Shortly after noon we passed the mouth of a large river, from 150 to 200 yards in width, which my Chilkat Indians told me was called the Tah-heen'-a by them. The resemblance of this name to that of the Tahk-heen'-a made me abandon it, and I called it after M. Antoine D'Abbadie, Membre d'Institut, the French explorer. In regard to Indian names on this part of the Yukon River, I found that a white man labors under one difficulty not easy to overcome. The Chilkats, who are, as it were, the self-appointed masters over the docile and degraded "Sticks," while in the country of the latter, have one set of names and the "Sticks," or Tahk-heesh, have another. Oftentimes the name of a geographical object is the same in meaning, differing only according to the language. More often the names are radically different, and what is most perplexing of all, the Sticks will give the same name as the Chilkats in the presence of the latter, thus acknowledging in the most humble and abject way their savage suzerainty.
For some time before reaching the mouth of the D'Abbadie high hills had been rising on the eastern slope, until near this tributary their character had become truly mountainous. I called them the Semenow Mountains, after Von Semenow, President of the Imperial Geographical Society of Russia. They extend from the D'Abbadie River on the north to the Newberry River (after Professor Newberry, of New York), on the south. Between them and the Hancock Hills is located an isolated and conspicuous butte which I named after M. Charles Maunoir, of the Paris Geographical Society. A very similar hill between the Tahk River and the Yukon was named after Professor Ernst Haeckel, of Jena, Germany. The mouth of the D'Abbadie marks an important point on the Yukon River, as being the place at which gold begins to be found in placer deposits. From the D'Abbadie almost to the very mouth of the great Yukon, a panful of "dirt" taken with any discretion from almost any bar or bank, will when washed give several "colors," to use a miner's phrase. The Daly River comes in from the east some forty miles further on, measured along the stream, forming, with the Newberry and D'Abbadie, a singular trio of almost similar streams. The last-mentioned river I have named after Chief Justice Daly, of New York, a leading patron of my Franklin Search expedition. The frequent occurrence of large tributaries flowing from the east showed this to be the main drainage area of the Upper Yukon, a rule to which the sole exception of the Nordenskiöld River (after Baron von Nordenskiöld, the celebrated Swedish explorer of the Arctic), which comes in from the west, fifty miles beyond the Daly, and is the peer of any of the three just mentioned. Immediately after passing those rivers, the Newberry especially, the Yukon became very much darker in hue, showing, as I believe, that the tributaries drained a considerable amount of what might be called—possibly inappropriately—"tundra" land, i.e., where the water, saturated with the dyes extracted from dead leaves and mosses, is prevented by an impervious substratum of ice from clarifying itself by percolating through the soil, and is carried off by superficial drainage directly into the river-beds. Where we camped on the night of the 25th I noticed that many of the dead seasoned poplars with which we built our camp-fire and cooked our food had been killed in previous winters by the hares, that had peeled the bark in a circle around the trunk at such a uniform height of from twenty to twenty-four inches from the ground, measured from the lower edge of the girdle, that I could not but think that this was about the average depth of the winter snow, upon which the hares stood at the time. On the 11th we drifted over fifty miles. Shortly after starting we passed the mouth of the Daly, already referred to, while directly ahead was a noticeable hill named by the Chilkats Eagles' Nest, and by the Tahk-heesh Otter Tail, each in their own language. I easily saw my way out of the difficulty by changing its name to Parkman Peak, after Professor Francis Parkman, the well-known American historian.
LOOKING BACK AT THE RINK RAPIDS.
LORING BLUFF.
(Looking up the Yukon River from Von Wilczek Valley)
We passed the mouth of the Nordenskiöld River on the afternoon of the 11th, and the same day our Indians told us of a perilous rapid ahead which the Indians of the country sometimes shot in their small rafts; but they felt very anxious in regard to our bulky vessel of forty-two feet in length, as the stream made a double sharp bend with a huge rock in the center. We started late on the morning of the 12th, and at 10 o'clock stopped our raft on the eastern bank in order to go ahead and inspect the rapids which we were about to shoot. I found them to be a contraction of the river bed, into about one-third its usual width of from four to six hundred yards, and that the stream was also impeded by a number of massive trap rocks, thirty to forty feet high, lying directly in the channel and dividing it into three or four well marked channels, the second from the east, being the one ordinarily used by the Indians. We rejected this, however, on account of a sharp turn in it which could not be avoided. These rapids were very picturesque, as they rushed between the fantastically formed trap rocks and high towers, two of which were united by a slender natural bridge of stone, that spanned a whirlpool, making the whole look like an old ruined stone bridge with but one arch that had withstood the general demolition. We essayed the extreme right-hand (eastern) passage, although it was quite narrow and its boiling current was covered with waves running two and three feet high, but being the straightest was the best for our long craft. Thousands of gulls had made the top of these isolated towers their breeding places, for nothing but winged life could ever reach them, and here, safe from all intrusion, they reared their young. As we shot by on the raft they rose in clouds and almost drowned the noise of the roaring waters with their shrill cries. This extreme right-hand channel through which we shot, could, I believe, be ascended by a light-draft river steamer provided with a steam windlass, a sharp bend in the river bank just before it is entered giving a short and secure hold for a cable rope; and if I am not too sanguine in my conjectures, the cascades below the Grand Cañon mark the head of navigation on the Yukon River, as already noted. I named this picturesque little rapid after Dr. Henry Rink, of Christiana, a well-known authority on Greenland. After the Yukon receives the many large tributaries mentioned, it spreads into quite a formidable magnitude; interspersed with many islands, all of which at their upper ends, are so loaded with great piles of driftwood, oftentimes fifteen to twenty feet high, as to make the vista in one of these archipelagoes quite different according as one looks up or down the river, the former resembling the picturesque Thousand Isles of the St. Lawrence, while the latter reveals only a dreary stretch of felled timber, lying in unpicturesque groups, with the bright green of the island foliage making the dreariness more conspicuous.