Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/134

130 miles of mudflats and shifting sandbars, with no landmarks to indicate the channels of which only the salmon knew the secret. No invader, seeking a fairway for his vessel, might find comfort here. On the south the mighty rock walls of the Alaskan and St. Elias ranges, bristling with splintered crags, between which lurk the unconquered remnants of the Glacier Age, confront the would-be intruder. Lastly, on the east, mountains alternate with morasses for hundreds of miles; with streams unnavigable even by canoes, except at the price of hourly portages; tamarack thickets too dense to traverse, standing in bogs too soft to afford foothold, *and so populated by black flies and mosquitoes as to be abandoned in summer by all the larger animals. Here a little band of Hudson Bay voyageurs, bent on reaching the great unknown river, some sixty-six years ago, were driven, through desperate starvation, to the last imaginable horror. Not till MacMurray flanked them by descending the Mackenzie far beyond the Arctic circle and forcing the Eat River portage to the waters of the Porcupine, were the eastern defenses of the valley carried by an explorer.

Even then, a quarter of a century should pass before the white man from the east met his fellow from the west, under the Arctic circle, at Port Yukon, and the whole long river should know the stroke of their paddles and smoke of their camp-fires.

When the whites came they but followed on the trails of the Indian, whose far progenitors, lost in the mists of time, had penetrated to the valley, retreating, as legends tell, from massacre on the south at the hands of stronger tribes; or from starvation on the north, where, beyond the fiats of frozen mud, lay only the barren floe. To them the Yukon gave of her caribou and salmon, and among her clustered spruce trees they found a safe refuge. There they prospered and begat other generations, who in the fulness of time came to call themselves Yukonikatana, Men of the Yukon. The ancient feud between Indian and Eskimo kept them from the coasts. Thus in a very emphatic sense the valley of the Yukon was their world.

To enter into the Yukon Valley one must scale its watershed or advance by the stream itself through the delta. The former was more difficult, the latter longer and more monotonous. Creeping along the coast in shallow water, one came finally to a branch where a loaded sloop might enter, and, by hard pulling against the current, finally gain the main channel. After leaving the sea one rowed between steep banks, hour after hour, the traveler seeing nothing but muddy water and scattered driftwood. If, in desperation, one scrambled to the level of the land, one saw on every hand an apparently illimitable plain, broken only far to the southeast by a single summit, the isolated peak of Kusilvak Mountain, blue in the distance.

Over the level surface lay scattered the worn and shattered trunks of