I had started with four Chilkat Indians, who were to go over the whole length of the Yukon with me. One of them was always complaining of severe illness, with such a wonderful adaptation to the amount of labor on hand that I discharged him at Lake Bennett as the only method of breaking up the coincidence. The best workman among them discharged himself by disappearing with a hatchet and an ax, and I was left with but two, neither of whom, properly speaking, could be called a Chilkat Indian; in fact one was a half-breed Tlinkit interpreter, "Billy" Dickinson by name, whose mother had been a Tsimpsean Indian woman and whose father kept the store of the North-west Trading Company in Chilkat Inlet. "Billy," as we always called him, was a rather good-looking young fellow of about twenty-five years, who understood the Tlinkit language thoroughly, but had the fault of nearly all interpreters of mixed blood, that when called on for duty he considered himself as one of the high contracting parties to the bargain to be made; a sort of agent instead of an interpreter, and being a wonderfully poor agent he became still worse as an interpreter. He was as strong as two or three ordinary men of his build and in any sort of an emergency with a sprinkle of dangerous excitement about it he put all his strength to use and proved invaluable, but in the hum-drum, monotonous work of the trip, such as the steering of the raft or other continuous labor, his Indian nature came to the front, and he did every thing in the world on the outskirts of the work required, but would not be brought down to the main issue until compelled to do so by the application of strong language. Our other native companion was named Indianne, a Chilkat Tahk-heesh Indian, whose familiarity with the latter language, through his mother, a Tahk-heesh squaw, made him invaluable to us as an interpreter while in the country of this tribe, which stretches to the site of old Fort Selkirk at the mouth of the Pelly River. Physically, Indianne was not all that might be required in an Indian, for they are generally supposed to do twice as much out-of-door work as a white man, but he was well past fifty years and such activity was hardly to be expected of him. Besides being a Tahk-heesh, or Stick interpreter, he was fairly familiar with the ground as a guide, having traveled over parts of it much oftener than most Indians, owing to the demand for his services as an interpreter among the Sticks. Through the medium of our two interpreters, and the knowledge found in each tribe of the language of their neighbors, we managed to get along on the river until English and Russian were again encountered, although we occasionally had to use four or five interpreters at once.
There was a fair wind in our favor as we started, but it was accompanied with a disagreeable rain which made things very unpleasant, as we had no sign of a cover on our open boat, nor could we raise one in a strong wind. Under this wind we made about a mile and a half an hour, and as it kept slowly increasing we dashed along at the noble rate of two or two and a half miles an hour. This increasing wind, however, also had its disadvantages, for on long, unprotected stretches of the lake the water was swelling into waves that gave us no small apprehension for our vessel. Not that we feared she might strike a rock, or spring a leak, but that in her peculiar explorations she might spread herself over the lake, and her crew and cargo over its bottom. By three in the afternoon the waves were dashing high over the stern, and the raft having no logs running its entire length, was working in the center like an accordion, and with as much distraction to us. Still it was important to take advantage of every possible breath of wind in the right direction while on the lakes; and we held the raft rigidly to the north for about two hours longer, at which time a perfect hurricane was howling, the high waves sweeping the rowing space so that no one could stand on his feet in that part, much less sit down to the oars, and as a few of the faithful pins commenced snapping, we headed the vessel for the eastern shore at as sharp an angle as it was possible to make running before the wind, and which I do not think was over two points of the compass, equal to an angle of about twenty degrees.
This course brought us in time to a rough, rocky beach strewn with big bowlders along the water's edge, over which the waves were dashing in a boiling sheet of water that looked threatening enough; but a line was gotten ashore through the surf with the aid of a canoe, and while a number of the crew kept the raft off the rocks with poles, the remainder of the party tracked it back about a half a mile along the slippery stones of the beach, to a crescent-shaped cove sheltered from the waves and wind, where it was anchored near the beach. We at once began looking around for a sufficient number of long logs to run the whole length of the raft, a search in which we were conspicuously successful, for the timber skirting the little cove was the largest and best adapted for raft repairing of any we saw for many hundred miles along the lakes. Four quite large trees were found, and all the next day, the 20th, was occupied in cutting them down, clearing a way for them through the timber to the shore of the lake, and prying, pulling, and pushing them there, and then incorporating them into the raft. Two were used for the side logs and two for the center, and when we had finished our task it was evident that a much needed improvement had been made. It was just made in time, too, for many of our tools were rapidly going to pieces; the last auger had slipped the nut that held it in the handle, so that it could not be withdrawn from the logs to clear it of the shavings, but a small hand-vise was firmly screwed on as a substitute, and this too lost its hold and fell overboard on the outer edge of the raft in eight or ten feet of water, and ice-water at that. A magnet of fair size was lashed on the end of a long pole, and we fished for the invisible implement, but without avail. "Billy" Dickinson, our half-breed Chilkat interpreter, of his own free will and accord, then stripped himself and dived down into the ice-cold water and discovered that near the spot where it had sunk was a precipitous bank of an unknown depth, down which it had probably rolled, otherwise the magnet would have secured it. Other means were employed and we got along without it.
The day we spent in repairing the raft a good, strong, steady wind from the south kept us all day in a state of perfect irritation at the loss of so much good motive power, but we consoled ourselves by observing that it did us one service at least—no mean one, however—in keeping the mosquitoes quiet during our labors.
Across Lake Bennett to the north-westward was a very prominent cape, brought out in bold relief by the valley of a picturesque stream, which emptied itself just beyond. I called it Prejevalsky Point after the well-known Russian explorer, while the stream was called Wheaton River after Brevet Major-General Frank Wheaton, U. S. Army, at the time commanding the Military Department (of the Columbia) in which Alaska is comprised, and to whose efforts and generosity the ample outfit of the expedition was due.
On the 21st we again started early, with a good breeze behind us that on the long stretches gave us quite heavy seas, which tested the raft very thoroughly, and with a result much to our satisfaction. It no longer conformed to the surface of the long swelling waves, but remained rigidly intact, the helmsman at the steering oar getting considerably splashed as a consequence. The red rocks and ridges of the ice-covered mountain tops that I have mentioned finally culminated in one bold, beetling pinnacle, well isolated from the rest, and quite noticeable for many miles along the lake from either direction. This I named Richards' Rock, after Vice-Admiral Richards, of the Royal Navy. The country was becoming a little more open as we neared the northern end of Lake Bennett, and, indeed, more picturesque in its relief to the monotonous grandeur of the mountain scenery. Lake Bennett is thirty miles long. At its north-western extremity a couple of streams disembogue, forming a wide, flat and conspicuous valley that, as we approached it, we all anticipated would prove our outlet. Several well marked conical buttes spring from this valley, and these with the distant mountains give it a very picturesque appearance, its largest river being sixty to seventy-five yards wide, but quite shallow. It received the name of Watson Valley, for Professor Sereno Watson, of Harvard University.
About five o'clock the northern end or outlet of the lake was reached. As the sail was lowered, and we entered a river from one hundred to two hundred yards wide, and started forward at a speed of three or four miles an hour—a pace which seemed ten times as fast as our progress upon the lake, since, from our proximity to the shore, our relative motion was more clearly indicated, our spirits ascended, and the prospects of our future journey when we should be rid of the lakes were joyfully discussed, and the subject was not exhausted when we grounded and ran upon a mud flat that took us two hours of hard work to get clear of. This short stretch of the draining river of Lake Bennett, nearly two miles long, is called by the natives of the country "the place where the caribou cross," and appears on the map as Caribou Crossing.
At certain seasons of the year, so the Tahk-heesh Indians say, these caribou—the woodland reindeer—pass over this part of the river in large numbers in their migrations to the different feeding grounds, supplied and withdrawn in turn by the changing seasons, and ford its wide shallow current, passing backward and forward through Watson Valley. Unfortunately for our party neither of these crossings occurred at this time of the year, although a dejected camp of two Tahk-heesh families not far away from ours (No. 10) had a very ancient reindeer ham hanging in front of their brush tent, which, however, we did not care to buy. The numerous tracks of the animals, some apparently as large as oxen, confirmed the Indian stories, and as I looked at our skeleton game score and our provisions of Government bacon, I wished sincerely that June was one of the months of the reindeers' migration, and the 21st or 22d about the period of its culmination.
The very few Indians living in this part of the country—the "Sticks"—subsist mostly on these animals and on mountain goats, with now and then a wandering moose, and more frequently a black bear. One would expect to find such followers of the chase the very hardiest of all Indians, in compliance with the rule that prevails in most countries, by which the hunter excels the fisherman, but this does not seem to be the case along this great river. Here, indeed, it appears that the further down the stream the Indian lives, and the more he subsists on fish, the hardier, the more robust, the more self-asserting and impudent he becomes.
After prying our raft off the soft mud flat we again spread our sail for the beach of the little lake and went into camp, after having been on the water (or in it) for over thirteen hours.