at Creek, every creek for
many miles in every direction, had long since been tied up by the men
with lead-pencils and hatchets. So the newly arrived prospectors must
spread out yet wider, and they were soon scattered over all the rugged
hundred miles between Iditarod City and the Kuskokwim River. Here and
there they found prospects; and here and there what promised to be
"pay." They started a new town, Georgetown, on the Kuskokwim itself;
another town sprang up on the Takotna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim; and
the great Commercial Company of Alaska, ever alert for new developments,
put a steamboat on the Kuskokwim and built trading-posts at both these
points. Thus the Kuskokwim country, which for long had been one of the
least-known portions of Alaska, was opened up almost at a stroke.

[Sidenote: CAMP AT 50 deg. BELOW]

It was my purpose to visit Iditarod City during the winter of 1910-11,
although, by reason of the distance to be travelled, a journey thither
would involve the omission of the customary winter visit to upper Yukon
points. When the northern trip to the Koyukuk was returned from at
Tanana, a sad journey had to be made to Nenana to bury the body of Miss
Farthing, and Doctor Loomis, missionary physician at Tanana, who
accompanied me on this errand, had almost as rough a breaking-in to the
Alaska trail as we came back to Tanana again as Doctor Burke had in our
journey over the "first ice" of the Koyukuk two years before. Two feet
of new snow lay on the trail, and the thermometer went down to 60 deg. below
zero. We were camped once on the mail trail, unable to reach a
road-house, at 50 deg. below zero.

[Illustration: THE ROUGH BREAKING IN OF DOCTOR LOOMIS, CAMPED ON THE
MAIL TRAIL AT 50 deg. BELOW ZERO, UNABLE TO REACH A ROAD-HOUSE FOR THE DEEP
SNOW.]

[Illustration: ESQUIMAUX OF THE UPPER KUSKOKWIM.]

[Sidenote: THE ROUTE TO THE IDITAROD]

From Tanana the beaten track to the Iditarod lay one hundred and sixty
miles down the Yukon to Lewis's Landing, and then across country by the
Lewis Cut-Off one hundred miles to Dishkaket on the Innoko, and
thence across country another hundred miles to Iditarod City. But I
designed to penetrate to the Iditarod by another route. I had long
desired to visit Lake Minchumina and its little band of Indians, and to
pass through the upper Kuskokwim country. So I had engaged a Minchumina
Indian as a guide, and laid my course up the Tanana River to the
Coschaket, and then