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 YOUNG ALASKANS
 IN THE
 FAR NORTH

 BY
 EMERSON HOUGH
 _Author of_ "YOUNG ALASKANS
 IN THE ROCKIES" ETC.

 ILLUSTRATED

 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

 NEW YORK AND LONDON




 YOUNG ALASKANS IN THE FAR NORTH

 Copyright, 1918, by Harper & Brothers
 Printed in the United States of America




[Illustration: THE FIRST PORTAGE--SLAVE RIVER. "THE SCOWS WERE HAULED
UP THE STEEP BANK BY MEANS OF BLOCK AND TACKLE"]




CONTENTS

 CHAP.                                                      PAGE

 I.      THE START FOR THE MIDNIGHT SUN                       1
 II.     THE SCOWS                                           12
 III.    THE GREAT BRIGADE                                   32
 IV.     THE GRAND RAPIDS                                    51
 V.      WHITE-WATER DAYS                                    64
 VI.     ON THE STEAMBOAT                                    79
 VII.    THE WILD PORTAGE                                    89
 VIII.   ON THE MACKENZIE                                   112
 IX.     UNDER THE ARCTIC CIRCLE                            132
 X.      FARTHEST NORTH                                     149
 XI.     THE MIDNIGHT SUN                                   164
 XII.    THE RAT PORTAGE                                    176
 XIII.   DOWN THE PORCUPINE                                 192
 XIV.    AT FORT YUKON                                      212
 XV.     THE FUR TRADE                                      222
 XVI.    DAWSON, THE GOLDEN CITY                            231
 XVII.   WHAT UNCLE DICK THOUGHT                            246




ILLUSTRATIONS

 THE FIRST PORTAGE--SLAVE RIVER. "THE SCOWS
 WERE HAULED UP THE STEEP BANK BY MEANS
 OF BLOCK AND TACKLE"                            _Frontispiece_

 AN ENCAMPMENT OF ESKIMOS ON THE BEACH AT
 FORT MCPHERSON                                  _Facing p._ 55

 HUSKY FLEET--FORT MCPHERSON                         "      172

 HUSKY DOG--RAMPART HOUSE                            "      206




YOUNG ALASKANS IN THE FAR NORTH




I

THE START FOR THE MIDNIGHT SUN


"Well, fellows," said Jesse Wilcox, 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 Dick," 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 pass 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 Dick 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 Dick, 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 Dick 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 Dick 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 Dick 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 Dick 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
Dick 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
passed 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 Dick 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 Dick will take care of