Sunday, the 15th.—In the morning the men showed no sign of life, so after a cold breakfast H. and W. sallied forth to see whether it would be possible to ‘pack’ up the river by our camp, while E. and I curled up again in our blankets. About 2 P.M. the rain began to leave off, and the men emerged and made a fire. For lunch we fried some seal-meat, the Indians having been successful in shooting one the day before. H. and W. returned dripping at three o’clock, in time to share our repast, and reported that the bush was too dense to pack through, so we decided to start early next morning and follow the same route as the Schwatka party. In the evening E. announced the presence of two plover by the river close to camp, so I executed a stalk through the sand which brought me within easy shot, but trying to get both at once, I missed with the first barrel and only secured one. I then plucked and cleaned my four birds, and we fried them with bacon for supper.
Monday, the 16th.—Fine at last and some sunshine! We had a grand view of St. Elias through the clouds, which gradually cleared off, and we were able at our leisure to survey the monarch, who looked most formidable, but we hoped he would improve on acquaintance.
Though we were up at five, there was so much to be done that it was not till eight that the procession began its march along the sandhills. As it was the first day, the men were not used to their burdens of from sixty to eighty pounds, and could only go about two miles an hour, in addition to which they stopped to rest every three or four hundred yards. As some of the Indians seemed to be overburdened, I went back to H., who had not yet started, and we hired for the day three of the other Yakutats. At the site of Schwatka’s shore camp we picked up a short .44 cartridge and a piece of sheet-lead. While resting there I suddenly perceived a bear cantering along the other side of the lagoon about five hundred yards off. Shorty, who was carrying his rifle, which was also left at the first cache, was anxious to go in pursuit, but H. declined to allow this, as being a waste of valuable time. Progressing very slowly, and halting continually to attack the strawberries, we at length reached the first river at half-past eleven. Seton-Karr recommends the ascent of this, but it looked very unpromising and we kept on. Most of the men stripped more or less to cross this stream, which was well over our knees and horribly cold, but as we knew there would be lots more wading, none of us four took the trouble of taking off boots or stockings. In an hour more, across a flat grassy plain with scattered fir-trees we reached a creek of the main river and halted for lunch, after which the fun began.
The streams were not deep, being seldom above our knees, but their beds, and generally the spaces in between, were of that terrible glacier mud, as glutinous as quicksands, and through this we toiled, every now and then skirting the edge of the forest, where a scanty vegetation of sedge and marestails gave a little sounder going, and resting whenever a fallen log or two offered something substantial to sit on. Presently it began to rain heavily; Gums pointed out a spot where he declared Schwatka halted the first day, but this disagreed with Seton-Karr’s account, and as it was yet early we pushed on in hope of at least finding a dry camping-place. In this, although the moraine of the Agassiz Glacier was now looming near at hand, we were doomed to be disappointed; and after two unusually deep and rapid crossings, in one of which Lyons lost his footing and emerged in a pitiable plight, though with nothing gone except his temper, we sought the shelter of the woods, thoroughly numbed by this ceaseless wading in ice-water. Such a thing as a flat place was not to be found above the level of the mud, but by careful search we discovered a spot where the logs and stones were more or less disguised by the dense layer of moss, and pitched the tents. With the aid of a couple of roaring fires and some excellent pea-soup we restored some warmth to our shivering limbs, but, as it was still pouring, dryness was not to be hoped for, and decidedly weary with the first day’s march, we sought our blankets. E. and I then discovered the deceitfulness of the moss; H. and W. were fairly well off, but at our end of the tent an enormous boulder projected. With the aid of knapsacks I enlarged the mountain, so that I was able to doze more or less on its summit, while E. curled himself in a ball in the valley at my feet. The mosquitoes attacked us in myriads, but E. and W. were soon asleep; H. and I were not so fortunate, and I never became enough accustomed to the absence of darkness to sleep well. In the middle of the night, just as I was dropping off, I was suddenly aroused by something tickling my neck, and putting up my hand grasped an enormous beetle. Flinging it from me, I promptly massacred it, and discovered H. eyeing my movements with mild astonishment. I explained, and we composed ourselves to rest again, if not to sleep.
Tuesday, the 17th.—Next morning we got off at half-past seven and continued up the river, but with less wading as we were now next the Agassiz moraine. At one point, which must have been very near the site of Schwatka’s first camp, we halted for about an hour while W. and H. made an attempt to get up the face of the moraine. In this they succeeded, but only to find the scrub on the glacier itself so dense that it would have been impossible for the packers to penetrate it, and we pushed on up the bed of the river. Gums soon announced that there would be no more wading, to the delight of the men, who put on their boots; but their joy was turned to wrath when, on rounding the next corner, we had to plunge in again. Of course these streams are always changing their bed, and we found very great variations in their rise and fall apart from their natural increase by day and decrease by night. This was probably to be accounted for by the periodical closing and bursting of the many glacier lakes. At last the river began to contract, and its bed was now only about a mile wide. On the other side was the bare ice of the Guyot Glacier, while we were now driven by the depth of one of the main streams on to the moraine of the Agassiz Glacier, where we halted from half-past eleven till two, while we had lunch, made a cache, and dismissed our three extra Yakutats, one of whom was the boy who was to stay at Icy Bay as company for the canoe-owner.
We were now reduced to our proper quota of fourteen, and our retainers deserve a somewhat more elaborate description than they have hitherto had. Of our four whites, our right-hand man was Arthur McConnahay, nicknamed Shorty, apparently on the lucus a non lucendo principle, being some six feet four inches in height. Very handsome, with fair hair and blue eyes, he was the ideal Anglo-Saxon in appearance, and, being extremely good-natured, he was a great favourite with our Indians, with whom he would readily share his last bit of tobacco; but he was an inveterate grumbler, and often roused H.’s wrath by his ceaseless growls against the hardships of the way. Though the son of an Indiana farmer, he had been on the Pacific coast for some years, and, being captured in one of the sealers seized in the Behring’s Sea, had been stranded at Sitka without means to get away. In May he had been up to Yakutat and back in a canoe, searching for a lost sloop, the ‘Leola,’ and the knowledge he thus obtained of the coast proved subsequently most useful to me. He had, however, once been shipwrecked near Valparaiso, when he had a narrow escape of his life, being washed up insensible, and always had a great distrust of bad weather at sea.
Harry Lyons, his great friend, though not so tall, was a man of immense strength, with light hair and grey eyes. He hailed from Iowa, and had been for some time a fisherman on the Columbia river, where he seemed to have had some rather exciting experiences, and to have made things exciting for other people too; for, when one of the steamers was running through his salmon-nets, he put a bullet into the bridge within a foot of the captain. He once got in one haul seven hundred and fourteen salmon, each over twenty pounds, and also captured the biggest salmon ever taken in the river, weighing over seventy-four pounds. Having lost boat and nets in a storm he had gone in for sealing, and when we engaged him had just come in on the ‘Alpha.’ A good packer, and a first-rate man in a boat, he was terribly lazy in camp, not wilfully, but it didn’t seem to occur to him to do things.
Ed. and Finn were both Eastern men, the former coming from Maine, and the latter from Erie. Neither was conspicuous for ardour in packing, and it would have been pretty safe to bet on their loads being lighter than other people’s. But in camp they were very useful, especially as bakers. Ed. generally undertook this task, and it was not till we were back in Yakutat, and the baking-powder began to run short, that we discovered Finn’s talent for ‘sour-dough’ bread. He was a man of considerable education and of a scientific turn of mind, with some knowledge of chemistry and botany. With Ed. and three or four others, he had come prospecting up the coast from Juneau, stopping every few miles. They had been up in Disenchantment Bay, a long fiord running inland from the head of Yakutat Bay, and were going on to Nuchuk, but a few miles west of Point Manby they were imprisoned on the beach by a storm from the south-east. Trying to get off too soon, they were swamped, and barely escaped with their lives. Luckily for them their boat was not injured, and when they got off a day or two later, they returned to Yakutat, as they had lost most of their stores, and there we found them.
Of our Indians, Matthew, our so-called interpreter, was not popular with us. He had been a mission boy, and accordingly thought a good deal of himself, and was inclined to be insolent.
Mike, a short burly fellow, with a most ruffianly cast of countenance, was in reality very good-natured, and, like all the Indians, a magnificent packer; but he was very slow and somewhat dense.