we had hoped to lodge the previous
night.

[Sidenote: ALASKAN "FORTS"]

Buoyed by the hope of doing a double stage in a clear, windless day and
thus reaching Stephen's Village for service at night, we made a very
early start that beautiful Easter morning. But it was not to be. Such
trail as there was ran high up on the bank ice--level, doubtless, when
it was made much earlier in the season, but now at a slope towards the
middle of the river through the falling of the water, and seamed with
great cracks. Such a trail, called a "sidling" trail in the vernacular
of mushing, is always difficult and laborious to travel, for the sled
slips continually off it into the loose snow or the ice cracks, and
often for long stretches at a time one man must hold up the nose of the
sled while the other toils at the handle-bars. In one place, while thus
holding the front of the sled on the trail, Walter slipped into an ugly
ice crack concealed by drifted snow, and so wedged his foot that I had
difficulty in extricating him. The last two bends of the river within
the Ramparts seemed interminable and it was 6.30 P. M., with twelve
hours' travel behind us, when we reached old Fort Hamlin, on the verge
of the Yukon Flats. These "forts," it might be explained, if one chose
to pursue the elucidation of Alaskan nomenclature in the same strain,
are so called because they never had any defences and never needed any.
As a matter of fact, in the early days, when the Hudson Bay Company
made its first establishments on the upper river, there was supposed to
be some need of fortification, and Fort Selkirk and Fort Yukon were
stockaded. Fort Selkirk, indeed, was sacked and burned sixty years ago,
but not by Yukon Indians. The Chilkats from the coast, indignant at the
loss of their middle-man profits by the invasion of the interior,
crossed the mountains, descended the river, and destroyed the post. It
thus became customary to call a trading-post a "fort," and every little
point where a store and a warehouse stood was so dignified. Hence Fort
Reliance, Fort Hamlin, Fort Adams.

For years Fort Hamlin had been quite deserted, but now smoke issued from
the stovepipe and dogs gave tongue at our approach, and we found a white
man with an Esquimau wife from Saint Michael and a half-breed child
dwelling there and carrying a few goods for sale. With him we made our
lodging, and with him and his family said our evening service of Easter,
and so to bed, thorou