of a
village a little farther up this stream where every living being, save
one old man, died of diphtheria five years previously, while those who
have heard the stories of the horrors of the epidemic of measles in
1900, usually connected in some way with the stampede to Nome of that
year when the disease seems to have entered the country, will understand
how a region once thickly peopled, for Alaska, has become the most
thinly peopled in all the territory.

A half-breed trader, long resident at a point perhaps two hundred miles
lower down the Kuskokwim, told me of coming back to a populous village
after an absence of a few weeks, to find every person dead and the
starving dogs tearing at the rotting corpses. It is terrible to think
what the irruption of a new disease may mean to these primitive natives.
Even a disease like measles, rarely fatal and not commonly regarded as
serious amongst whites, takes to itself a strange and awful virulence
when it invades this virgin blood. The people know no proper treatment;
maddened by the itching rash that covers the body, they fling off all
cover, rush outdoors naked, whatever the weather, and either roll in the
snow or plunge into the stream; with the result that the disease
"strikes in" and kills them. Such is the description that is given of
its course along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim. At many a Yukon village
half the people died, despite the aid the few missionaries then on the
river could afford; upon the Kuskokwim the havoc seems to have been
still greater. Six years later, death again stalked through this region
after having visited the Yukon, and this time seized his victims by the
throat. In another chapter has been given some account of an outbreak of
diphtheria on the Chandalar, following a more serious epidemic at Circle
City and Fort Yukon. It was during that same winter the disease raged in
this region, remote from any sort of medical or even intelligent lay
aid, and swept off all the children that had been spared by the measles
or had been born since that time. At our next stopping-place we saw the
graves of nineteen children who died in one day!

[Sidenote: THE INDIAN GUIDE]

We learned that we were now within one day's travel of a road-house, at
or near the junction of the forks of the Kuskokwim, and that a
government trail had been surveyed and staked from the Iditarod to the
Sushitna, passing close to the same point, and that during the present
winter ro