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Updated: May 25, 2025
I would have liked to have stayed a day with them, but if we were to spend Palm Sunday at Fortymile and Easter at Eagle as had been promised, the time remaining did no more than serve; and there was a large band of Indians to visit at Ketchumstock. The next day took us into and across the Ketchumstock Flats, a wide basin surrounded by hills and drained by the Mosquito Fork of the Fortymile.
Their speech had much more affinity with the upper Yukon language, and it dawned upon me that they were not of the migration that had pushed up the Tanana River from the Yukon, as all the natives as far as the Salchaket certainly did, were not of that tribe or that movement at all, but had come across country by the Ketchumstock from the neighbourhood of Eagle the route we should return to the Yukon by and were of the Porcupine and Peel River stock.
A portion of this last migration must have gone across country to the Ketchumstock and the upper Tanana, for the inhabitants of the upper Tanana do not speak the Tanana tongue, which is the tongue of the Middle Yukon but a variant of the tongue of the upper Yukon. How long ago these migrations took place there is not the slightest knowledge to base even a surmise upon.
We amused ourselves calculating just how much farther mules and men could go until they ate up all they could carry. The Tanana Crossing is a central spot for the Indians of this region. Two days' journey up the river was the village of the Tetlin Indians. Two days' journey into the mountain range were the Mantasta Indians. Two days' journey across towards the Yukon were the Ketchumstock Indians.
Others had once been to the Ketchumstock, upon the occasion of a visit from our missionary at Eagle, and had received instruction from him. But there were many present in that tent who had never seen any missionary, never had any teaching, to whom it was wholly new save as they might have picked up some inkling from those that had been more fortunate.
The annual migration of the vast herd that roams the section of Alaska between the Yukon and the Tanana Rivers swarms over this Flat and through these hills, and we were told at the Ketchumstock telegraph station by the signal-corps men that they estimated that upward of one hundred thousand animals crossed the Mosquito Fork the previous October.
We reached the village and telegraph post of Ketchumstock for the night only to find all the natives gone hunting; but since they had gone in the direction of Chicken Creek, towards which we were travelling, we were able to catch up with them the next morning without going far out of our way.
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