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We knew that it would not greatly interfere with our plans to lie another week at the Allakaket, and that would bring our departure after the monthly journey of the mail-carrier and would thus compel him to break trail for us through all that snow.
Every one must shake hands; even the babies on their mothers' backs stretch out their little fingers eagerly, and if they be too small for that, the mother will take the little hand and hold it out. At the bend we take a portage and a quarter of a mile brings us to the Allakaket, to the familiar modest buildings of the mission, with its new Koyukuk village gradually clustering round it.
Our start had been late it is next to impossible to get an early start from a mission; there is always some native who must have audience at the last moment and after the long repose we were so soft that the heavy trail had wearied us, and we decided to "call it a day" when in five and a half hours we came to the road-house, the last occupied habitation between the Allakaket and Tanana.
In the long roll of women who have labored devotedly for many years amongst the natives of the interior of Alaska, there are no brighter names than those of Miss Annie Farthing and Miss Clara Carter, the one forever associated with Nenana, the other with the Allakaket.
LEAVING Fort Yukon on the 26th of November, 1909, and going again over almost the same route we followed during the first journey described in this volume, we reached the new mission at the Allakaket on the Koyukuk River on the 14th of December, after a period of almost continual cold. The climate of the interior of Alaska varies as much as any climate.
The next day I sent the auxiliary sled and team and driver back to the Allakaket, keeping the mission boy with me, however, to return with the mail-carrier, who was already late and must go back as soon as he reached Tanana.
Let these two mission stations, the Allakaket and Tanana, one hundred and fifty miles or so apart by the winter trail, represent the two conditions. In six years' time there has been manifest advance at the one and decay at the other. The birth-rate is greatly in excess of the death-rate at the Allakaket, the death-rate greatly in excess of the birth-rate at Tanana.
Here is a picture of native football at the Allakaket, just north of the Arctic Circle, made late in April with a Graflex, fitted with a lens working at f. 4.5, at the full speed of its focal-plane shutter one one-thousandth of a second. In five years' use that was the only time when that speed was used, or any speed above one two-hundred-and-fiftieth.
Our winter itinerary called us to leave the Allakaket immediately after New Year's Day, and our route lay overland through a totally uninhabited country for nearly one hundred and fifty miles, to Tanana on the Yukon.
At the Allakaket is fine example of what, I think, is the best rule in the world for the inferior races the absolute rule of a devoted, intelligent, capable gentlewoman. We are but now writing the indentures of their apprenticeship to self-government in the elective village councils we have set up; it is good for them to serve it under this loving and unquestioned despotism.
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