Fair weather and good luck attended the expedition until it reached Point Barrow where ice was encountered and they were compelled to fall back to Tellar Point, a hundred miles north of Nome, Alaska, before returning south, where the cargo of the “Ruby” was discharged and the “Fort McPherson” beached for the Winter. In July, 1915, the “Ruby” returned from the south, picked up her cargo again, and with the schooner “Fort McPherson,” set sail for Herschel Island, arriving there in August, 1915.
Since August, 1915, the Company has opened seven fur trade posts in the Western Arctic, the first being at Herschel Island; then followed one at Baillie Island, two hundred fifty miles east of Herschel and since then others have been established at Kittigazuit, Aklavick, Fort Thomson, Three Rivers, Kent’s Peninsula and Shingle Point.
The “Fort McPherson” is the Company’s supply boat which during the Summer distributes the goods sent to Herschel Island and to the small posts in the Arctic.
Captain Hendriksen and Engineer Johnson are on their way to Winnipeg on vacation. During their leave of absence, the “Fort McPherson” will remain at Kittigazuit. It is the Captain’s intention to continue this trip to the home of his aged mother who is about to celebrate her centenary in Denmark, and whom he has not seen for thirty years.
The journey to the coast was, as they term it, an uneventful one, being the same kind of an experience they are accustomed to and which is part of the daily round of all the Company’s employees in the Arctic. But to us it reads like a fairy tale.
Imagine, if you will, two men starting on a twelve hundred mile “mush” from Herschel Island to Fairbanks in a sleigh drawn by four large “huskies.”
The frozen country they traversed is broken only by the remains of a once great forest, an ice-locked lagoon, horizons bounded by irridescent glaciers whose tips pierce the sky–and over all the sparkling arctic sunshine flooding the wide plains which stretch away to the Mystery of the World. In their long hike they met no human being except one roving band of Indians. But they saw immense herds of cariboo, many moose, and now and then a cinnamon or grizzly bear. And all the while, the thermometer ranged from 47 to 70 degrees below zero.
At night they rested under the canopy of the stars in a small tent perched impertinently in one of earth’s most awful and majestic solitudes.
Picture to yourself the long trail, the occasional pause in the wilderness to stalk and kill a cariboo or moose for food to replenish the larder of the voyageurs and their faithful dogs.