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Updated: June 1, 2025
The upper Kobuk is a picturesque river, the timber being especially large and handsome for interior Alaska. We reached it just above the mouth of the Reed River, tributary from the north. The weather was warm too warm for good travelling the thermometer standing at 15°, 20°, and one day even 30° above zero all day long, so that we were all bareheaded and in our shirt-sleeves.
To Baldy the word "Devil" had an evil sound, for when he had heard it at Golconda it was generally associated with a kick or a blow. She even ostentatiously walked past the chained dogs sometimes, carrying fluffy Jimmie Gibson, the baby blue fox from the Kobuk, which was tantalizing to a degree.
It was thought at Bettles that we might possibly procure some supplies at a newly established mission of the Society of Friends about half-way down the Kobuk River, but there was no certainty about it, and we must carry with us enough man-food to take us to salt water. Our supply of dog fish we might safely count upon replenishing from the natives on the Kobuk.
It was during the quieter hours when the place rumbled to snores that Folsom yielded to his desire to write his wife, a desire which had been growing steadily. He was disgusted with Harkness, disappointed with the whole Kobuk enterprise, and in a peculiarly softened mood, therefore, he wrote with no attempt to conceal his yearning, homesick tenderness.
The same night we reached the native village at the mouth of the Squirrel River, another northern tributary the Kobuk receives most of its waters from the north and we spent the night and the next day, which was Sunday, in one of the half-underground huts of the place, in company with twelve other people. Here we found Roxy's brother, dubbed "Napoleon" by some white man.
If such devotion to the instruction of the ignorant as was described at the mission on the middle Kobuk be praiseworthy, by how much the more is one moved to admiration at the spectacle of this man, who might fill with credit any one of half a dozen professional chairs at the ordinary college, gladly consecrating his life to the teaching of an Indian school!
The dwellings resembled igloos more than cabins, being completely covered with snow and approached by underground passages, with heavy flaps of untanned sealskin to close them. When we passed a fork of the river we knew that we were entering the delta of the Kobuk, and that another day would take us to the mission on Kotzebue Sound.
We had come down from the remotest points to which the influence of these people has extended; we had met their natives five hundred miles away from their base of instruction, and everywhere we found the same thing. It was said by the white men on the Koyukuk that a Kobuk could not be induced to take a drink of whisky.
We were come to the first near view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected light of that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a group of wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up incandescent, with a vivid colour that seemed to come through them as well as from them.
It is a very tedious business, this double interpretation and a twenty-minute sermon takes fully an hour to deliver, but there is no help for it. The singing is hearty and enthusiastic though the repertory is wisely very limited; and here, north of the Arctic Circle, is a vested choir of eight or ten Kobuk and Koyukuk boys who lead the singing and lead it very well.
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