The Boy With the U. S. Survey

by Francis Rolt-Wheeler

The little skipper waved his hand.

"The incident is closed, sir," he said, "and I wish you good luck on your trip to the Arctic Ocean. I am only sorry that my duty will not permit me to take you at least part of the way to Dall City, but, sir, I am due in Fort Yukon on the sixth of the month."

An appropriate answering expression of good wishes having been made by Rivers, the little steamer started off and in a few minutes was only visible as a cloud of smoke around a bend in the river. A busy day was spent at Fort Hamlin, making the last preparations for the next lap of the journey, namely to Bettles, at the junction of the John and Koyukuk Rivers, a long and by no means easy trip.

But the days were growing long, indeed the nights were excessively short, and as everything was ready for the trip by a little after three o'clock, Rivers gave the word to start, and a few hours' paddling brought the voyagers to the Dall River, where it plunged its muddy waters into the north fork of the Yukon. There, immediately across from an Indian village, the party made its first camp on the third stage of the journey.

The Dall River was full to overflowing, as the spring floods had not all come down, and, so far as the boy could see, it hardly looked like a river at all, but a large flat marsh, with a sluggish current. Over this the boats made good time, sometimes following a blind channel only marked by the trees sticking up out of the water, and sometimes making a short cut over the submerged land. Several times, in the doing of this, the canoes grounded, but the bottom was of mud and no harm was done, the men jumping into the icy water to pull them clear.

Higher up the stream, however, the ground rose a little and these short cuts no longer became possible, so that the tortuous channel had to be followed, and as the valley of the Dall is extremely wide and the stream winds from side to side, a long day's traveling did not cause so great an advance. Twenty miles of this irregular going was rarely more than ten or twelve miles of progress, and the eighty-five miles between the mouth of the river and Coal Creek consumed an entire week. Here Rivers called a halt, as he desired to examine the lignite or soft coal of the region.

Taking Roger with him, the geologist ascended Coal Creek for a little over a mile above its confluence with the Dall, and there they found a large outcrop of lignite, of which one half the thickness of the seam showed coal of a firm, bright quality.

"I should think," said Roger, "that this ought to be more valuable than a gold mine, for Alaska would be all right to live in during the winter, if coal was cheap and easily obtained."

"It would make an immense difference," his chief rejoined, "for coal will go further to build up the greatness of a country than any other factor. That was largely the cause of England's rise, and the United States would never be what they are to-day if it were not for the anthracite and bituminous beds of Pennsylvania. If we could lay bare a big anthracite field, Doughty, it would be better for Alaska than all the gold that's ever been struck, though the soft coking coals, used in steel-making, etc., also are extremely valuable."

"Perhaps we may," suggested the boy, his eyes alight with the thought of a possible discovery.