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Updated: June 16, 2025
In 1898 George Eldridge and Robert Muldrow, of the United States Geological Survey, traversed the region, and Muldrow estimated the height of the mountain by triangulation at twenty thousand three hundred feet. In 1899 Lieutenant Herron crossed the range from Cook's Inlet and reached the Kuskokwim.
The natives of the interior are of two races, the Indian and the Esquimau. The Indian inhabits the valley of the Yukon down to within three or four hundred miles of its mouth; the Esquimau occupies the lower reaches of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim and the whole of the rivers that drain into the Arctic Ocean west and north.
Four hours brought us to the military telegraph station at Melozi, and we were able to send word ahead that we were safely out of the Kuskokwim wilderness. Then a portage was crossed and then the river pursued again until with about thirty miles to our credit we made camp.
The valley of the upper Kuskokwim was almost depopulated by it in 1906. A disease resembling measles took half the population of the lower Yukon villages in 1900. In the last few years there have been no serious epidemics; but epidemic disease does not constitute the chief danger that threatens the native. That chief danger looms from two things: tuberculosis and whisky.
It took us all that week to make the watershed between the drainage of the Tanana and the drainage of the Kuskokwim, a point about half-way to Lake Minchúmina. One day trail was broken, the next day the loads went forward.
The people know no proper treatment; maddened by the itching rash that covers the body, they fling off all cover, rush outdoors naked, whatever the weather, and either roll in the snow or plunge into the stream; with the result that the disease "strikes in" and kills them. Such is the description that is given of its course along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim.
This point at the junction of the two rivers was an important place for the inhabitants of interior Alaska ages before the white man reached the country. Tribes from all the middle Yukon, from the lower Yukon, from the Tanana, from the upper Kuskokwim met here for trading and for general festivity.
They started a new town, Georgetown, on the Kuskokwim itself; another town sprang up on the Takotna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim; and the great Commercial Company of Alaska, ever alert for new developments, put a steamboat on the Kuskokwim and built trading-posts at both these points.
Our way now left the Kuskokwim and struck across country to a point just below the junction of the forks, and then across country again to a tributary of the right bank, the Takotna; with a general northerly direction. Road-houses there indeed were, in the crudity and discomfort of their first season, and other evidences of the proximity of the white man.
The summit between the head of Moose Creek and the head of Bonanza Creek is again a watershed between the waters of the Kuskokwim and the waters of the Yukon; for Moose Creek is tributary to the Takotna and Bonanza Creek is tributary to Otter Creek, which is tributary to the Iditarod River.
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