akaket immediately after
New Year's Day, and our route lay overland through a totally uninhabited
country for nearly one hundred and fifty miles, to Tanana on the Yukon.
We knew that it would not greatly interfere with our plans to lie
another week at the Allakaket, and that would bring our departure after
the monthly journey of the mail-carrier and would thus compel him to
break trail for us through all that snow. That is the way the
mail-carriers in Alaska are usually treated, but Arthur and I took some
pride in keeping as closely as possible to the announced dates of
visitation and in doing such share of trail breaking as fell to us.

[Sidenote: TRAIL BREAKING]

So on Monday, the 3d of January, 1910, we bade farewell to Deaconess
Carter and her colleague and to the native charges they rule and care
for so admirably, and set out on our journey with an additional boy from
the mission to help us through the heavy snow of the Koyukuk valley. For
ten or twelve miles the way lay down the river, and the going was slow
and toilsome from the first, although there had been some passage from
Moses' Village to the mission, and there was, therefore, some trail. Our
start had been late--it is next to impossible to get an early start from
a mission; there is always some native who must have audience at the
last moment--and after the long repose we were so soft that the heavy
trail had wearied us, and we decided to "call it a day" when in five and
a half hours we came to the road-house, the last occupied habitation
between the Allakaket and Tanana. Soon after we reached the village
there came trooping down from the mission a number of the inhabitants
gone up for Christmas, who, after weeping upon our necks, so to speak,
at our departure, had left us to break out that drifted trail for their
convenient return. So will Indians treat a white man almost always, but
I had thought myself an exception and was vexed to find that so they had
treated me.

The next morning we entered the uninhabited wilderness with three feet
of new snow on the trail and no passage over it since it had fallen. Our
first trouble was finding the trail at all. The previous fall the Alaska
Road Commission had appropriated a sum of money to stake this trail from
Tanana to the Koyukuk River, for it passes over wind-swept, treeless
wastes, where many men had lost their way. Starting out from Tanana, the
men employed had done their work well until within ten miles o