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In another chapter has been given some account of an outbreak of diphtheria on the Chandalar, following a more serious epidemic at Circle City and Fort Yukon. It was during that same winter the disease raged in this region, remote from any sort of medical or even intelligent lay aid, and swept off all the children that had been spared by the measles or had been born since that time.
Ten miles along the river's surface brought us to the Chandalar native village, a settlement of half a dozen cabins and twenty-five or thirty souls. The people came out to meet us, and said they were just about to bury a baby, and asked me to conduct the funeral.
The Chandalar River is to me as much the scene of Lorna Doone, which I read for the sixth or seventh time on my first journey along it, as Exmoor itself; and The Cloister and the Hearth, that noble historical romance, belongs in my literary geography to the Alatna-Kobuk portage. So will Boswell always bring back to me this trip across country from the Koyukuk to the Yukon through the deep snow.
The "folding pocket lantern," which is nothing but a convenient tin can with mica sides, is the best equipment for travel, but an empty butter can or lard can is sometimes easier to come by. The Chandalar is wide-spread in these parts, with several channels, and the trail was hard to follow.
These gaps are noted for wind, and the Chandalar Gap, which had loomed before us since daybreak, is deservedly in especial bad repute. The most hateful thing in the Arctic regions is the wind. Cold one may protect one's self against, but there is no adequate protection against wind.
Six years later, when these words are written, I have just baptized a son of the boy who lay so ill, who would have perished, I think, had we not reached the Chandalar village just in time.
But there was doubt in their minds and a reluctance to alter in any particular the liturgy that had been taught them, and it is quite likely that intercessions for a defunct sovereign of another land still arise from the Chandalar village.
At the end of the second day from the Gap we were at the mouth of the West Fork of the Chandalar, and after passing up it for fifteen or sixteen miles we left that watercourse to cross the mountains to the South Fork of the Koyukuk River. Then began hard labour again. A toboggan is not a good vehicle for crossing summits.
It is the native metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred miles, and what may be termed its permanent population of one hundred and fifty is doubled and sometimes trebled by contingents from the Chandalar, the Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country.
It was that rare and lovely thing a coloured aurora all of one rich deep tint. It was on the 11th of March, 1907, on the Chandalar River, a day's march above the gap by which that stream enters the Yukon Flats and five days north of Fort Yukon. A new "strike" had been made on the Chandalar, and a new town, "Caro," established; abandoned since.
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