ligious need. To occupy them at all they should be
occupied at once when yet eligible sites may be had for the staking; if
they prosper, to come into them later means buying at a high price. Yet
what seventh son of a seventh son shall have foresight enough to tell
the fortunes of them? The North is strewn with "cities" of one winter.
Nor is the selection of suitable men to minister to such communities a
simple matter. Amidst the overthrow of all the usual criteria of
conduct, the fading out of the usual dividing lines and the blending
into one another of the usual divisions, it requires a tactful and
prudent man "to keep the happy mean between too much stiffness in
refusing and to much easiness in admitting" variations from conventional
standards. His point of view, if he is to have any influence whatever,
must not exclude the point of view of the great majority; he must accept
the situation in order to have any chance of improving the situation.
And yet in the fundamentals of character and conduct he must be
unswerving. And if on any such fundamental the battle gauge is thrown
down, he must take it up and fight the quarrel out at whatever cost.

We left Iditarod City on Monday, the 20th of March, the dogs the fatter
and fresher for their week's rest, resolved not to return by the
Kuskokwim but to take the beaten trail out to the Yukon, and so all the
way up that stream to Fort Yukon. The monthly mail had arrived a few
days previously--a monthly mail was all that the thousands of men in
this camp could secure--and had gone out again the very next morning,
before people had time to answer their letters, before the registered
mail had even been delivered. So our departure for the Yukon was eagerly
seized upon and advertised as a means of despatching probably the last
mail that would go outside over the ice. I was sworn in as special
carrier, and a heavy sack of first-class mail added to our load as far
as Tanana. The first stage of thirty miles led to Dikeman, a town at the
headwaters of ordinary steamboat navigation of the Iditarod River, at
which the Commercial Company had built a depot and extensive warehouse,
since in the main abandoned. Two streets of cabins lined the bank, but
forty or fifty souls comprised the population, and almost all of them
gathered for Divine service that night.

[Sidenote: THE "MOVING OF THE MEAT"]

From Dikeman to Dishkaket, on the Innoko River, a distance of some
seventy miles, our route