e,
docile, kindly people that one's heart warms to.

This mission was our last outpost to the south. My farther journey had
for its prime object the visiting of the natives of the upper Tanana as
far as the Tanana Crossing, some two hundred and fifty miles beyond the
Salchaket, the inquiring into their condition and into the desirability
of establishing a post amongst them.

[Sidenote: THE UPPER TANANA]

The upper Tanana is probably one of the most difficult streams in the
world to navigate that can by any stretch of the term be called
navigable. The great Alaskan range begins to approach the Tanana River
so soon as one gets above Fairbanks. Its prominent peaks, ten thousand
to twelve thousand feet high, are continually in view from one angle to
another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and
nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left
bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They
come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times
merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the
wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for
the most part through heavily wooded country, and come out cleanly into
the river. So the glacial waters form shoals and bars, and the woodland
waters during freshets pile them high with driftwood. Such is the chief
characteristic of the upper Tanana; a multiplicity of swift, narrow
channels amidst bars laden with drift. It is subject to sudden rises of
great violence; the attempt to stem a freshet on the upper Tanana is a
hair-raising experience as the log of the _Pelican_ would show, but does
not come within this narrative. Owing to the origin of much of its
water, the Tanana is often in flood in dry, hot seasons, when other
rivers run meagrely, as well as in times of rain. It cannot be stemmed
in flood; its shoals deny passage in drouth; there must be just the
right stage of water to permit its navigation, and that stage, "without
o'erflowing, full," is not often found of duration to serve the voyage
after the month of June.

A river difficult to navigate in summer is usually a river difficult to
travel upon in winter, and the upper Tanana is notoriously dangerous and
treacherous. Scarce a winter or a summer that it does not claim victims.
It is emphatically a "bad river." Therefore, as far as there is any
travel to speak of, land trails parallel the ri