Young Alaskans in the Far North.

by Emerson Hough.

I

THE START FOR THE MIDNIGHT SUN

"Well, fellows," said Jesse Wilc.o.x, the youngest of the three boys who stood now at the ragged railway station of Athabasca Landing, where they had just disembarked, "here we are once more. For my part, I'm ready to start right now."

He spoke somewhat pompously for a youth no more than fifteen years of age. John Hardy and Rob McIntyre, his two companions, somewhat older than himself, laughed at him as he sat now on his pack-bag, which had just been tossed off the baggage-car of the train that had brought them hither.

"You might wait for Uncle d.i.c.k," said John. "He'd feel pretty bad if we started off now for the Arctic Circle and didn't allow him to come along!"

Rob, the older of the three, and the one to whom they were all in the habit of looking up in their wilderness journeyings, smiled at them both. He was not apt to talk very much in any case, and he seemed now content in these new surroundings to sit and observe what lay about him.

It was a straggling little settlement which they saw, with one long, broken street running through the center. There was a church spire, to be sure, and a square little wooden building in which some business men had started a bank for the sake of the coming settlers now beginning to pa.s.s through for the country along the Peace River. There were one or two stores, as the average new-comer would have called them, though each really was the post of one of the fur-trading companies then occupying that country. Most prominent of these, naturally, was the building of the ancient Hudson's Bay Company.

A rude hotel with a dirty bar full of carousing half-breeds and rowdy new-comers lay just beyond the end of the uneven railroad tracks which had been laid within the month. The surface of the low hills running back from the Athabasca River was covered with a stunted growth of aspens, scattered among which here and there stood the cabins or board houses of the men who had moved here following the rush of the last emigration to the North. There were a few tents and lodges of half-breeds also scattered about.

"Well, Uncle d.i.c.k said we would be starting right away," argued Jesse, a trifle crestfallen.

"Yes," said Rob, "but he told me we would be lucky if 'right away'

meant inside of a week. He said the breeds always powwow around and drink for a few days before they start north with the brigade for a long trip. That's a custom they have. They say the Hudson's Bay Company has more customs than customers these days. Times are changing for the fur trade even here.

"Where's your map, John?" he added; and John spread out on the platform where they stood his own rude tracing of the upper country which he had made by reference to the best government maps obtainable.

Their uncle d.i.c.k, engineer of this new railroad and other frontier development enterprises, of course had a full supply of these maps, but it pleased the boys better to think that they made their own maps--as indeed they always had in such earlier trips as those across the Rockies, down the Peace River, in the Kadiak Island country, or along the headwaters of the Columbia, where, as has been told, they had followed the trails of the wilderness in their adventures before this time.

They all now bent over the great sheet of paper, some of which was blank and marked "Unknown."

"Here we are, right here," said John, putting his finger on the map.

"Only, when this map was made there wasn't any railroad. They used to come up from Edmonton a hundred miles across the prairies and muskeg by wagon. A rotten bad journey, Uncle d.i.c.k said."

"Well, it couldn't have been much worse than the new railroad,"

grumbled Jesse. "It was awfully rough, and there wasn't any place to eat."

"Oh, don't condemn the new railroad too much," said Rob. "You may be glad to see it before you get back from this trip. It's going to be the hardest one we ever had. Uncle d.i.c.k says this is the last great wilderness of the world, and one less known than any other part of the earth's surface. Look here! It's two thousand miles from here to the top of the map, northwest, where the Mackenzie comes in. We've got to get there if all goes well with us."

John was still tracing localities on the map with his forefinger.

"Right here is where we are now. If we went the other way, up the Athabasca instead of down, then we would come out at the Peace River Landing, beyond Little Slave Lake. That's where we came out when we crossed the Rockies, down the Finlay and the Parsnip and the Peace.

I've got that course of ours all marked in red."

"But we go the other way," began Jesse, bending over his shoulder and looking at the map now. "Here's the mouth of the Peace River, more than four hundred miles north of here, in Athabasca Lake. Both these two rivers, you might say, come together there. But look what a long river it is if you call the Athabasca and the Mackenzie the same! And look at the big lakes up there that we have read about. The Mackenzie takes you right into that country."

"The Mackenzie! One of the very greatest rivers of the world," said Rob. "I've always wanted to see it some time. And now we shall.

"I'd have liked to have been along with old Sir Alexander Mackenzie, the old trader who first explored it," he added, thoughtfully.

"I forget just what time that was," said Jesse, hesitating and scratching his head.

"It was in seventeen eighty-nine," said Rob, always accurate. "He was only a young Scotchman then, and they didn't call him Sir Alexander at all until a good while later--after he had made some of his great discoveries. He put up the first post on Lake Athabasca--right here where our river discharges--and he went from there to the mouth of the Mackenzie River and back all in one season."

"How did they travel?" demanded John. "They must have had nothing better than canoes."

"Nothing else," nodded Rob, "for they could have had nothing else.

They just had birch-bark canoes, too, not as good as white men take into that country now. There were only six white men in the party, with a few Indians. They left Athabasca Lake--here it is on the map--on June third, and they got to the mouth of the great river in forty days. That certainly must have been traveling pretty fast! It was more than fifteen hundred miles--almost sixteen hundred. But they got back to Athabasca Lake in one hundred and two days, covering over three thousand miles down-stream and up-stream. Well, we've all traveled enough in these strong rivers to know how hard it is to go back up-stream, whether with the tracking-line or the paddle or the sail. They did it."

"And now we're here to see what it was that they did," said Jesse, looking with some respect at the ragged line on the map which marked the strong course of the Mackenzie River toward the Arctic Sea.

"He must have been quite a man, old Alexander Mackenzie," John added.

"Yes," said Rob. "As you know, he came back to Athabasca and started up the Peace River in seventeen ninety-three, and was the first man to cross to the Pacific. We studied him over in there. But he went up-stream there, and we came down. That's much easier. It will be easier going down this river, too, which was his first great exploration place.

"Now," he continued, "we'll be going down-stream, as I said, almost two thousand miles to the mouth of that river. Uncle d.i.c.k says we'll be comfortable as princes all the way. We'll have big scows to travel in, with everything fixed up fine."

"Here," said Jesse, putting his finger on the map hesitatingly, "is the place where it says 'rapids.' Must be over a hundred miles of it on this river, or even more."

"That's right, Jess," commented John. "We can't dodge those rapids yet. Uncle d.i.c.k says that the new railroad in the North may go to Fort McMurray at the foot of this great system of the Athabasca rapids.

That would cut out a lot of hard work. If there were a railroad up there, a fellow could go to the Arctics almost as easy as going to New York."

"I'd rather go to the Midnight Sun now," said Rob. "There's some trouble about it now, and there's some wilderness now between here and there. It's no fun to do a thing when it's too easy. I wouldn't give a cent to go to Fort McPherson, the last post north, by any railroad."

John was still poring over the map, which lay upon the rude boards of the platform, and he shook his head now somewhat dubiously. "Look where we'll have to go," he said, "and all in three months. We have to get back for school next fall."

"Never doubt we can do it," said Rob, stoutly. "If we couldn't, Uncle d.i.c.k would never try it. He's got it all figured out, you may be sure of that, and he's made all his arrangements with the Hudson's Bay Company. You forget they've been going up into this country for a hundred years, and they know how long it takes and how hard it is.

They know all about how to outfit for it, too."

"The hardest place we'll have," said John, following his map with his finger now almost to the upper edge, "is right here where we leave the Mackenzie and start over toward the Yukon, just south of the Arctic Ocean. That's a whizzer, all right! No railroad up in there, and I guess there never will be. That's where so many of the Klondikers were lost, my father told me--twenty years ago that was."

"They took a year for it," commented Rob, "and sometimes eighteen months, to get across the mountains there. They built houses and pa.s.sed the winter, and so a great many of them got sick and died. But twenty years ago is a long time nowadays. We can do easily what they could hardly do at all. Uncle d.i.c.k has allowed us about three weeks to cover that five hundred miles over the Rat Portage!"

"Well, surely if Sir Alexander Mackenzie could make that trip in birch-bark canoes, over three thousand miles, with just a few men who didn't know where they were going, we ought to be able to get through now. That was a hundred and twenty-eight years ago, I figure it, and a lot of things have happened since then." John spoke now with considerable confidence.

"Well, Uncle d.i.c.k will take care of us," said Jesse, the youngest of these adventurers.

"Yes, and we'll take care of ourselves all we can," added Rob. "Uncle d.i.c.k tells me that the trouble with the Klondikers was that they didn't know how to take care of themselves out of doors. A lot of them were city people fresh to all kinds of wilderness work, and they simply died because they didn't know how to do things. They were tenderfeet when they started. A good many of them died before they got through. Some of those who did get through are the prominent men of Alaska to-day. But we're not tenderfeet. Are we, boys?"

"No, indeed," said Jesse, stoutly. "As I said, I'm ready to start."

And he again puffed out his chest with much show of bravery, although, to be sure, the wild country in which he now found himself rather worked on his imagination.

It had required all the persuasion of Uncle d.i.c.k, expert railway engineer in wilderness countries, to persuade the parents of these three boys to allow them to accompany him on this, his own first exploration into the extreme North, under the Midnight Sun itself. He had promised them--and something of a promise it was, too--to bring the young travelers back safely to their home in Valdez, on the Pacific Ocean, in three months from the time they left the head of the railroad at Athabasca Landing.

"Well, now," said John, folding up his map and putting it back in his pocket, "here comes Uncle d.i.c.k at last. I only hope that we won't have to wait long, for it seems to me we'll have to hustle if we get through on time--over five thousand miles it will be, and in less than ninety days! I'll bet Sir Alexander Mackenzie himself couldn't have beat that a hundred years ago."

II