THE COLVILLE RIVER, ALASKA. THE HIGH BLUFF, IN THE BACKGROUND, ACTS as the canoeists pulled their craft along by the roots of the trees protruding from the banks. nation. But spring was about to strike off the fetters of frost. On any day the white silence might end. At night the voyageurs could hear the cracking and groaning of the ice as nature roused herself from sleep. One morning when Schrader stepped from his shack and looked at the Koyukuk River a strange phenomenon met his gaze. The ice in the middle of the river had bowed upward until it was on the level of his eyes. Down each side of this smooth ridge the green water was rushing in torrents on top of the shore ice. "Turn out, boys!" shouted Schrader, "she 's come. Hydraulic pressure from upstream bent that ice. The break-up has arrived. There is enough water now on that ice to float a steamboat." There was the bustle of departure. Hot breakfasts were hurriedly eaten, and the outfit was packed aboard the canoes. Saying farewell to the settlers at Coldfoot, and also to the faithful dogs who had to be left behind at this point, the explorers pushed off, and were shot downstream at a dizzy speed. Their destination on the Koyukuk was the mouth of its principal northern tributary, the John River, fifty miles below. speed in the torrent on the frictionless ice was so great that they reached this point that same night. They made camp at the junction of the John, and next morning they saw that the ice in this stream was running freely. All was ready to ascend this river and penetrate into the unknown. Their This proved to be the most arduous part of the undertaking. The John River is white The John River is white water from source to mouth, the current being too swift for the stoutest paddlers. This meant it was a towing job, and each canoe carried 1400 pounds of outfit. Often the banks were steep and wooded, where progress was literally made hand over hand, 1 Two weeks of this wearing struggle brought the expedition to the source of the John River, one hundred miles above its mouth. The men were lean as wolves from their work. There had been no serious accidents, but several narrow escapes. In the valley of the John River, Schrader saw one of the strangest sights that existed on earth in that day. Where the valley widened out, he observed a remarkable moraine, which is a great pile of earth, rounded pebbles, and rocks deposited by a glacier. Moraines are common throughout the northern States. This moraine, however, was peculiar in that it had precipitous sides, and Schrader went over to examine it. He found that the precipices were ice. In other words, stranded in this cold, northern valley was a genuine relic of the great ice-cap that once came down from the north to cover half of this continent-the last splinter left from the glacial age. At the headwaters of the John, Schrader cached much of his supplies. The pass in the mountains was in sight. The long portage was about to begin. What food they could carry was packed into the canoes. Two men carried a canoe. Since there were eight men in the party, this always left two men with no load. Thus they were able to take turns resting and to make fairly good time in spite of their burden. Schrader cached more of the food than he would have done had he not expected to find plenty of game in the mountains. On the first day of the portage, their guns brought down a bighorn sheep; but next day the air was filled with an ominous sign-great swarms of mosquitos, breeding so thickly in the warming weather that they fairly darkened the sky. Let one of the men remove his glove for a second, and the back of his AS A LEVEE, KEEPING THE STREAM FROM FLOWING INTO ITS FORMER VALLEY hand would be black with the stinging pests. The men wore veils, but even under this protection their faces were swollen from the bites of gnats. The leader's heart began to fail, for he feared that this might drive him back to his food supplies. Arctic mosquitos are so ravenous that even the larger animals can not endure their bites. Schrader knew that it was no use to hunt, the big game would not stay where the mosquitos flew, yet he pressed on. Three days later they reached the summit of the pass. The men were then subsisting on a measured ration of tea, biscuit, and a little bacon. On the pass the famine threat ended in the presence of the strangest natural phenomenon which Schrader had ever seen. This was a lake of solid ice-not glacial ice, which is compact and frozen snow, nor was it a former lake of water which had been frozen to the bottom. At that latitude and at such a height the rays of the sun, falling obliquely upon the level ground, were scarcely strong enough even in midsummer to thaw ice and snow. But the rays do fall perpendicularly upon the slopes above the pass, melting the snow there. The water bubbled up in springs on the pass, flowed out upon the ice lake, and froze again. The ice in this lake was fifty feet thick in places. Schrader believes that this lake is unique.. The phenomenon furnished not only notes for his future report, but also food for the famishing men. "We will find meat here, boys," predicted Schrader, scanning the crystal expanse. "Mosquitos will not swarm above that ice." And so it proved. Out on the ice lake the hunters found herds of caribou and other big game seeking a chilly refuge there from the poisonous insects. Some of these animals seemed never to have seen men before, they were so tame. A few, their curiosity overcoming timidity, would even venture into camp. The leader of the expedition resolved to give his men a well-earned and much-needed rest and a period of feasting in the relative comfort of the pass, which he named Anaktuvak, from the arctic river of that name which he hoped to find. The most perilous part of the journey lay ahead, because its character was entirely unknown. He desired to have his followers in the best possible physical condition for the test of their mettle. Accordingly the tents were pitched on the ice and the men given liberty to hunt, eat, and loaf to their hearts' content. It was now July. The declining sun still made the circuit of the heavens, shining at midnight, and day and night were terms used by the men because there were no others to denote sleeping and waking periods of time. Far outside, in the States they had left, picnickers were seeking the shade to escape the heat, while fireworks were being set off to celebrate the Fourth of July; and that same night a furious snow-storm, weirdly punctuated with stabs of lightning and resounding peals of thunder, half buried in drifts the little tents on the pass. This storm warned Schrader of the severity of the weather that might be expected there a few weeks later. Nevertheless, he tarried to conclude his observations, climbing to a number of high eminences that he might view the country on all sides. On these summits he could understand why the northern Indians came to believe that these mountains were the haunts of evil spirits. All of the peaks are of about the same height and level on the summits, giving the scene an unreal appearance, as if a giant hand had planed off the peaks. From his knowledge of geology, Schrader was able to explain how this came about; and, indeed, to identify the mountains as THE LAST SPLINTER OF THE ICE AGE-A STRANDED GLACIER IN THE JOHN RIVER VALLEY the northernmost part of the great range of the Rockies the most important discovery made by the expedition. Once the whole region had been a flat, low plain. Some mighty convulsion of nature had uplifted this plain to an altitude of 5000 to 6000 feet; and the erosion of rains and streams had eventually cut the deep valleys, leaving the flat-topped peaks. Since the Rocky Mountains in our own country were formed in the same way, Schrader correctly concluded that these Alaskan mountains are part of the same range, and that the Rockies, instead of ending in northern Canada, as was previously supposed, actually cross Alaska and reach the Arctic Ocean, forming Cape Lisburne as their northwestern extremity. At length, Schrader was ready to leave this interesting, but dangerous, region. Once more the heavy toil of packing canoes and supplies was taken up; but now the trail led down, making progress faster. They were still plagued by mosquitos, still forced to depend on the small meat supply which they were able to carry away from Anaktuvak Pass. At length they came to the headwaters of a stream deep enough to float the less resolute man than Schrader might have hesitated. It was not yet too late to turn back and win the way to safety over the pass again and down the explored John River. Ahead of them on this unknown torrent there might be fearful cataracts to engulf them, impassable cañons from which, once entrapped, they might never escape. But Schrader kept on. Their progress down the rapid Anaktuvak, as the stream proved to be, was slow. For much of the distance the men were forced to walk the banks and let the canoes down over the rapids by their tow-lines. Often the portage became necessary. Schrader was becoming alarmed. He feared they would reach the coast too late to catch the revenue cutter Bear, which usually left Point Barrow late in August. Winter was already beginning to close down. It had driven away the mosquitos, so that the party again fed on fresh meat. When the canoes at length floated out of the mouth of the Anaktuvak upon the placid tide of the Colville, the largest Alaskan river emptying into the Arctic Ocean, Schrader felt that the worst of the hardships was over, and that thenceforth it merely became a race to get out before winter locked up all transportation. Even in his haste, Schrader took time to observe and photograph the curious phenomenon of that strange stream, the Colville, which for much of its course lies higher than one side of its own valley, and which is gradually sliding down hill. The river flows north parallel to an eastern range of hills and actually part way up on the slope of the hills, so that if the stream's western bank were cut, the water would abandon the present bed and flow down into the bottom of the valley. The western side of the river is deep, where the current is eating into the bank year after year, but the eastern side shallows out into a broad, stony beach, which shows by its great width how far the river has already traveled sideways. The explanation of the Colville's eccentric conduct is that after it formed its bed and valley, as a normally behaved river does, there was a later contortion of the earth's crust, lifting the stream bodily part way up the side of the slope. Ever since then the river has been trying to get down to its old level again. When the expedition reached the Arctic Ocean at Nigaluk it was August; the season was threatening; there had been several snow-storms; from the heights, Schrader could see the arctic ice-pack, far out at sea as yet, but steadily closing in. Even if the revenue cutter Bear left at her normal time, there remained to the voyageurs only two weeks in which to paddle to Point Barrow, 150 miles up the coast to the northwest. derness could have done. Danger continually beset them. ally beset them. Storms were becoming frequent. They kept the canoes just outside the line of surf, so that in case of a capsize they might reach the shore by swimming. The nights were becoming very cold. Part of the time the canoes were running through leads in the forming shore ice. On the second day of this dangerous voyage they overtook a party of Point Barrow Eskimos leisurely returning from a two-year hunt in the Mackenzie River country in Canada. Their big, seaworthy "oomiaks," beautiful boats made by stretching walrus skin perfectly over walrus ribs and joining this structure with ivory pins, were laden with a magnificent cargo of furs taken in the great hunt. They had their dogs along, powerful Malamutes, savage as wolves, who would ride on board the oomiaks when the wind was astern and sails were spread, but who were harnessed in teams and driven along the beach to tow the boats against adverse winds. Schrader bargained first for one of the oomiaks so that he might take his men out of the canoes, which were not adapted to ocean cruising. He failed at this, but the Eskimo invited the white men to ride in the oomiaks ESKIMO PARTY WHICH WAS OVERTAKEN BY SCHRADER ON THE ARCTIC OCEAN But the Bear might leave earlier in such a threatening season. Schrader grimaced at the thought of another year in the Arctic. He decided to make a race for it. The men tumbled into the canoes and bent over their paddles as only men inured to the wil with them, towing the canoes behind. Falling in with the white men's desire for haste, the Eskimo kept going. Twice the voyage was interrupted by storms too severe for safe travel, one blizzard, which blew for thirtysix hours, piling the drifts over the boats, AN ESKIMO OOMIAK-WALRUS HIDE STRETCHED OVER WALRUS BONES It was not to be wondered at. The icepack was now near, threatening in the next storm to come crushing upon the land with the full force of the Arctic behind it. It was then that Schrader showed his resolution. One less courageous than he might have resigned himself to a year of idleness, snowed in at Point Barrow. Schrader determined to push on to Cape Lisburne, three hundred miles down the coast, where there was a coal-mine and a possible belated collier yet to sail south. Heedless of the warnings of the settlers, he abandoned his canoes, bought a whale-boat, and loaded his party into it. Even seasoned sailors might have hesitated to embark on such a voyage. All the way to Cape Lisburne the coast was abrupt and entirely without human settlements. Shipwreck meant sure death to the whole party. Because the shore now bent southward, Schrader and his men thought they could keep ahead of the ice pack coming down from the north. How rash this undertaking was, they would have known had they been sailors. Nevertheless, they made the voyage safely. As they rounded the cape they saw the yel stead were a dozen or more ships, some of which had just arrived. That night a terrific storm came in out of Bering Sea, wrecking the flimsier shacks of the town and shaking even substantial structures. Some of the gold hunters aboard the vessels riding out the storm safely insisted upon coming ashore through the surf. A number of small boats were swamped in the waves, and in all nearly twenty men drowned. Schrader shuddered to think what might have befallen his party had such a storm caught them in their open whaleboat. So Schrader came through, as his chief said he would, undaunted by any obstacles along 2000 miles of journey in sleds, canoes, and open boats on the Arctic Ocean. His achievement gained for him a two-line notice in the few newspapers interested in scientific attainment. But Uncle Sam's adventurers do not work for public applause, any more than they do for private gain. Schrader showed that, when he wrote a dry document describing his discoveries in jaw-breaking terms, but with never a word about the perils of his expedition. |