g altogether in encampments, was named "Gens de
large," and the river which they frequented took their name.

It is one of the second-rate tributaries of the Yukon, and in general
its waters are swift and shallow, not navigable for light-draught
steamboats for more than one hundred and fifty miles, save at flood, and
not easily navigable at all. It is these swift shallow streams that are
so formidable in winter on account of overflow water, and the Chandalar
is one of the most dreaded.

[Sidenote: DIPHTHERIA]

Ten miles along the river's surface brought us to the Chandalar native
village, a settlement of half a dozen cabins and twenty-five or thirty
souls. The people came out to meet us, and said they were just about to
bury a baby, and asked me to conduct the funeral. Because we had not
done a day's march and were under compulsion to push on at our best
speed, I did not unlash the sled but went just as I was up the hill with
the sorrowful procession to the little graveyard. On the way down I
asked as best I could of what sickness the baby had died, and I felt
some uneasiness when the throat was pointed to as the seat of disease.
When, presently, I was informed that two others were sick, and of the
same complaint, my uneasiness became alarm. I went at once to see them,
and the angry swollen throats patched with white membrane which I
discovered left no room for doubt that we were in the presence of
another outbreak of diphtheria. That disease had scourged the Yukon in
the two preceding years. Twenty-three children died at Fort Yukon in the
summer of 1904, half a dozen at Circle in the following winter, though
that outbreak was grappled with from the first; and all along the river
the loss of life was terrible.

There was no question that we must give up all hope of reaching Bettles
for Christmas and stay and do what we could for these people. So we made
camp on the outskirts of the village, and I went to work swabbing out
the throats with carbolic acid and preparing liquid food from our grub
box. There was nothing to eat in the village but dried fish and a little
dried moose, and these throats like red-hot iron could hardly swallow
liquids. The two patients were a boy of sixteen and a grown woman. It
was evident that unless we could isolate them the disease would probably
pass through the whole village, and, indeed, others might have been
infected already. It was likely that we were in for a siege of it, and
our sup