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Updated: June 18, 2025
You may go on and see for yourself; you may go back to your brothers; but up the Koyukuk you shall not go while the priests and fighting men do my bidding. Thus do I command, I, Baptiste the Red, whose word is law and who am head man over this people." "And should I not go down to the Russians, or back to my brothers?"
By noon we were opposite the Red Mountain, one of the well-known Koyukuk landmarks, and on the site of an old Indian fishing camp. William and Arthur had made a great fire when we came up, and we heated some beans and made some tea and ate lunch. A mile farther on was the cabin of a white man, and we paid him a brief visit and got a little tea from him, for ours was nearly gone.
Below Anvik to the river's mouth the natives are divided between the Roman and the Greek Churches, and they are outside the scope of this book. On the tributaries of the Yukon the only native schools are conducted by the missions of the Episcopal Church, on the Koyukuk and Tanana Rivers, and have no connection with the government.
Furs, though they diminish in number, continually rise in price. There are localities, it is true, where the game has been largely killed off and the furs trapped out; the Koyukuk country is one of them, though perhaps that region never was a very good game country. In this region, when a few years ago there was a partial failure of the salmon, there was distress amongst the Indians.
When a stampede took place to the Red Mountain or Indian River country of the middle Koyukuk in 1911-12, I was told that there was not a creek in the camp that did not show signs of having been prospected long before, although it had passed altogether out of knowledge that this particular region had ever been visited by prospectors.
The Koyukuk has its own Indian people, but these enterprising Kobuks have pushed their way farther and farther from salt water into what used to be exclusive Indian territory. Representatives of both races were at Coldfoot, and as we lay weather-bound for a couple of days, I was enabled to renew last year's acquaintance with them, though without a good interpreter not much progress was made.
And it would seem that there must have been two distinct migrations: one that passed down the Yukon to the Tanana district and spread thence up the Tanana River and up the Koyukuk; and long after, as one supposes, a migration that peopled the upper Yukon.
I held my nerve and had good controll over my men and after a waery march reached the Mouth of the Koyukuk and sold our furs at Rampart, Here Black Dave quit us saying he was going back to Arizonia.
Five miners had returned from the Koyukuk country and given out information of a gold "strike" of exceeding richness. Three of these men had arrived before the others, but all told the same story. A Selawik Eskimo, they said, had recently guided them to the creek where their own discoveries had confirmed his statement. Nothing so rich had they ever before seen.
In the Fairbanks and Nome districts, in the Circle and Koyukuk districts, in the Fortymile and in the Iditarod in all districts where any extensive mining is carried on heavy freights are moved by horses, and this tendency will doubtless increase rather than diminish. The dog team cannot compete with the horse team when it comes to moving heavy loads over good trails.
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