We camped that night at the mouth of a noticeable but small stream coming in from the east, which we afterward learned was called Deer Creek by the traders, from the large number of caribou or woodland reindeer seen in its valley at certain times of their migrations.
At this point of its course the Yukon River is extremely narrow in comparison with the distance from its head—about 700 miles,—and considering its previous mean width, being here only two hundred or two hundred and fifty yards across. It certainly must have great depth to be able to carry the immense volume of water of so swift and wide a river as it is above, for the current does not seem to increase appreciably in this narrow channel.
Directly northward in plain sight is a prominent landmark on this part of the river, viz., a high hill called by the Indians "the moose-skin mountain." Two ravines that converge from its top again diverge when about to meet about half way down the mountain slope, and along these two arms of an hyperbola there has been a great landslide, laying bare the dull red ocherous soil beneath, which contrasts almost vividly with the bright green of the grass and foliage of the mountain flank, and in shape and color resembles a gigantic moose-skin stretched out to dry. That day's drift gave us forty-seven and a half miles, and all our scores were good while passing the ramparts, the delays from sand, mud and gravel bars being very small.
Believing that I was now in close proximity to the British boundary, as shown by our dead reckoning—kept by Mr. Homan,—I reluctantly determined on giving a day (the 19th of July) to astronomical observations,—reluctantly because every day was of vital importance in reaching St. Michael's, near the mouth of the river, in time to reach any outgoing vessels for the United States; for if too late to catch them, we should have to spend a dismal and profitless year at that place. That day, however, proved so tempestuous, and the prospect so uninviting, that after getting a couple of poor "sights" for longitude, I ordered camp broken, and we got away shortly after eleven o'clock.
A few minutes before one o'clock we passed the abandoned trading station on the right bank of the river, which we surmised from certain maps and from subsequent information to be the one named Fort Reliance. It was a most dilapidated-looking frontier pile of shanties, consisting of one main house, probably the store, above ground, and three or four cellar-like houses, the ruined roofs of which were the only vestiges remaining above ground. The Indians said that Mr. McQuestion, the trader, had left on account of severe sickness, but his own story, when we met him afterward on the lower river, was that he was sick of the Indians, the main tribe of which were peaceful enough, but contained several ugly tempered communistic medicine-men who had threatened his life in order to get rid of his competition in the drug business, which resulted greatly to their financial detriment.
Nearly opposite Fort Reliance was the Indian village of Noo-klak-o, or Nuclaco, numbering about one hundred and fifty people. Our approach was welcomed by a protracted salute of from fifty to seventy-five discharges of their old rusty muskets, to which we replied with a far less number. Despite the great value of powder and other ammunition to these poor isolated savages, who are often obliged to make journeys of many hundreds of miles in order to procure them, and must oftentimes be in sore need of them for hunting purposes, they do not hesitate in exciting times—and every visit of a stranger causes excitement—to waste their ammunition in foolish hangings and silly salutes that suggest the vicinity of a powder magazine. I suppose the expenditure on our visit, if judiciously employed in hunting, would have supplied their village with meat for probably a month; and yet we drifted by with hardly a response. This method of saluting is very common along the river from this point on, and is, I believe, an old Russian custom which has found its way thus far up the stream, which is much beyond where they had ever traded. It is a custom often mentioned in descriptions of travel further down the river. The permanent number of inhabitants, according to Mr. McQuestion, was about seventy-five or eighty; and therefore there must have been a great number of visitors among them at the time of our passing. They seemed very much disappointed that we did not visit their village, and the many who crowded around the drifting raft in their little fleet of canoes spoke only of tea and tobacco, for which they seemed ready to barter their very souls. Their principal diet in summer and early fall is furnished by the salmon of the Yukon, while during winter and spring, until the ice disappears, they feed on the flesh of moose and caribou. A trader on the upper river told me that the ice of the stream is removed from the upper ramparts and above principally by melting, while all that covers the Yukon below that part is washed out by the spring rise of the river, there being fully a month's difference in the matter between the two districts. Noo-klak-o' was a semi-permanent village, but a most squalid-looking affair,—somewhat resembling the Ayan town, but with a much greater preponderance of canvas. Most of the native visitors we saw were Tanana' Indians, and I was somewhat surprised to find them put the accent, in a broad way, on the second syllable, Ta-nah'-nee, differing radically from the pronunciation of the same name by the Indians at the mouth of the river, and by most white travelers of the Lower Yukon. From this point a trail leads south-westward over the mountains to a tributary of the Tanana, by means of which these Indians visit Noo-klak-o. The 19th was a most disagreeable day, with alternating rain showers and drifting fog, which had followed us since the day of our failure in securing astronomical observations, and to vary the discomfort, after making less than thirty miles we stuck so fast on the upper point of a long gravel bar that we had to carry our effects ashore on our backs, and there camp with only half a dozen water-logged sticks for a camp-fire. What in the world any mosquito wanted to do out on that desert of a sand-bar in a cold drifting fog I could never imagine, but before our beds were fairly made they put in an appearance in the usual unlimited numbers and made sleep, after a hard day's work, almost impossible.
Starting at 8:10 A.M., next morning, from Camp 33, at 11:30 we passed a good sized river coming in from the west, which I named the Cone-Hill River, from the fact that there is a prominent conical hill in the center of its broad valley, near the mouth.
Just beyond the mouth of the Cone-Hill River we suddenly came in sight of some four or five black and brown bears in an open or untimbered space of about an acre or two on the steep hillsides of the western slope. The raft was left to look after itself and we gave them a running volley of skirmish fire that sent them scampering up the steep hill into the dense brush and timber, their principal loss being loss of breath. By not attending to the navigation of our craft in the excitement of the short bear hunt we ran on a submerged rock in a current so swift that we swung around so rapidly as almost to throw a number of us overboard, stuck for a couple of minutes with the water boiling over the stern, and in general lost our faith in the ability of our vessel to navigate itself. In a previous chapter I have mentioned having been told by a person in southern Alaska, undoubtedly conscientious in his statement, and having considerable experience as a hunter, that the black and brown bear of his district never occupied the same localities, and although the sequence of these localities might be as promiscuous as the white and black squares on a checker-board, yet each species remained wholly on his own color, so to speak; and this led him to believe that the weaker of the two, the black bear, had good reason to be afraid of his more powerful neighbor. This day's observation of the two species living together, in one very small area, shows either an error of judgment on the part of the observer mentioned, or a difference of the ursine nature in different regions.
After leaving the Stewart River, which had been identified by a sort of reductio ad absurdum reasoning, I found it absolutely impossible to identify any of the other streams from the descriptions and maps now in existence, even when aided by the imperfect information derived from the local tribes. Indianne, my Chilkat-Tahk-heesh interpreter, got along very well among the latter tribe. Among the Ayans were many who spoke Tahk-heesh, with whom they traded, and here we had but little trouble. Even lower down we managed to get along after a fashion, for one or two of the Ayan medicine-men who came as far as Fort Reliance with us, could occasionally be found, and they understood the lower languages pretty fairly, and although we struggled through four or five tongues we could still make out that tea and tobacco were the leading topics of conversation everywhere. Beyond Fort Reliance, and after bidding adieu to our four Ayans, we were almost at sea, but occasionally in the most roundabout way we managed to elicit information of a limited character.