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Updated: May 15, 2025
We spent Sunday there and roamed over the curious domain, snow-free amidst all the surrounding snow, rank in vegetation amidst the yet-lingering winter death; and then we wallowed again. Tolovana, Nenana, and then one long run of fifty-four miles, the longest and last run of the winter, and Chena and Fairbanks.
There we had to border round a piece of country which had some years before been subject to the process of chena cultivation, but which, having been again deserted, was covered with a dense thorny jungle such as no man could force his way through without being almost torn in pieces, but which affords a secure retreat to elephants and all other wild animals.
Chena is at the virtual head of the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter place is not on the Tanana River at all but on a slough, impracticable for almost any craft at low water. For every topographical reason, from every consideration of natural advantage, Chena should have been the river port and town of these gold-fields.
The space was divided into patches, containing paddy or dry rice, grain, Indian corn, coracan, with sweet potatoes, cassava, onions, yams, chillies, as also cotton-plants. I was surprised to find that the cultivators had only a temporary occupation of the ground. It is called chena cultivation. Pumpkins, sugar-cane, hemp, yams, as well as grains and vegetables, are grown.
This is called chena jungle, and is always the favourite resort of elephants and all wild animals, the impervious character of the bush forming a secure retreat. From these haunts the elephants commit nocturnal descents upon the crops of the natives.
The chocolate nut of Sulo is preferred at Manilla to that from South America. The tree that yields the clove-bark, and the nutmeg, and clove, thrive luxuriantly, though never tried to any extent. The woods about Pontiana for carpentry and joinery, are kayu bulean, chena, mintangore, laban, ebony, iron-wood, dammar, and dammar laut, &c. &c. The pine abounds in the bay of Maludu, teak at Sulo.
Although the fences around these chenas are little more than lines of reeds loosely fastened together, they are sufficient, with the presence of a single watcher, to prevent the entrance of the elephants, who wait patiently till the rice and coracan have been removed, and the watcher withdrawn; and, then finding gaps in the fence, they may be seen gleaning among the leavings and the stubble; and they take their departure when these are exhausted, apparently in the direction of some other chena, which they have ascertained to be about to be cut.
There seems also to have entered into the undertaking a naïve notion that in some way or other large money reward would follow a successful ascent. The enterprise took form under Thomas Lloyd, who managed to secure the financial backing of McPhee and Petersen, saloon-keepers of Fairbanks, and Griffin, a wholesale liquor dealer of Chena.
The company came, the courts came, the hospital came, the churches came, and Chena woke up from its dreams of easy wealth to find itself and its manifold natural advantages passed by and ignored and the big town firmly established elsewhere. How well I remember the virulent little newspaper published at Chena in those days and the bitterness and vituperation it used to pour out week by week!
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