Eskimo dogs are driven with harness, hitched to sleds, and teams of five or seven with a good leader can haul several hundred pounds, if blessed with a kind driver. In summer they have nothing to do but sleep, and find their food as best they may. Along the Yukon they haunt steamer-landings and are always fed by the stewards—who can thus muster a dog fight for the pleasure of heartless passengers at a moment's notice.
With the coming of winter a kind of electric strength seems to enter into these dogs. They long for the harness and the journeys over snow and ice; and for a time they leap and frisk like puppies and will not be restrained. They are about the size of a St. Bernard dog, but of very different shape; the leader is always an intelligent and superior animal and his eyes frequently hold an almost human appeal. He is fairly dynamic in force, and when not in harness will fling himself upon food with a swiftness and a strength that suggest a missile hurled from a catapult. Nothing can check his course; and he has been known to strike his master to the earth in his headlong rush of greeting—although it has been cruelly said of him that he has no affection for any save the one that feeds him, and not for him after his hunger is satisfied.
The Eskimo dog seldom barks, but he has a mournful, wolflike howl. His coat is thick and somewhat like wool, and his feet are hard; he travels for great distances without becoming footsore, and at night he digs a deep hole in the snow, crawls into it, curls up in his own wool, and sleeps as sweetly as a pet Spitz on a cushion of down. His chief food is fish. If the Alaska dog is not affectionate, it is because for generations he has had no cause for affection. No dog with such eyes—so asking and so human-like in their expression—could fail to be affectionate and devoted to a master possessing the qualities which inspire affection and devotion.
In winter all the mails are carried by dogs, covering hundreds of miles.
Half a mile below Forty-Mile the town of Cudahy was founded in 1892 by the North American Trading and Transportation Company, as a rival settlement.
Fifty miles below Forty-Mile, at the confluence of Mission Creek with the Yukon, is Eagle, having a population of three or four hundred people. It has the most northerly customs office and military post, Fort Egbert, belonging to the United States, and is the terminus of the Valdez-Eagle mail route and telegraph line. It is also of importance as being but a few miles from the boundary.
Fort Egbert is a two-company post, and usually, as at the time of our visit, two companies are stationed there. The winter of 1904-1905 was the gayest in the social history of the fort. Several ladies, the wives and the sisters of officers, were there, and these, with the wife of the company's agent and other residents of the town, formed a brilliant and refined social club.
From November the 27th to January the 16th the sun does not appear above the hills to the south. The two "great" days at Eagle are the 16th of January,—"when the sun comes back,"—and the day "when the ice breaks in the river," usually the 12th of May. On the former occasion the people assemble, like a band of sun-worshippers, and celebrate its return.
The vegetable and flower gardens of Eagle were a revelation of what may be expected in the agricultural and floral line in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle. Potatoes, cabbages, cauliflower, lettuce, turnips, radishes, and other vegetables were in a state of spendthrift luxuriance that cannot be imagined by one who has not travelled in a country where vegetables grow day and night.
In winter Eagle is a lonely place. The only mail it receives is the monthly mail passing through from Dawson to Nome by dog sleds; and no magazines, papers, or parcels are carried.