The Mississippi of Alaska: the Yukon River, and its Thorough Exploration.—Its vast Deltoid Mouth.—Cannot be Entered by Sea-going Vessels.—Its Valley, and its Tributaries.—Dividing Line between the Eskimo and the Indian on its Banks.—The Trader’s Steamer; its Whistle in this Lone Waste of the Yukon.—Michaelovsky, the Trading Centre for this Extensive Circumpolar Area.—The Characteristic Beauties of an Arctic Landscape in Summer.—Thunder-storms on the Upper Yukon; never Experienced on the Coast and at its Mouth.—Gorgeous Arches of Auroral Light; Beautiful Spectacular Fires in the Heavens.—Unhappy Climate.—Saint Michael’s to the Northward.—Zagoskin, the Intrepid Young Russian Explorer, 1842.—Snow Blizzards.—Golovin Bay; our People Prospecting there for Lead and Silver.—Drift-wood from the Yukon Strews the Beaches of Bering Sea.—Ookivok, and its Cliff-cave Houses.—Hardy Walrus-hunters.—Grantley Harbor; a Reminder of a Costly American Enterprise and its Failure.—Cape Prince of Wales—facing Asia, thirty-six miles away.—Simeon Deschnev, the first White Man to see Alaska, 1648. His Bold Journey.—The Diomede Islands; Stepping-stones between Asia and America in Bering Straits.—Kotzebue Sound; the Rendezvous for Arctic Traders; the Last Northern Station Visited by Salmon.—Interesting Features of the Place.
Lo! to the wintry winds the pilot yields,
His bark careering o’er unfathomed fields,
Now far he sweeps, where scarce a summer smiles,
On Behring’s rocks, or Greenland’s naked isles.
—Campbell.
Is it not a little singular that the lonely and monotonous course of the Yukon River, reaching as it does to the very limits of the pathless interior of a vast, unexplored region on either side, should be that one section of all others in Alaska the best known to us? An almost uninterrupted annual march has been made up and down its dreary banks since 1865, by men[157] well qualified to describe its varying moods and endless shoals—every turn in its flood, every shelving bank of alluvium or rocky bluff that lines the margin of its turbid current, has been minutely examined, named and renamed to suit the occasion and character of a traveller.
The Yukon River is not reached by traders as any other stream of size is in Alaska, by sailing into its mouth. No ocean-going craft can get within sixty miles of its deltoid entrance. Were a sailor foolhardy enough to attempt such a thing, he would be hard aground, in soft silt or mud, a hundred miles from land in a direct line from the point of his destination. Therefore it is the habit of mariners to sail up as far north as Norton’s Sound, and then turn a little to the southward and anchor their schooners or steamers under a lee of Stuart’s and St. Michael’s Islands, where the old post of Michaelovsky is established on the latter.
The “Rédoute Saint Michael” was founded here in 1835 by Lieutenant Tebenkov, and has been ever since, and is to-day, the most important post in the Alaskan North. This post is a shipping point for the accumulated furs gathered by all traders from the Lower and Upper Yukon, and the Tannanah, the annual yield from such points being the largest and the most valuable catch of land-furs taken in Alaska. A vessel coming into St. Michael’s at any time during the summer will find, encamped around its warehouses many bands of Innuits and Indians who have come in there, over long distances of hundreds of miles, from the north, east, and south. They are there as traders and middlemen. The fur-trading on the Yukon is very irregular as to its annual time and place—the traders constantly moving from settlement to settlement, because this year they may get only a thousand skins where they got five thousand last season, and vice versa. It is impossible to locate the best single spots for trade; the catch in different sections will vary every winter according to the depth of snow, the severity of climate, the prevalence of forest fires, or starvation of whole villages, owing to unwonted absence of fish, and so on.
In midsummer the Yukon is reached by small, light-draft, stern-wheel steamers, which, watching their opportunity, run down from St. Michael’s and enter its mouth, towing behind them a string of five or six large wooden boats which are each laden with several tons of merchandise. The scream of their whistles and puffing of these little trading-steamers as they slowly drag such tows against a rapid current, is the only enlivenment which the immense lonely solitudes of the Yukon are subjected to by our people. That area of watery waste is so wide and long, and the boats are so small and few in number, that even this innovation must be watched for every year with a hawk’s eye, or it will pass unobserved.