BRIEF HISTORICAL DATA
The Tanana is the largest tributary of the Yukon. It is over 600 miles in length, and in its breadth, though not in its volume, it appears to equal, if not to exceed, the Yukon at their junction. The first white men to see the mouth of the Tanana were the Russian traders (about 1860), followed before long by the employees of the Hudson Bay Co. Dall says that it has long been noted on the old maps of Russian America, under the name of the River of the Mountain Men, while the Hudson Bay men called it the Gens-des-Buttes River. (Alaska and Its Resources, 281-282.) Dall mapped the junction of the river with the Yukon. The first who descended a part of its course were two traders, Harper and Bates, who reached the river higher up, sometime in the late seventies. The name of Harper is preserved by having been given to the big bend of the stream, 12 miles above its mouth. Its scientific exploration begins only in 1885, with the passage down nearly its entire length of Lieut. Henry T. Allen, United States Army;[5] the main work concerning the geography and geology of the river being done in 1898 by A. H. Brooks.[6]
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Allen, Henry T., Military Reconnaissance in Alaska. Comp. Narr. Expl. Alas., 415-416, 446-452.
[6] Brooks, A. H., Reconnaissance in the Tanana and White River Basins. Twentieth Ann. Rept. U. S. Geol. Surv., Washington, 1900, pt. VII, 437-438; also the Geog. and Geol. Alas., U. S. Geol. Surv. Doc. 201, 1906.
POPULATION
The native population of the Tanana has always been remarkably scarce. Dall obtained an estimate of their whole number as about 150 families.[7] Petrof, in 1880, thought they numbered perhaps seven or eight hundred;[8] Allen in 1885 estimated them at between 550 and 600;[9] Brooks, in 1898, thought there were less than 400;[10] and the 1910 United States Census gives the total number of the "Tenan-kutchin," full bloods and mix bloods, as 415.[11]
According to Brooks (Reconnaissance, 490-491), the Tanana natives were separated into two geographic contingents, the eastern or highland and the northwestern or lowland groups. The most easterly group included the Indian settlements in the vicinity of Forty-mile and Mentasta Pass trail; the northwestern comprises to-day those from Nenana to the mouth of the river.
The Tanana Indians were generally regarded by other natives as warlike and dangerous, but so far as their relation with the whites was concerned there was little justification for this notion.[12] Physically they were reported by Brooks to "average rather better than the Indians of the Yukon" (Reconnaissance, 492). There are but a few and scanty other references to them in this connection.