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Updated: June 18, 2025
The extent to which that early prospecting was carried is not generally known, for these men, after the manner of their kind, left no record behind them. There are few creek beds that give any promise at all in the whole of this vast country that have not had some holes sunk in them. Even in districts so remote as the Koyukuk, signs of old prospecting are encountered.
Beyond the Kornuchaket much more snow had fallen, and a few miles brought us to Moses' Village, called grandiosely "Arctic City," since a trader had established a store and a road-house there. At this spot a new overland mail trail from Tanana strikes the Koyukuk, and, although ten or twelve miles remained, we felt that our journey was done.
Any one who visits the Koyukuk may see monster turnips and cabbages raised at Coldfoot, near the 68th parallel; from Sir William Parry's description we may feel quite sure that vegetables of size and excellence might be raised at the head of Bushnan's Cove of Melville Island, on the 75th parallel; he called it "an arctic paradise"; Greely reported "grass twenty-four inches high and many butterflies" in the interior of Grinnell Land under the 82d parallel; and if gold were ever discovered on the north coast of Greenland one might quite expect to hear that some enterprising Swede was growing turnips and cabbages at Cape Morris Jessup above the 83d parallel, and getting a dollar a pound for them.
We are all frozen again a little; this man's nose is touched, that man's cheeks, and the other man's finger. On the middle fork of the Koyukuk, at the mouth of Slate Creek, Coldfoot sits within a cirque of rugged mountain peaks, the most northerly postal town in the interior of Alaska, the most northerly gold-mining town in the world, as it claims.
Until my visit of the previous year no minister of religion of any sort had penetrated to the Koyukuk, and, save for one journey thither by Bishop Rowe, my annual visits have been the only opportunities for public worship since. It will suffice for the visit now describing as well as for all the others to say that the reception was most cordial and the opportunity much appreciated.
There was no time to hunt others, to linger was to invite the very mishap we sought to guard against, so we pulled out dogless, reached the mouth of the Koyukuk on the 17th of September and, having taken on board the supply of gasoline cached there, turned our bow up the river the next morning.
We should have had a toboggan, but toboggans are little used on the Koyukuk, and we had only our sled. In five hours we made five miles and were worn out. We decided to pitch our tent and go ahead and break trail for the morrow's journey. On the lakes interspersed amongst the brush we had to break an entirely new trail, for we could find no trace of the old one.
That Indian had come seventy-five miles on snow-shoes in one run, without stopping at all save to eat two or three times, at a continuous temperature of 50° below zero or lower, to bring word that he had found a white man frozen to death on the trail; and on the Koyukuk that feat will always be counted to Albert the Pilot for righteousness.
When the northern trip to the Koyukuk was returned from at Tanana, a sad journey had to be made to Nenana to bury the body of Miss Farthing, and Doctor Loomis, missionary physician at Tanana, who accompanied me on this errand, had almost as rough a breaking-in to the Alaska trail as we came back to Tanana again as Doctor Burke had in our journey over the "first ice" of the Koyukuk two years before.
The cold itself becomes merely a condition; the wind a deadly weapon which uses that condition to deprive its victim of all defence. The warmth which active exercise stores up, the buckler of the traveller, is borne away. His reserves are invaded, depleted, destroyed. And then the wind falls upon him with its sword. Of all of which we were to have instance here on the Koyukuk.
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