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Updated: June 2, 2025
I had confidently expected when I left Gizhiga that I should meet somewhere on the road a courier with news and despatches from Bush; and I was very much disappointed and a little alarmed when I reached Penzhina to find that no one had arrived at that place from Anadyrsk, and that nothing had been heard from our party since the previous spring.
The Cossack, however, told us that a party of men from the Anadyr River had arrived at Gizhiga on dog-sledges just previous to his departure, and that they had brought no news of any Americans in the vicinity of Anadyrsk or on the river. Col.
Beyond the two or three hundred miles of snowy desert which lay before us we could see, in imagination, a shadowy stove-pipe rising out of a bank of snow the "San greal" of which we, as arctic knights-errant, were in search. I will not detain the reader long with the first part of our journey from Anadyrsk to the Pacific Coast, as it did not differ much from our previous Siberian experience.
Notwithstanding the famine the dog-sledges were sent, and Bush, with two men, had returned on them to Anadyrsk. Finding that settlement famine-stricken and deserted, he had started without a moment's delay for Gizhiga, his exhausted and starving dogs dying along the road.
I may as well mention here, that when I returned from Anadyrsk in March I went to look at the poles, 500 in number, which the Penzhina men had cut. I found, to my great astonishment, that there was hardly one of them less than twelve inches in diameter at the top, and that the majority were so heavy and unwieldy that a dozen men could not move them.
The inhabitants of Anadyrsk, as well as of all the other Russian settlements in Siberia, are dependent for their very existence upon the fish which enter the rivers every summer to spawn, and are caught by thousands as they make their way up-stream toward the shallow water of the tributary brooks in the interior of the country.
The short winter day of three hours had long since closed and the night was far advanced when after twenty-three days of rough travel we drew near our final destination the ultima Thule of Russian civilisation. I was lying on my sledge nearly buried in heavy furs and half asleep, when the distant barking of dogs announced our approach to the village of Anadyrsk.
During the war which resulted in the destruction of Anadyrsk, two native tribes, Chuances and Yukagirs, who had taken sides with the Russians, were almost annihilated by the Chukchis, and were never able afterward to regain their distinct tribal individuality.
It was not without uneasiness that I thought of the possibility of being overtaken by a ten days' storm in such a region as this. We had made, as nearly as we could estimate, since leaving Anadyrsk, about two hundred versts; but whether we were anywhere near the seacoast or not we had no means of knowing.
The four little Russian and native villages, just south of the Arctic Circle, which are collectively known as Anadyrsk, form the last link in the great chain of settlements which extends in one almost unbroken line from the Ural Mountains to Bering Strait.
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