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Updated: June 1, 2025
His mother did little more than touch the paper with the pencil. She smiled at the tiny dark line she had made, and gave back the pencil and paper to the boy. She was proud of him, proud that the strange white man should have thought her boy good enough to give him such queer things. Anvik saw her pride, and felt comforted. "To-morrow will be another day," murmured Tanana from his lounging place.
The military authorities refuse to call their post "Fort Tanana" and the postal authorities refuse to allow the town post-office to be called "Fort Gibbon," so there they lie, cheek by jowl, two separate places with a fence between them a source of endless confusion. A letter addressed to Fort Gibbon is likely to go astray and a telegram addressed to Tanana to be refused.
Chena is at the virtual head of the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter place is not on the Tanana River at all but on a slough, impracticable for almost any craft at low water. For every topographical reason, from every consideration of natural advantage, Chena should have been the river port and town of these gold-fields.
In 1889 Frank Densmore, a prospector, with several companions, crossed from the Tanana to the Kuskokwim by way of the Coschaket and Lake Minchúmina, and had the magnificent view of the Denali group which Lake Minchúmina affords, which the present writer was privileged to have in 1911.
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.
Two clumsy water-towers give height without dignity a quality denied to military architecture in Alaska. To the right the town begins, and an irregular row of one and two story buildings, stores, warehouses, drinking shops, straggle along the water-front. Unlike most towns in interior Alaska, Tanana does not depend upon an adjacent mining camp.
Past Richardson where the next night is spent, a decayed mining and trading town that dates back to the stampedes of 1905-6 when it was thought the upper Tanana would prove rich in gold, past Tenderfoot Creek on which the discoveries were made, past the mouth of the Big Delta with the great bluff on the opposite shore and the rushing black water at its foot that never entirely closes all the winter, and on the other hand the wide barrens of the Big Delta itself giving the whole fine sweep of the Alaskan range, we came at length to McCarthy's, the last telegraph station on the river, for the line strikes across country thence to Valdez following the government trail, and there spent another night, and here we leave the government-made trail and take to the river surface and the wilderness.
"It seems queer to put weapons and blankets and things to eat on people's graves," said Ted. "Why do they do it?" "Of the dead we know nothing," said Tanana, "Perhaps the warrior spirit wishes his arrows in the Land of the Great Unknown." "Yes, but he can't come back for them," persisted Ted. "At Wrangel, Boston man put flowers on his girl's grave," said Kalitan, drily.
A glance at the map will show that the Innoko and Iditarod country lies between the two great rivers of Alaska, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim, much lower down the Yukon than any of the earlier gold discoveries; that is to say that while the Tanana gold fields lie off the Middle Yukon, the Circle fields off the upper Yukon, the Iditarod camp belongs to the lower river.
Five days of almost ceaseless snow-storm during our stay at Tanana did not give prospect of good travelling, and, indeed, when we pulled out from the mission on the Monday in Holy Week there was no sign of any trail. From Tanana up to Fort Yukon there is very little travel; since the whole of this long stretch of river was deprived of winter mail a year or two before, no through travel at all.
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