This new lake I called after Lieutenant Bove of the Italian navy. Here too, the mountainous shores were carved into a series of terraces rising one above the other, which probably indicated the ancient beaches of the lake when its outlet was closed at a much higher level than at present, and when great bodies of ice on their surface plowed up the beach into these terraces. This new lake was nine miles long. The next day again we had the same fight with a battling wind from half past six in the morning until after nine at night, nearly seventeen hours, but we managed to make twelve miles, and better than all, regain our old course pointing northward. During one of these temporary landings on the shores of Lake Bove our Indians amused themselves in wasting government matches, articles which they had never seen in such profusion before, and in a little while they succeeded in getting some dead and fallen spruce trees on fire, and these communicating to the living ones above them, soon sent up great billows of dense resinous smoke that must have been visible for miles, and which lasted for a number of minutes after we had left. Before camping that evening we could see a very distant smoke, apparently six or seven miles ahead, but really ten or twenty, which our Indians told us was an answering smoke to them, the Tahk-heesh, who kindled the second fire, evidently thinking that they were Chilkat traders in their country, this being a frequent signal among them as a means of announcing their approach, when engaged in trading. It was worthy of note as marking the existence of this primitive method of signaling, so common among some of the Indian tribes of the plains, among these far-off savages, but I was unable to ascertain whether they carried it to such a degree of intricacy with respect to the different meanings of compound smokes either as to number or relative intervals of time or space. It is very doubtful if they do, as the necessity for such complex signals can hardly arise.
This new lake on which we had taken up our northward course, and which is about eighteen miles long, is called by the Indians of the country Tahk-o (each lake and connecting length of river has a different name with them), and, I understand, receives a river coming in from the south, which, followed up to one of its sources, gives a mountain pass to another river emptying into the inland estuaries of the Pacific Ocean. It is said by the Indians to be smaller than the one we had just come over, and therefore we might consider that we were on the Yukon proper thus far.
Lake Tahk-o and Lake Bove are almost a single sheet, separated only by a narrow strait formed by a point of remarkable length (Point Perthes, after Justus Perthes of Gotha), which juts nearly across to the opposite shore. It is almost covered with limestones, some of them almost true marble in their whiteness, a circumstance which gives a decided hue to the cape even when seen at a distance.
LOOKING ACROSS LAKE BOVE FROM PERTHES POINT.
Field Peak in the far distance. (Named for Hon. David Dudley Field.)
Leaving the raft alongside the beach of Lake Tahk-o at our only camping place on it (Camp No. 13), a short stroll along its shores revealed a great number of long, well-trimmed logs that strongly resembled telegraph poles, and would have sold for those necessary nuisances in a civilized country. They were finally made out to be the logs used by the Indians in rafting down the stream, and well-trimmed by constant attrition on the rough rocky beaches while held there by the storms. Most of these were observed on the northern shores of the lakes, to which the current through them, slight as it was, coupled with the prevailing south wind, naturally drifts them. I afterward ascertained that rafting was quite a usual thing along the head waters of the Yukon, and that we were not pioneers in this rude art by any means, although we had thought so from the direful prognostications they were continually making as to our probable success with our own. The "cottonwood" canoes already referred to are very scarce, there probably not existing over ten or twelve along the whole length of the upper river as far as old Fort Selkirk. Many of their journeys up the swift stream are performed by the natives on foot, carrying their limited necessities on their backs. Upon their return a small raft of from two to six or eight logs is made, and they float down with the current in the streams, and pole and sail across the lakes. By comparing these logs with telegraph poles one has a good idea of the usual size of the timber of these districts. The scarcity of good wooden canoes is also partially explained by this smallness of the logs; while birch bark canoes are unknown on the Yukon until the neighborhood of old Fort Selkirk is reached.
This same Lake Tahk-o, or probably some lake very near it, had been reached by an intrepid miner, a Mr. Byrnes, then in the employ of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Many of my readers are probably not acquainted with the fact that this corporation, at about the close of our civil war, conceived the grand idea of uniting civilization in the eastern and western continents by a telegraph line running by way of Bering's Straits, and that a great deal of the preliminary surveys and even a vast amount of the actual work had been completed when the success of the Atlantic cable put a stop to the project. The Yukon River had been carefully examined from its mouth as far as old Fort Yukon (then a flourishing Hudson Bay Company post), some one thousand miles from the mouth, and even roughly beyond, in their interest, although it had previously been more or less known to the Russian-American and Hudson Bay trading companies. Mr. Byrnes, a practical miner from the Caribou mines of British Columbia, crossed the Tahk-o Pass, already cited, got on one of the sources of the Yukon, and as near as can be made out, descended it to the vicinity of the lake of which I am writing. Here it appears he was recalled by a courier sent on his trail and dispatched by the telegraph company, who were now mournfully assisting in the jubilee of the Atlantic cable's success, and he retraced his steps over the river and lakes, and returned to his former occupation of mining.
Whether he ever furnished a map and a description of his journey, so that it could be called an exploration, I do not know, but from the books which purport to give a description of the country as deduced from his travels, I should say not, considering their great inaccuracy. One book, noticing his travels, and purporting to be a faithful record of the telegraph explorers on the American side, said that had Mr. Byrnes continued his trip only a day and a half further in the light birch-bark canoes of the country, he would have reached old Fort Selkirk, and thus completed the exploration of the Yukon. Had he reached the site of old Fort Selkirk, he certainly would have had the credit, had he recorded it, however rough his notes may have been, but he would never have done so in the light birch-bark canoes of the country, for the conclusive reason that they do not exist, as already stated; and as to doing it in a day and a half, our measurements from Lake Tahk-o to Fort Selkirk show nearly four hundred and fifty miles, and observations proved that the Indians seldom exceed a journey of six hours in their cramped wooden craft, so that his progress would necessarily have demanded a speed of nearly fifty miles an hour. At this rate of canoeing along the whole river, across Bering Sea and up the Amoor River, the telegraph company need not have completed their line along this part, but might simply have turned their dispatch over to these rapid couriers, and they would have only been a few hours behind the telegraph dispatch if it had been worked as slowly as it is now in the interest of the public.