Yukon Valley News
Issued every Tuesday.
Sam J. Callahan.Publisher
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*4.50; one month, *1.
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CALENDAR
JULY
S M T W T F S j
12 3;
4 5 6 7 8 0 10 1
11 12 13 14 15 1(5 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 20 27 28 20 30 31
Moon’s Phases.—
Full moon, 3d;
lust quarter, 10th;
new moon, 17th;
hrst quaretr, 25th.
AUGUST
S M T W T F S
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31
Moon’s Phases.—
Full moon. 1st;
last quarter, 8th;
new moon, 15th;
hrst quarter, 23d;
full moon, 30th.
Tuesday, July 13, 1909.
PUBLIC SENTIMENT AND THE LAW.
The fact that the verdict of the jury
acquitting Eckengreen of the liquor
selling charge is approved by a practi
cally unanimous community does not
signify that lawlessness is or will be
sanctioned.
The illicit liquor traffic is heartily con
demned by all right-thinking people.
If there are some who might hesitate
to divulge information they have acci
dentally acquired, because they wish to
avoid the trouble and expense of ap
pearing in court, that is the worst that
can be truthfully said of the average
resident of this country.
If occasions arise, there will be no
difficulty in securing juries here who
will do their full duty in suppressing
crime.
The public sentiment is only a rebuke
to white persons, missionaries, traders or
what not, who try to accomplish their
own selfish ends through connivance
with irresponsible natives. In saying
this it is not intended to impute wrong
motives to Archdeacon Stuck: Ecken
green and his friends only claim that
he was induced by false statements to
make the complaint.
Peculiar conditions make the Ecken
green case a very important one. For
some hundreds of miles up or down the
Yukon river a few small trading posts
and wood camps afford a livelihood to a
scant number of white men. Some of
the men have worked diligently for
years and have accumulated a little
money; have provided comfortable hab
itations and apparently intend to re
main indefinitely, if not permanently.
To get tangled up in the courts means
ruin to any of them. Guilty or inno
cent, the result is crushing disaster.
It would cost scarcely less than five
hundred dollars to secure the services
of a competent attorney from Fair
banks, if one could be had at all; the
court costs are enormous when the court
is sitting two or three hundred miles
from the man’s home; and to his
loss of time may be added the loss of
his property while he is away.
Aside from all considerations of wright
and wrong, it seems to be poor policy to
make the position of the few people
1 along the river so hazardous they can
I not afford to stay.
PROGRESS OF THE GAME.
Probably in no country in the world
is a man’s every movement in life so
totally a gamble as in this. There are
no well-understood, fixed past condi
tions upon which to predicate a future
prospect. The problems of govern
ment, of economic conditions having
their sources far away and of those de
pendent on unproved value nearer at
band, all of which enter into the situa
tion and render it complicated, leave
but a weak base upon which to calcu
late. With interior Alaska and with
every individual in it, just now each
occurrence is as a turn from the deal
box—and the percentage is weakening
the players at the game.
It is not good to habitually look at
the world through smoked spectacles;
neither is it wise to subject ones eyes too
long to an artificial glare. In the na
ture of things, traffic on the Tanana
must decline—unless quartz gives every
body an agreeable surprise. The worst
feature of the situation lies in the fact
that green men are doing the work in
the big placer camp: the fine body of
trained prospectors who once earned
grubstakes in Fairbanks district are
gone, not to look for new paystreaks
within striking distance, but to the
coast and to the further outside. The
chances for another big discovery are
not non-existent, but they are reduced.
Activitives up the Yukon are not of a
kind even to cut a large figure in river
traffic. The Innoko strike can not help
this part of the country except to afford
an asylum for a limited number who
leave, through necessity or choice. Even
the furs, which formerly added a con
siderable quota to the sum of the coun
try’s resources, are reduced to a mini
mum. And the rake-off is increasing
with the progress of the game. Tanana,
with three hundred people, is paying
approximately fourteen thousand dollars
a year in license taxes. The money go
ing in indirect taxes—internal revenue,
protective tariff, fines, fees to federal
officials, telegraph tolls—will afford a
diverting occupation for any one who
desires to figure out just where he is at.
Yet, with all this, (and a lot more a
lot worse), there are bright sides to the
picture. Tanana will be in the game to
the end of the deal. The great country
between the Yukon and the northern
range is producing in spots; the nearby
prospects are being followed with a grim
determination akin to despair. Tanana
will be in the game to the end of the
deal, be the stakes high or low.
Meantime, everybody has learned a
valuable lesson in economy. While
people here have retrenched, they have
built new houses and put the town at
least as far to the front as circumstances
warrant. The result shows that they
are no quitters. If they have slept they
have done so with an eye open. They
have watched the game.
Public opinion is a seldom far wrong.
FERRO MARINE ENGINES
^~~-The Kind that
Made in 1, 2 and 3 cylinder, from 3 to 25 h. p., jump spark ignition, and in
1 and 2 cylinder, 4 to 15 h. p., make and break ignition.
Just the Engine for Any Boat for Work or Pleasure
Orders filled by Wire from Seattle Agency.
S. E. HEETER, Agent.
THE PRIEST AND THE PAGAN
The following was taken from the San
Francisco Weekly Examiner of Tuesday,
May 4, 1909. To those inclined to read it crit
ically, it is recommended that they first
come to a clear realization that, so far as
human understanding is able to penetrate
it, truth is not an absolute—but a relative—
thing; it is something the existence of which
is known to every mind, but the conception
of which conforms to the capacity, tempera
ment, and mental training of the individual.
It is a quantity that can not be exactly
measured; hence in pondering it the indi
vidual should remember that if he thinks at
all his thoughts differ somewhat from those
of any other person.
TWO MEN FACING
DEATH IN
FAR NORTH
Episcopal Archdeacon of Alaska
and a’Japanese Prospector
Brave Arctic Ice.
Fairbanks, Alaska, May 3.—Of those
hard men who “mush" the ice-ribbed
trails of Alaska, which is champion?
Who of them fares farthest down the
blizzard in shortest time? Who does
and dares most in the death winds that
whip the tundra ?
Two there are between whom this
honor lies; one a priest and one a
pagan.
One is Stuck, archdeacon of the Epis
copal diocese of Alaska.
The other is Wada, a Japanese, famed
for his dog team and acclaimed for the
lion heart that takes him alone into
the bosom of the untrodden wastes.
When the archdeacon hits the trail
he goes us God’s man, to do the Al
mighty’s work, and 35 below is as 55
above, so long us duty’s finger beckons.
When Wada hooks up his dogs, it’s
the lure of the gold that calls him, and
55 below is as 55 above, so long as the
hope holds in his breast that he will
find the foot of the rainbow.
A winter ago the archdeacon, his sled
laden with medicines and axes, breast
ed the blizzard for a thousand miles, to
the tribe of the Gens tlu Large, whose
home is near to the Arctic sea. With
the medicine he drove out smallpox
and made this tribe clean. With the
axes he hewed logs for a chapel and a
hospital, and to this, when the summer
waters came, gentle women were sent,
that the sin and sickness of this most
northern tribe might be fought on its
own ground.
When the man of the church was
leaving Fairbanks Wada and his dogs
were leaving Nome. Wada’s sled was
laden with salmon sides and pickaxes.
He traveled a thousand miles into the
upreaclies of the Porcupine and ucross
to the Arctic sea. There he prospected
for gold and hewed logs for a cabin.
Stuck, who sought souls, was sick of
pneumonia and nearly lost an arm by
freezing.
Wada, whose quest was gold, had to
boil his caribou-hide parka and share
it with his dogs, to keep them from
starving.
Recent advices from the extreme
north are that Archdeacon Stuck, la
den again with medicines, has started
on a three-thousand-mile mush that will
take him to every tribe in his far-flung
jurisdiction, and that every soul in the
Fairbanks parish turned out to give
him godspeed into the wilderness.
If he comes back out of the Arctic,
Archdeacon Stuck will bring with him
Indians from all his northern trilies,
that the world may see his charges and
through sympathy coiigress be induced
to do for them those things the church
knows is sadly needed.
Passing over the style of composition em
ployed in the Examiner’s story—which may
not appeal to persons here—and forgiving
the writer any deviation from fact of which
he may be guilty, and considering his pro
duction as merely intended to illustrate two
prime forces that are at work here in this
new and naturally attractive land, we can
state the gist of his proposition something
like this, without dealing with the personal
aspects of the drama:
The land is so forbidding and beset
with dangers and discomforts that
men who enter it are impelled by one
or other of two strong passions which
rule the woi Id: the love of God and
poor sinful man, or the lust for gold
and the power its possession would
bring.
i It appears hardly worth while to point out
St. James Mission
Holy Eucharist each Sunday at 11 a. m.
Each following: Sunday, Evening: Prayer at
7:45 p. m. Sunday school every Sunday at
12 o’clock. WINTHROP PEABODY,
Priest in Charge.
A nr Yfll Ione of ,hose Pe°p,e wh°\
MllL I UU seldom write home? \
They will know you are all right if you 1
send them the YUKON VALLEY NEWS. I
Mail yours or let us send one weekly. J
NEW
LAUNDRY
All Classes of Work Solicited
Satisfaction Guaranteed
MRS. A. A. SWANSON <
N. C. Slough, neap Kentucky \
Kitchen Building \
Golden North
RESTAURANT /.
High Class in Every Particular
ALWAYS OPEN
Choicest Eatables Obtainable
ED LEE, Proprietor
-innnnnnnnnn
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the false moral of the drama. Here, as else
where, men find inspiring1 beauty in their
surroundings and are strengthened by diffi
culties met and overcome. Their relation
to God and their fellow men are not changed.
To a marked degree, however, the view of
life is broadened, and while the pagan of tfie
story builds on a different foundation from
that of the priest, who can assert that the
work of one is less in consonance with God’s
will than that of the other? or that one’s im
pelling instinct is purely commercial while
that of the other is wholly charitable?
Unclaimed Letters.
Tunana, Alaska, July 1, 1909.
rseevis. sam
Collins, C. H.
Daley, Hugh
Dreskel, Jacob
Frenil, Jos.
Livovic, Luke
HasKuis, iravis r.
Leonard, Homer*
McClellan, Harry M.
Medley, A. H.
Sheldon, M. L.
tr. rt. lir\f aim x , Jrostmaster.
Man Inquired For.
Information is sought regarding of John
Alfred Mattson, a native of Karlskrona, Swe
den, who came to Alaska from Hoboken,
1 N. J., eleven years ago and w-as last heard of
at Tatiana two years ago. He is 6 feet 1 inch
and about 411 years old. Address his nephew,
j John E. Mattson, Camp 18, care M. J. Heney,
! Cordova, Alaska.