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Updated: June 6, 2025
I felt a presentiment that something was wrong, because Bush had been expressly directed to send a courier to Gizhiga by the first winter road, and it was now late in November. On the following day my worst anticipations were realised.
In the first place, although we had at Gizhiga fifteen or twenty thousand dollars' worth of unused material, most of it was of such a nature as to be absolutely unsalable in that country.
If he made a junction with Mahood and Bush, at that place, he would return at once, and meet us again at Gizhiga by the first of April, 1866.
The chief engineer of our enterprise had promised faithfully that ships with men, material, and supplies for the immediate prosecution of the work, should be at Gizhiga and at the mouth of the Anadyr River as early in the season as ice would permit them to enter; but it was now August, and they had not yet made their appearance.
A dense forest of larch, poplar, and aspen surrounds the town, so that the traveller coming from Gizhiga sometimes has to hunt for it a whole day, and if he be not familiar with the net-work of channels into which the Anadyr River is here divided, he may not find it at all.
He had ascertained the possibility of hiring a thousand Yakut labourers in the settlements along the Lena River, at the rate of sixty dollars a year for each man, and of purchasing there as many Siberian horses as we should require at very reasonable prices. He had located a route for the line from Gizhiga to Okhotsk, and had superintended generally the whole work of exploration.
In the whole distance of eight hundred versts between Gizhiga and the mouth of the Anadyr River there were said to be only four or five places where timber could be found large enough for telegraph poles, and over most of the route there was no wood except occasional patches of trailing-pine.
I also sent two natives back to Gizhiga on dog-sledges, with a letter to the Russian governor, apprising him of the famine, and another to Dodd, directing him to load all the dog-sledges he could get with provisions and send them at once to Penzhina, where I would make arrangements for their transportation to the famine-stricken settlement.
In the meantime, however, the famine was irremediable, and on December 1, 1867, poor Bush found himself in a deserted settlement 600 versts from Gizhiga without money, without provisions, and without means of transportation but with a helpless party of forty-four men, at the mouth of the Anadyr River, dependent upon him for support.
A journey from Gizhiga to the last settlement, Anadyrsk, on the Arctic Circle, would occupy from twenty to thirty days, according to weather, and beyond that point there was no possibility of going under any circumstances. The region west of Gizhiga, along the coast of the Okhotsk Sea, was reported to be better, but very rugged and mountainous, and heavily timbered with pine and larch.
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