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Updated: June 18, 2025
After that he would spend a week or so in the Peninsula, then go up the Kobuk, across the big portage to the Koyukuk and the far headwaters of the north, and still farther beyond the last trails of civilized men to his herds and his people. And Stampede Smith would be with him. After a long winter of homesickness it was all a comforting inducement to sleep and pleasant dreams.
It had been the happy duty of the writer to return to the Koyukuk late in the winter of 1906-7, empowered to build the promised mission for the hitherto neglected natives of that region.
The men had come from Nome to the Koyukuk, where at a small trading post they had changed a large amount of currency into gold dust and nuggets, mined from adjacent creeks. With this they were making their way south to the Yukon River where they intended to go quietly on board a steamer heading up stream, thus making their way to the Klondyke and later to the States.
If I were not a white man I would far rather be one of these nomadic inland Esquimaux than any other native I know of. That same day we crossed two headwater forks of the Kokochatna, as the Kobuks call it, or the Hogatzitna as the Koyukuks call it, or the Hog River, as the white men call it, a tributary of the Koyukuk that comes in about one hundred and fifty miles below the Alatna.
"You've certainly got it in for us hard," he laughed. "It isn't that," she said quickly. "Man by man, I know the crowd from Sea Lion, and they are men. They starved in this country in the old days, and they worked like giants to develop it. I went through the hard times on the Koyukuk with them when I was a little girl. And I was with them in the Birch Creek famine, and in the Forty Mile famine.
From that on the going was heavier and our progress slower, but we kept at it till dark, and still far into the night, fortunate in having two Indians who knew every step of the way, until at last we reached the hut that marks the end of the second stage from the Koyukuk River, on the top of a birch hill. We had made nineteen and a half miles that day and had taken eleven hours to do it.
The course lay fifty or sixty miles across country to the Chandalar River, about one hundred miles up that stream, and then across a divide to the South Fork of the Koyukuk, and across another to the Middle Fork, on which Coldfoot is situated.
The bold, shapely peaks of the South Fork of the Koyukuk turn their snows to pink fire as his rays slowly descend their sides, and the whole scene is exquisitely beautiful. What a wonderful thing colour is! When the skies are overcast this is a dead black-and-white country in winter, for spruce, the prevailing wood, is black in the mass at a little distance.
The smoke may be observed just issuing from the pipe, or rising but a few feet, and then curling downward to be diffused amidst the air near the ground. It was to such a smoke-enveloped inn that we pulled up to warm and refresh ourselves and our team for the twenty miles that remained of the day's march. We had almost reached the limit of Koyukuk road-houses.
The writer, with an Indian attendant, was travelling on the Koyukuk River from Coldfoot to Bettles, and, owing to a heavy, drifted trail, night had fallen while yet the road-house was far away.
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