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There has been but one setback in the construction, and that was the washing out of 12 miles of tracks along the Nenana River. This is a glacial stream which, when the snows melt, comes down at times with irresistible force.
Miss Farthing lies buried high up on the bluffs opposite the school at Nenana, in a spot she was wont to visit for the fine view of Denali it commands, and her brother, the present bishop of Montreal, and some of her colleagues of the Alaskan mission, have set a concrete cross there.
From Anchorage it was also intended to drive farther north through the Susitna Valley and across Broad Pass, and to the south along Turnagain Arm toward the Alaska Northern track. To secure coal for Alaska was the first need. So in addition to Anchorage as a base, one was also started at Nenana, on the Tanana River, from which to reach the Nenana coal fields lying to the south.
In the long roll of women who have labored devotedly for many years amongst the natives of the interior of Alaska, there are no brighter names than those of Miss Annie Farthing and Miss Clara Carter, the one forever associated with Nenana, the other with the Allakaket.
Robert G. Tatum of Tennessee, just twenty-one years old, a postulant for holy orders, stationed at the mission at Nenana, had been employed all the winter in a determined attempt to get supplies freighted over the ice, by natives and their dog teams, to two women missionaries, a nurse and a teacher, at the Tanana Crossing.
There is an open stretch across Broad Pass to connect the Susitna Valley with the road coming down from Nenana. This gap closed, there will be through connection between Seward and Fairbanks. By decisions of the Commissioner of the Land Office all of the claims in the Matanuska coal field were set aside, and by act of Congress a leasing bill was put into effect over the entire field.
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.
R. G. Tatum and the two boys, Johnny and Esaias, joined the company, which, thus increased to six persons, two sleds, and fourteen dogs, set out from Nenana across country to the Kantishna on St. Patrick's day. Travelling was over the beaten trail to the Kantishna gold camp, one of the smallest of Alaskan camps, supporting about thirty men.
We spent Sunday there and roamed over the curious domain, snow-free amidst all the surrounding snow, rank in vegetation amidst the yet-lingering winter death; and then we wallowed again. Tolovana, Nenana, and then one long run of fifty-four miles, the longest and last run of the winter, and Chena and Fairbanks.
To the right hand the glittering, tiny threads of streams draining the mountain range into the Chulitna and Sushitna Rivers, and so to Cook's Inlet and the Pacific Ocean, spread themselves out; to the left the affluents of the Kantishna and the Nenana drained the range into the Yukon and Bering Sea.
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