Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

From White Horse, at the head of navigation on the Yukon, during the open season from June to October one can travel by steamer down that river for two thousand miles to Nome on Bering Sea.

A wood-burning heating stove common throughout Alaska and the Yukon is made from a gasoline tank turned on its side and fitted with legs of iron pipe.

We have other live stock on board. Down in the hold are eight hundred chickens bound for the hen fanciers of interior Alaska. They crow night and morning, and with the baaing of the sheep and the mooing of the cattle we seem to be in a floating barnyard. The barge is swung this way and that, and whenever it touches the bank, the sheep pile up one over the other, some of the cattle are thrown from their feet, and the chickens cackle in protest.

The Selkirk burns wood, and we stop several times a day to take on fuel, which is wheeled to the steamer in barrows over a gangplank from the piles of cord wood stacked up on the banks. At many of the stops the only dwelling we see is the cabin of the wood chopper, who supplies fuel for a few dollars a cord. The purser measures with a ten-foot pole the amount in each pile loaded on board. Going down stream the Selkirk burns about one cord an hour, and in coming back against the current the consumption is often four times as much. The wood is largely from spruce trees from three to six inches in diameter. Many of the little islands we pass are covered with the stumps of trees cut for the steamers, but most of the wood stations are on the mainland, the cutting having been done along the banks or in the valleys back from the river.

Except where we take on fuel there are no settlements on the Yukon between White Horse and Dawson. The country is much the same as it was when the cave dwellers, the ancestors of the Eskimos, wrought with their tools of stone. For a distance of four hundred and sixty miles we do not see a half dozen people at any stop of the steamer, although here and there are deserted camps with the abandoned cabins of prospectors and wood choppers. One such is at Chisana, near the mouth of the White River. The town was built during the rush to the Chisana gold mines, and it was for a time a thriving village, with a government telegraph office, a two-story hotel, and a log stable that could accommodate a dozen horses and numerous sled dogs. The White Pass and Yukon Company built the hotel and the stable, expecting to bring the miners in by its steamers and to send them into the interior with horses and dogs. It did a good business until the gold bubble burst and the camp “busted.” To-day the Chisana Hotel is deserted, all the cabins except that of the wood chopper are empty, and under the wires leading into one of them is a notice: “Government telegraph, closed August 3, 1914.”

The woodman’s cabin is open. A horseshoe is nailed over the door and a rifle stands on the porch at the side. On the wall at the back of the hut a dog harness hangs on a peg. The skin of a freshly killed bear is tacked up on one side, and bits of rabbit skins lie here and there on the ground. The cabin itself is not more than eight feet in height. It is made of logs, well chinked with mud and with earth banked up about the foundation. There is a weather-strip of bagging nailed to the door posts. The door is a framework filled in with pieces of wooden packing boxes for panels.

Entering, we find that there are two rooms. One is a kitchen, and the other a living room and bedroom combined. Three cots, made of poles and covered with blankets, form the beds. There are some benches for seats and a rude table stands under the window. Various articles of clothing hang from the walls or lie upon the floor. In the kitchen a table is covered with unwashed dishes. There is a guitar on the shelf near the stove and a pack of cards on a ledge in the logs. The whole is by no means inviting, but I doubt not it is a fair type of the home of the prospectors and woodsmen throughout this whole region.

I have seen most of the great rivers of the world—the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Nile, the Zambesi, the Yangtse, and the Hoang Ho. I know the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Indus, and the Irrawaddy, as well as the Amazon and the Parana, and many other streams of more or less fame. But nowhere else have I seen scenery like that along the Yukon. We seem to have joined the army of early explorers and to be steaming through a new world. We pass places