of the old school, with her dignity that nothing ever invaded and
her poise that nothing ever disturbed, is perhaps the most powerful
single influence that has come into the lives of the natives of interior
Alaska.

Two days brought us past the little native village and mission at Chena
(which is pronounced Shen-a['w]), past the little white town of the same
name, to Fairbanks, the chief town of interior Alaska. Chena is at the
virtual head of the navigation of the Tanana River and is quite as near
to the gold-producing creeks as Fairbanks, which latter place is not on
the Tanana River at all but on a slough, impracticable for almost any
craft at low water. For every topographical reason, from every
consideration of natural advantage, Chena should have been the river
port and town of these gold-fields. But Chena was so sure of her
manifold natural advantages that she became unduly confident and
grasping. When the traders at Fairbanks offered to remove to Chena at
the beginning of the camp, if the traders at Chena would provide a site,
the offer was scornfully rejected. "They would have to come, anyway, or
go out of business." But they did not come; rather they put their backs
up and fought. And because Fairbanks was enterprising and far-sighted,
while Chena was avaricious and narrow, because Fairbanks offered free
sites and Chena charged enormously for water-front, business went the
ten miles up the often unnavigable slough and settled there, and by and
by built a little railway that it might be independent of the uncertain
boat service. The company came, the courts came, the hospital came, the
churches came, and Chena woke up from its dreams of easy wealth to find
itself and its manifold natural advantages passed by and ignored and the
big town firmly established elsewhere.

How well I remember the virulent little newspaper published at Chena in
those days and the bitterness and vituperation it used to pour out week
by week! One wishes a file of it had been preserved. Alaskan journalism
has presented many amusing curiosities that no one has had leisure to
collect, but nothing more amusing than the frenzy of impotent wrath
Chena vented when it saw its cherished prospects and opportunities
slipping out of its grasp for ever.

"If of all words on tongue or pen,
The saddest are 'it might have been,'
Full sad are those we often see,
It is, but it hadn't ought to be."

It takes Bret H