, the going steadily improved, and, best of all, for three hours we were travelling in the suns.h.i.+ne for the first time this winter. Only those who have been deprived of the sun can really understand how joyful and grateful his return is. There was no heat in his rays, this last day of January; the thermometer stood at 49 below at noon, and had risen but 5 since our start in the morning; but the mere sight of him glowing in the south, where a great bend of the river gave him to us through a gap in the mountains, was cheerful and invigorating after two months in which we had seen no more than his gilding of the high snows. The sun gives life to the dead landscape, colour to the oppressive monotony of white and black, and man's heart leaps to the change as jubilantly as does the face of nature.
[Sidenote: RAMPART AND ITS SALOON]
Rampart City differs from Circle City, the other decayed mining town of the Yukon River, only in that the process is further advanced. Year by year there are a few less men on the creeks behind it, a few less residents in the town itself. Its long, straggling water-front consists in the main of empty buildings, the windows boarded up, the snow drifted high about the doors. One store now serves all ends of trade, one liquor shop serves all the desire for drink of the whites, and slops over through the agency of two or three dissolute squaw men and half-breeds to the natives up and down the river.[C]
Rampart had one fat year, 1898, when many hundreds of gold seekers, approaching the Klondike by Saint Michael and the lower Yukon were attracted and halted by the gold discoveries on Big and Little Minook, and spent the winter here. The next spring news was brought of the rich discoveries on Anvil Creek, behind Cape Nome, and an exodus began which grew into a veritable stampede in 1900, when the gold discoveries in the beach itself were made. Rampart's large population faded away as surely and as quickly to Nome as Circle City's population did to the Klondike.
The Indians are almost all gone from their village a mile above the town; they dwindled away with the dwindling prosperity, some to Tanana, some to other points down the river; and what used to be the worst small native community in the interior of Alaska has almost ceased to exist.
Most of the little band of white folks still remaining were gathered together at night, and appreciated, I thought, their semiannual opportunity for Divine service.
[Sidenote: ”DEVELOPED”]
There is no resisting the melancholy that hangs over a place like this.
As one treads the crazy, treacherous board sidewalks, full of holes and rotten planks, now rising a step or two, now falling, and reads the dimmed and dirty signs that once flaunted their gold and colours, ”Golden North,” ”Pioneer,” ”Reception,” ”The Senate” (why should every town in Alaska have a ”Senate” saloon and not one a ”House of Representatives”?), one conjures up the scenes of rude revelry these drinking places witnessed a few years ago. How high the hopes of sudden riches burned in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the men who went in and out of them, doomed to utter disappointment in the vast majority! What a rapscallion crew, male and female, followed this great mob of gold seekers, and grew richer as their victims grew poorer! What earned and borrowed and saved and begged and stolen moneys were frittered away and flung away that winter; what health and character were undermined! How the ribaldry and valiant, stupid blasphemy rang out in these tumbling-down shanties! Go out on the creeks and see the hills denuded of their timber, the stream-beds punched with innumerable holes, filled up or filling up, the cabins and sluice-boxes rotting into the moss, here and there a broken pick and shovel, here and there a rusting boiler, and take notice that this region has been ”developed.”
When the debit and credit sides of the ledger are balanced, what remains to Alaska of all these thousands of men, of all the many hundreds of thousands of dollars they brought with them? Those creeks, stripped, gutted, and deserted; this town, waiting for a kindly fire with a favouring breeze to wipe out its useless emptiness; a few half-breed children at mission schools; a hardy native tribe, sophisticated, diseased, demoralised, and largely dead--that seems the net result.
The portage trail from Rampart to the Tanana River goes up Minook Creek and follows the valley to its head, then crosses a summit and pa.s.ses down through several small mining settlements to the Hot Springs. The trail saves traversing two sides of the triangle which it makes with the two rivers.
The dogs' feet and legs had suffered so much from the deep snow and the heavy labour of the journey out of the Koyukuk and the rough ice of the Yukon that I was compelled to have not merely moccasins but moose-hide leggings made here, coming right up to the belly and tying over the back. All the hair was worn away from the back of the legs and the skin was in many places raw.