Young Alaskans in the Far North   By: Emerson Hough (1857-1923)

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.