ens, of Fairbanks,
as the one colleague with whom he would be willing to make the attempt.
Mr. Karstens had gone to the Klondike in his seventeenth year, during
the wild stampede to those diggings, paying the expenses of the trip by
packing over the Chilkoot Pass, and had been engaged in pioneering and
in travel of an arduous and adventurous kind ever since. He had mined in
the Klondike and in the Seventy-Mile (hence his sobriquet of "The
Seventy-Mile Kid"). It was he and his partner, McGonogill, who broke the
first trail from Fairbanks to Valdez and for two years of difficulty and
danger--dogs and men alike starving sometimes--brought the mail
regularly through. When the stampede to the Kantishna took place, and
the government was dilatory about instituting a mail service for the
three thousand men in the camp, Karstens and his partner organized and
maintained a private mail service of their own. He had freighted with
dogs from the Yukon to the Iditarod, had run motor-boats on the Yukon
and the Tanana. For more than a year he had been guide to Mr. Charles
Sheldon, the well-known naturalist and hunter, in the region around the
foot-hills of Denali. With the full vigor of maturity, with all this
accumulated experience and the resourcefulness and self-reliance which
such experience brings, he had yet an almost juvenile keenness for
further adventure which made him admirably suited to this undertaking.

Mr. Robert G. Tatum of Tennessee, just twenty-one years old, a postulant
for holy orders, stationed at the mission at Nenana, had been employed
all the winter in a determined attempt to get supplies freighted over
the ice, by natives and their dog teams, to two women missionaries, a
nurse and a teacher, at the Tanana Crossing. The steamboat had cached
the supplies at a point about one hundred miles below the mission the
previous summer, unable to proceed any farther. The upper Tanana is a
dangerous and difficult river alike for navigation and for ice travel,
and Tatum's efforts were made desperate by the knowledge that the women
were reduced to a diet of straight rabbits without even salt. The famine
relieved, he had returned to Nenana. The summer before he had worked on
a survey party and had thus some knowledge of the use of instruments. By
undertaking the entire cooking for the expedition he was most useful and
helpful, and his consistent courtesy and considerateness made him a very
pleasant comrade.

Of the half-breed