Gates of the Arctic Gaunt Beauty ... Tenuous Life Historic Resource Study for Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve

What impresses one about Robert Marshall is the breadth of his interests and the energy with which he pursued them. A ramble through his many publications and the letters, research notes, and field journals in the Marshall Collection at the University of California's Bancroft Library reveals a man of liberal instincts striving for a world enlightened and equitable. He believed that decency and fairness should extend not only to people but also to a natural world besieged by misdirected political, industrial, and technological forces. As a man of substance and reputation, Marshall corresponded with scientists, academics, and men of power across the United States and around the world. During his short life, he fought with equal vigor the destructive commercial forestry practices that were desecrating America's timbered country, the rise of Fascism in Europe, and a host of other evils and derelictions that caught his roving attention.

In the north Alaskan wilderness he found a place and a people that represented the antithesis of the many things going wrong with the stressed world beyond. His fondness for the friends and haunts of Alaska could only be heightened by the ominous developments outside during the Thirties. Through his northland adventures and his writings about the Koyukuk country he channeled part of his powerful energies toward a saner and more civilized world. It may seem ironical that in this wilderness and its outpost community of Wiseman he found values that he believed could help remedy the problems of the larger world. As this was part of Marshall's message, so had similar thoughts issued nearly a century earlier from another thinker on the outskirts of Concord.

Though Bob Marshall had started out as a shy lad, he became a man who radiated charm and dragged people along with infectious enthusiasm. In the Koyukuk wildlands, in company with the competent people who found satisfaction there, he discovered personal growth as well as a wondrous geography. Born in New York City in 1901—his father "...a prominent constitutional lawyer, a leader in Jewish affairs, fighter for minority rights, humanitarian, and conservationist"—Marshall naturally became a professional man, but not in law or medicine. His boyhood treks and nature studies at the family's summer retreat in the Adirondacks led him to choose the study of forestry, "...so that he could spend the greater part of his life in the woods he loved."

His academic career took him to the New York State College of Forestry, Harvard University, and Johns Hopkins, where he received his doctorate in 1930. During his advanced studies he worked with a U.S. Forest Service experimental station in Idaho and Montana, where he could combine the "...mental adventure of science with the physical adventure of life in the woods." With maturity and experience, he would become Director of Forestry for the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., and later, Chief of the Division of Recreation and Lands for the U.S. Forest Service, the position he held at his death in November 1939. Throughout his professional career he worked to improve the science and practice of forestry, the economy and opportunities of Indian people, and the preservation of virgin forest lands that would be accessible for the recreation of the people at large.¹ His joy of living combined with moral courage to make him a potent force in the many causes he espoused. He needed both wilderness and people to fulfill his life. In Alaska he found an ideal mix of the two.

Marshall's affair with the upper Koyukuk country began with a search for uncharted places on the map. Turning his atlas pages to Alaska in the spring of 1929, he found a vast, blank zone in the central Brooks Range that lured him north for a summer in the Arctic.

...[S]o I rationalized a scientific investigation as a reason for my expedition. As a forester and plant physiologist, it seemed eminently appropriate that I should make a study of tree growth at northern timberline.

I cannot say that I learned very much either about tree growth or timberline. But I did come away with a vivid impression that the few white and Eskimo people who were scattered through this remote region were on the whole the happiest folk I had ever encountered. It is so easy, however, to found an erroneous impression on the superficial contacts of a couple of months that I decided to return for at least a year in order to make a detailed study of this civilization of the North.²

He would return to reside a year in Wiseman in 1930-31, and for subsequent summer visits in 1938 and 1939. Thus, for the last decade of his life, the Koyukuk environment—as on-site reality and as abiding ideal when he was away—served as touchstone for a maturing philosophy that celebrated the human values of wilderness.

In pursuit of his scientific investigation, Marshall established sample plots beyond the spruce timberline. Using white spruce seeds gathered locally and from the northern states, he sowed various plots to test his theory "...that the only reason spruce is not far north of the present timberline is that there has not been enough time, since the last ice sheet receded, for seeds to blow north from the most northerly spruce trees left after the glacier...." He calculated that the spruce forest advanced about a mile north every 250 years, each increment requiring maturation of trees for development of cones and scattering of seeds. One of his plots 8 miles north of timberline on a North Fork creek "...would be anticipating nature by 2,000 years."³ Revisits to two plots, 9 years after initial sowing, showed no positive results. He pondered the reasons: environmental? faulty sowing technique? But from the beginning his other interests had overshadowed the mysteries of forest advance and the subtle combinations of plant succession. He shrugged off the disappointment of barren plots "...as the clouds gradually disappeared from the mountains and the great peaks of the Arctic Divide jutted all around us into the sunlight."⁴

More important than Marshall's botanical experiments were the geographic explorations and mapping that initially flowed from the timberline studies. Almost immediately these explorations—particularly the pioneering work on the North Fork—became the basic rationale for Marshall's upper country rambles. Using extant USGS maps; the services of local Eskimos, miners, and trappers; and his own rough surveys and triangulations, Marshall filled in the main physical features of an area long of interest to the USGS, but deferred because of other demands on the agency. Philip S. Smith, by now Chief Alaskan Geologist for the Survey, encouraged Marshall and was instrumental in having his upper Koyukuk description and sketch map published as a USGS bulletin.⁵

In the bulletin foreword, Smith stated that "Mr. Marshall has prepared a sketch map showing all the principal streams of the region, has determined from local sources the names of many of the features, and has otherwise contributed to the knowledge of the geography of the region. His record...partly fills the need that has long been felt for more adequate and reliable information about ... [the Koyukuk's] remote and less accessible parts. ..."⁶

Even geographic discovery, a time- and culture-bound abstraction, faded before the grand and tangible visions that Marshall met at every turn of the Koyukuk's mountain drainage:

It is doubtful whether any of the famous scenic areas in the United States contain more magnificent scenery than that at the head of the different Arctic tributaries of the Koyukuk River. To the writer the great U-shaped valleys at the head of Ernie Creek, the North Fork, and Clear River are not a whit less stupendous than those of the famous Yosemite, and the grandeur of the deep gorge of the Kenunga Valley is not excelled by any of the magnificent valleys of Glacier National Park. Grizzly Creek flows through a canyon 2 miles across at the top, with walls about 3,500 feet high on the north side and 2,500 feet on the south. Blackface Mountain, at the foot of the Valley of Precipices, has a sheer cliff of about 3,000 feet, resembling Gibraltar in appearance but more than twice as high. The Arrigetch Peaks of the Alatna River are a series of unscalable needle peaks such as probably cannot be duplicated anywhere else in the world. The Alatna and John Rivers flow for miles through high, rocky mountains which rise almost from the margins of streams. On Hunts Fork of the John River is Loon Lake, from the very shore of which a high, rocky mountain juts thousands of feet in the air, with a great waterfall plunging in several leaps for a drop of at least 2,000 feet.

All through this country in the clear days of winter the pure-white snow, the dark-green spruce trees, and the deep-blue sky mingle in an infinite variety of patterns. In summer the snow is gone, except on the north face of the higher mountains, but in its stead are the black and brown and gray and yellow rocks and the different colors of the varied vegetation, including the wild flowers, which blossom from early May until late August in gorgeous profusion.⁷

Spartan survivors of the Survey's old Alaska Geology Branch had trouble swallowing such poetic flights in a USGS bulletin, nor could they happily accept his sketchy map—except there was no other. But they had to approve Marshall's alliance with local people who guided him and shared their knowledge of the country. Marshall credited Big Charlie Suckik, whose wide-ranging pursuit of game and furs provided the basis for mapping the Iniakuk River, large parts of the John River, and many other streams. Trapper Ernie Johnson led him through large parts of the North Fork, Allen River, and Wild River country. Wiseman miners Jesse Allen, Kenneth Harvey, and Albert Ness sketched in Middle Fork drainages and also served as guides, along with mining geologist and prospector Al Retzlaf of the Fairbanks College. According to Marshall, these men were "...not only able field men but also companions with whom it was a great joy to live in the intimacy of the trail." Others whose landscape lore Marshall tapped included Selawik Sam, James Murphy, George Huey, Victor Neck, and Al West.⁸

Always, Marshall's enthusiasm for the Koyukuk people and wildlands obtrudes from the lean pages of the USGS bulletin. Having paid his respects to those who knew the passes through the jagged and forbidding mountains, having applied local geographic names wherever possible and been smitten with the "...innumerable mountains and streams in this unexplored country which, so far as could be learned, had never been named by either whites or Eskimos," Marshall concluded his description of the Koyukuk wilderness with a stunning statement on comparative population densities in the year 1930:

The distribution of 127 people over an area of 15,000 square miles means that the region has an average population of only about 0.0085 per square mile. Compared with this figure, Alaska, as a whole, is about 12 times as densely populated, the United States proper 5,000 times, Belgium about 80,000 times, and Manhattan Island almost 10,000,000 times.⁹

Marshall's two major works on the Koyukuk country, Alaska Wilderness and Arctic Village, comprise a kind of stereopticon in which the Koyukuk landscape and the people living there dissolve into one another to form a single image. Yet the first is essentially a journal of exploration, the second a sociological study of Wiseman. The dominance of land and climate, and the response of a few isolated people to these dominant realities, fascinated Marshall.

Despite his chosen profession as forester and his extensive field work in the West, Marshall was essentially a displaced urban man, a highly educated man moved by ideas and the celestial visions manifest in the wilderness. Reminiscences of Koyukuk folk who knew him, including the stalwarts who guided him, draw an affectionate picture of a man often overcome with the joy of wild adventure, pushing the risks in remote places, sometimes a bit clumsy. Men who lived there, like Ernie Johnson, avoided risk because their entire lives—in that land and climate—were full of risk. Moreover, their automatic competence, built of long experience in that place, made them seem naturalized, integrated in a way that Marshall could never quite attain, as he freely acknowledged. In physical action and in emotional response, Bob Marshall retained to the last a strain of delighted adolescence in the Alaskan wilds.

It was this quality, expressed in mad scrambles to topmost heights, in a slipped knot or a broken tool, in journal notes that painted landscapes as though with brush and oils, that endeared him to his bemused trail companions, even as they muttered cautions and repaired the damage. It was this quality that bred Marshall's subtle dependence upon these sturdy denizens, providing a crack of space that allowed him to indulge his exuberance and them to be indulgent. And, of course, it was this quality of everlasting youth, of unfailing faith in new glories to be discovered each dawn, that shaped his vision of the ultimate wilderness.

Nothing in this interpretation takes away from Bob Marshall's adventuring soul, his zest for trekking, his zeal for doing more than his share of camp chores. But most certainly, it was the minor discrepancy between him and those he traveled with—that shade of unconformity, of not being quite naturalized—that allowed him to see challenge and glory where Ernie Johnson, who also loved the country, saw a gradient too steep for pack horses.

Marshall's first trip in 1929 touched upon all the elements of his future studies and writing about the Koyukuk. Al Retzlaf and he flew from Fairbanks to Wiseman with Noel Wien to begin their summer adventure. Dropping into the valley to the little strip beneath the mountains,

A crowd of about twenty people met us, greeted us like old friends, helped us carry our luggage the half mile from the field to the roadhouse and gave us all sorts of information about the country. The roadhouse was a one-story log structure with the usual north-country peaked roof. Like other roadhouses in Alaska, it served primarily as a shelter in winter to dogteam travelers; in addition, it combined the functions of hotel, restaurant, bar, banquet hall, dance floor, store, and major social center of Wiseman. Martin Slisco, the roadhouse proprietor treated us like brothers and even lent us shoes for the dance which they staged specially for us at the Pioneer Hall. There, five Eskimo women and twenty men, of whom about half danced, were present. With the day still bright at midnight despite rain, with the long-yearned-for Arctic actually at hand, with the pleasant Eskimo girls as partners, with the queer old-fashioned steps which the prospectors had brought into the country at the start of the century, with friendly strangers smiling and welcoming, and with little Eskimo kids having hopping races with me—that evening seems today a dear, half-remembered dream.¹⁰

After two days of getting supplies, renting horses, fixing pack saddles, and picking the brains of old timers about routes to the verge of the North Fork country they would explore, Bob and Al set out. That first day of 25 that they would spend in the wilderness got them no farther than Ed Marsan's cabin on Nolan Creek, where his and his wife's hospitality could not be refused. Miners Charlie Irish and Jesse Allen dropped by and told them that in the memory of the locals only trapper Ernie Johnson had been farther north than the Clear River junction on North Fork. His line camp at the confluence of later-named Ernie Creek and North Fork was the last outpost. Beyond its environs, apparently, only Natives had traveled.

Next day the packers traversed Pasco Pass and dropped into Glacier River valley, which they would follow to North Fork. On the way they rested at Charlie Yale's cabin—long abandoned by that early miner, but maintained by local people as a shelter on the Wiseman-North Fork-Wild Lake trail. Bob marvelled that for 10 years the hermit miner's "lonely light [had] shone out on the snow with never a soul around to see it ...for the sake of a fortune he never attained."¹¹

Beyond Yale's cabin the trail disappeared. Already sedge tussocks and mosquitoes were taking toll. The mushroom-shaped clumps of cottongrass, with swampwater in between, made every step a pitching, lurching gamble both for the men and the heavy-laden horses. The insects descended in clouds, making headnets, gloves, and tucked-in pants essential.

Al's fishing skills provided grayling for lunch and dinner. A floored tent with tied-off tunnel entrance allowed respite and sleep despite the constant hum of mosquito hordes outside.

Finally they left Glacier River, cutting westward across Jack Delay Pass to the North Fork. Now they headed north, alternating between hillsides and brushy terraces on the one hand and gravel bars on the other, as dictated by the river's meanders. Whenever they stopped, Bob made ecological observations: tree borings, plant types, exposure, slope, soil and air temperatures, moisture.

Their daily progress settled into a routine of predictable tasks and sequences. Freed from petty decisions, they could absorb their surroundings and enjoy the country, despite the usual irritations of insects and tough terrain marked by snagging brush, slippery slopes, tussocks, and blocking canyons.¹²

On July 31, after a rough climb above Clear River canyon—nearly losing the horses in the landslide steeps of what Bob named Moving Mountain—they attained the peak some 2,500 feet above the water. Bob's journal records the moment:

The view from the top gave us an excellent idea of the jagged country toward which we were heading. The main Brooks Range divide was so high that it was entirely covered with snow. Close at hand, only about 10 miles airline to the north, was the exceedingly precipitous east portal of the Gates to the Arctic, which I tentatively christened Boreal. The west portal I called the Frigid Crags.¹³

At a high camp that night, exhausted and besieged by mosquitoes, they crawled into the tent. Because of the rough ground and sparse feed they had taken a chance and left the horses unhobbled. Hearing no horse bell they peeked out to find the horses gone. Al spotted their tracks and dashed up the mountain to retrieve them, then hobbled them near the tent. Again they broke for the mountain and the men raced over tussocks and slopes to bring them back.

Lacking any brush to scratch on in this barren campsite, the horses were going crazy from mosquitoes. Neither hobbles nor anything else could hold them. So the wornout men broke camp at 10:30 and headed for North Fork 8 miles away.

It was a dreamlike time, that long trek in the twilit night of arctic summer. At such times the gathering dusk of sunset quickly dissipates into sunrise as the sun itself circles just below the mountains. Peaks stand silhouetted, crowned by underlit clouds. The depleted men and numb horses moved placidly through the pink glow of this ethereal night. About 2 a.m. they camped by the river, with plenty of scratching brush for the horses, just as the sun tipped the high peaks to the west.

Next day they made good time. The higher reaches of the river were shallow enough to ford, so they crossed back and forth to fetch the easily traveled gravel bars.

As we advanced, the mountains became more and more precipitous until finally they culminated in the Gates of the Arctic. Here on the west side of the valley a whole series of bristling crags, probably at least a score, towered sheer for perhaps 2,000 feet from an exceedingly steep 2,000-foot pedestal. From a similar base on the east rose the 4,000-foot precipice of Boreal. This mountain rose straight up for almost 6,000 feet. Between these two stupendous walls, the valley was probably two miles wide, consisting mostly of dry gravel bars.

Fortunately this gorge was not in the continental United States, where its wild sublimity would almost certainly have been commercially exploited. We camped in the very center of the Gates, seventy-four miles from the closest human being and more than a thousand miles from the nearest automobile.¹⁴

On August 3, after camping at the Ernie Creek-North Fork junction, they ascended Ernie Creek about 6 miles, where they stopped for rest and lunch. While Al fished, Bob climbed.

My mountain rose about 3,500 feet above camp. It was just one great pile of loose slate heaped up in spots to the very steepest angle of repose. At places I had to go exceedingly carefully in order not to start a landslide which would carry me down a couple of thousand feet. The final going was along a knife edge ridge of crumbly rock.

The view from the summit ... but I must jump into the superlative again. This really was the finest of all. The hour and 20 minutes I spent on the top of the Slatepile were easily worth the entire journey to Alaska. In every direction rose mountains higher than mine. I seemed to be on a pedestal in the center of a great towering amphitheatre with more precipitous and lofty walls than anyone ever dreamed of. But there was variety as well as grandeur. To the southeast were three ragged giants with great glaciers near their summits. One of the three (Boreal) together with the ever cragged Frigid bounded the great Gates of the Arctic to the South. Westward, against a clouded sun six massive black needles projected into the sky, and there was also a great black basin at their base. Northward about 15 miles was the main Endicott Range, least jagged of the visible mountains, but higher than any and capped with snow. Through a notch I could see rocky mountains still farther beyond, on the Arctic side of the divide. They appeared utterly barren. In the same direction I could also look into the head of the...[Anaktuvuk] River, and could pick out the route we were to follow, though...[the] Pass itself was hidden by an immense nearby rock looking something like the pictures of Gibralter, but three times as high....¹⁵

Next day Bob and Al pushed up Ernie Creek to camp near its head. The upper "... valley was bounded by high, dark, and dangerous looking precipices, surpassing in my estimation, the grandeur of Yosemite."¹⁶

... On the West side, black cliffs of brittle slate towered into the air for 2,000 or 3,000 feet from a thousand-foot steeply sloping base. The strata were tilted at all angles, sometimes dipping north, sometimes south, and occasionally running nearly horizontal. On the east side of the valley, the mountains were less abrupt, but rose for about 3,000 feet with strata tilted at thirty degrees. These immense boundaries of the V-shaped canyon stretched with only four narrow breaks on the east side where chasms cut in the softer rock lead back to lofty cliffs and great peaks of tumbled conglomerate. Wherever the soft strata crossed the skyline they had crumbled away leaving hard serrations which added to the jaggedness of the scene.¹⁷

After a tangle with grizzlies, with Bob—on duty as camp guard—trying to hold the terrified horses and defend the camp at the same time, a climb out of Grizzly Creek toward the fog-shrouded divide, and days of rain that swelled the mountain streams, the men decided to return to Wiseman. High water forced them into difficult terrain, away from the easy crossings and gravel-bar travel of the ascent. Extremely rough ridges alternated with bog swales turned into quagmires by the constant rain.

From a layover rest camp near the Ernie Creek-North Fork junction, Bob hiked up North Fork on a stormy day, the flooded river turbulent and unfordable.

Leaning trees from cut banks extended over the water and framed shifting vistas of gray mountains, which looked exceptionally wild as a strong wind blew low-flying black scuds across their summits. On either side of the broad U-shaped glacial valley, tremendous rock masses rose into cloud-capped peaks. The highest and most rugged were to the south, forming the two easterly of the "ragged giants" which I had observed from Slatepile Mountain. These great mountains rose probably 5,000-6,000 feet above the valley floor. They were topped by hanging glaciers and sheer precipices. The most westerly of these two mountain masses I called Hanging Glacier. The easterly one was a towering, black unscalable-looking giant, the highest peak in this section of the Brooks Range. For the moment I called it Matterhorn of the Koyukuk, although it looked less ascendable than its celebrated Swiss namesake. Two years later I renamed it Mount Doonerak the name Doonerak I took from an Eskimo word which means a spirit or, as they would translate it, a devil. The Eskimos believe that there are thousands of dooneraks in the world, some beneficent, but generally delighting in making trouble.¹⁸

The long haul back to Wiseman was cold, damp, and dreary. The men forded side streams and sloughs endlessly, soaked up to the waist in icy water. Restricted to the east bank of the swollen North Fork they had to make long detours around cutbanks and over ridges through bogs and brush. At night they split deadwood for dry fuel, then dried themselves and their clothes under a tarpaulin. Fortunately, their waterproof tent and careful packing kept the sleeping bags dry and they got good sleep.

At Clear River, where they had camped 12 days before, they found their food cache intact, but it gave them only five days of slim rations for the 50-mile trek to Wiseman. The rains continued and even Clear River was unfordable. Rising waters surrounded their island camp. Gloomily they went to bed.

At three in the morning I awoke from the noise of rushing water. It was raining hard when I looked outside and, much to my surprise, I discovered that the water in the quiet slough next to camp had risen almost to the fire, and had become a strong, churning current. I moved the cooking pots back to what I thought was a safe place, commented casually to Al on the phenomenal rise of the water, and hurried back to bed. Moved by my report, Al took one sleepy look out of the tent and immediately was all consternation.

"Hurry, get up," he shouted, "we've got to get out of here quick. The main river's cutting back of our island and if we're not damn fast we'll be cut off from everything."

I thought he was exaggerating, but one look at his grim countenance and feverish haste in dressing made me change my mind, and I started putting on my clothes with all speed. It was now about three-thirty. Al, dressed first, grabbed the halters and started after the horses, calling for me to hurry and pack things. In a few minutes he was back, even more agitated.

"It's too late to pack the horses. It may be too late even if we carry the stuff ourselves, but we've just a chance. Water's up to my thighs already and cutting out the bottom. We've got a few minutes at best. Never mind the little things. Just pack up the tent and bed rolls, but for heaven's sake hurry. I'll take this box."

And away he went with his little packsack on his back, a heavy box of food on one shoulder, and the ax.

I continued the packing at breakneck speed, appreciating the danger, but strangely enough I felt quite calm. Al was back again before I had finished with the tent. He started across again with my big packsack, the gun, and the extra harness. When he returned a third time I had the tent done up.

"Just about time for one more load," he shouted, taking up the other box of food and the tent. But the load was too big and he had to drop the tent. I followed with his bed roll which also contained many stray items. We got across safely, though the water was nearly to our waists and just about as swift as we could stand. We immediately turned back, Al to pick up what was left around the camp and I to pick up the tent. I recovered it, deposited it on shore, and returned halfway into the water to relieve Al, staggering under a clumsy load, of his bed and some pots while he continued with the saddles, tarps, and shovels. It was four o'clock when we had led the horses across too and reached the safe shore for the last time, just thirty minutes after Al's alarm. Ten minutes later the channel was absolutely impassable for any human being. Had we slept even a little longer, we would have been caught on a tiny island covered only with willows and half a dozen slender cottonwoods, with no game, and food for only five days.

Some time during the excitement it had stopped raining. We set up camp again at what we believed to be a safe distance from the river on the highest spot of ground we could find, but it barely gave us a four-foot margin. I walked down once more to the edge of the river in the grim, gray light of a cloudy morning, and watched the mad torrent raging. Man may be taming nature, but no one standing on the bank of the North Fork of the Koyukuk on this gray morning would have claimed that nature is conquered.¹⁹

After more adventures with the raging rivers and a long hike on iron rations—ending up with only a few ounces of salt and tea—Bob and Al made it back to Wiseman. Their reception was warm, made doubly so by fears that they had been lost. The kidding and questions went on as they devoured caribou stew at Slisco's Roadhouse. Bob's journal concludes:

Adventure is wonderful, but there's no doubt that one of its joys is the end. That night there was a pleasure unknown to anyone who has not experienced days on end of cold and soggy weather in sitting in a dry room by a warm fire. That night lying in bed with no rising rivers, no straying horses, no morrow's route to worry about we enjoyed a peacefulness which made a glorious conclusion to a glorious adventure.²⁰

As he left the northland that late summer of 1929, Bob was already making plans for return the next year. Study of the "civilization of the North" would be his primary task, for he wanted to know if these people had truly achieved the balance and happiness he had observed and, if so, how. During his 13-month residence of 1930-31, he would combine sociology with wilderness adventuring to gain "...the absolutely unassessable thrill of just looking at superb natural beauty." As sidelines, he would make a bow in the direction of timberline studies and expand his preliminary mapping of the North Fork. And it was on this trip that he met Ernie Johnson, who would become his principal trail companion. In early September 1930 he recorded his first meeting with the Daniel Boone of the Arctic:

... we were startled by a voice shouting to us from the other side of the North Fork. I ran down to the bank and saw a man poling a boat across the stream. In a few moments he landed and introduced himself as Ernie Johnson. He had a friendly open face and the springing stride of a woodsman. The slight accent of his speech betrayed his origin from Sweden.²¹

Ernie was held up among the pioneers of the region as the most competent woodsman of the lot. He lived most of his time alone on the upper reaches of the North Fork, though "... he is not an anchorite by preference but merely because he seldom can find anyone to share his difficult life."²²

During this first encounter, Ernie regaled Bob and his companions with stories of the North Fork. He shared his intimate knowledge of its landscapes: the passes, the cutoffs to avoid bogs and tussocks. "It was the vital information of the wilderness."

Ernie told of his life: birth in Sweden 50 years before, migration to Minnesota where he became a carpenter, then the Gold Rush and Alaska. He spent all but 2 weeks a year away from the "cities" of Wiseman and Bettles. As trapper and hunter he made about $2,500 a year. He could make much more as a carpenter, for his cabins were tight and dry and lasted for decades, "but I am staying out here because I like it among these ruggedy mountains better than anywhere else in the world."²³

On the spot Bob and Ernie agreed to an upper Alatna exploration together the next summer. Then they parted, Ernie floating south to his town base at Bettles, Bob and his party heading for the Arctic Divide. For a moment the two camps had shared thousands of square miles of wilderness. A few days later Bob and Al Retzlaf would camp near Ernie's cabin at the Ernie Creek-North Fork junction and use his cook stove.

Back at Wiseman after the September trip to the North Fork, Bob began a series of long journal-based letters to his family and friends. These letters, with their anecdotes of travel and stories of friends made, form a large part of the Alaska Wilderness text. They also contain ruminations and summings up that show the progress of Bob's thoughts as he discovered new places in the central Brooks Range. In the letter of September 23, 1930, he recalls the effect of his second visit to the Ernie Creek headwaters area. It was "...an explorer's heaven, the sort of thing a person of adventuresome disposition might dream about for a lifetime without ever realizing."

Each day I set out to climb some fresh peak or explore some fresh valley which apparently no human being had ever visited. Often as when visiting Yosemite or Glacier Park or the Grand Canyon or Avalanche Lake or some other famous natural scenery of surpassing beauty, I had wished egotistically enough that I might have had the joy of being the first person to discover this grandeur. I had read Captain Lewis' glowing account of the discovery of the Great Falls of the Missouri and was completely thrilled. At about the ages of 11 to 20 I used to feel that I had been born a century too late, that though I might have some good times I would never enjoy anything as glorious as I would have known had I lived in the days of Lewis and Clark. Later I changed these notions as I became more realistic and appreciated that, statistically viewed, I would probably have been bumped off by Indians or died of fever before having many good times, and that anyway background is much less important than psychological processes in determining how happy a person can be. Later still I realized that though the field for geographical exploration was giving out, the realm of mental exploration—aesthetic, philosophical, scientific—was limitless. Nevertheless, I still maintained a suppressed yearning for geographical discovery which I never seriously hoped to realize. And then I found myself here, at the very headwaters of the mightiest river of the north, at a place where only three other human beings aside from myself had ever been and with dozens of never visited valleys, hundreds of unscaled summits still as virgin as during their Paleozoic creation.²⁴

As far as Bob Marshall knew or could know, this was a fresh world—unvisited, virgin. The facts are that the upper Koyukuk was a natural travel route and hunting area that had been used by Native Americans for millennia. Ernie Pass between the headwaters of Ernie Creek and Anaktuvuk River was a major access into the Koyukuk country for historic-period mountain Eskimos and for their prehistoric Indian and Eskimo antecedents, as was the pass between North Fork and Itkillik rivers. Archeological investigations in 1985 found scores of historic and prehistoric sites in these upper drainages. Their locations and artifactual remains indicate camping and hunting uses, including butchering stations. Scientific dating and artifact morphology give strong evidence of at least 6,000 years of human presence, probably several millennia more. Clustered sites at and within a few miles of the Ernie Creek-North Fork confluence show intensive use of a sporadic, seasonal sort from dawn times to the present. Camp sites and hunting lookouts have always been chosen for advantages of terrain, drainage, and visibility. These factors and their channeling influence over animal migration routes have changed little in the passage of recent geological time. Sheep are plentiful in the area today. They, along with migrating caribou, were probably major attractions in earlier times, as they still are.²⁵

Bob Marshall was not the first explorer to imagine himself the first human being in some remote place. Certainly his idols, Lewis and Clark, visited no place unknown to generations of vanished and living tribes. Since the early dispersions of humankind, geographical exploration has been a generational thing, a renewable resource in the world's wildlands where forgotten histories left few reminders. When Marshall spoke of preserving wilderness for its human values, this was part of what he meant. In wilderness, certain psychological processes could be revitalized—among them the sense of discovering an earth fresh and whole. That he had unwittingly partaken of his prescription for others—experienced the discoverer's exaltation where many had trod before—is fine irony and validation of his prescription.

That Bob Marshall and later pilgrims to the central Brooks Range could and can still have such experiences tells us much about traditional land use there. Anthropologist Richard Nelson draws this conclusion in a 1977 study of the subsistence way of life in what were then the proposed Alaska parklands:

The areas proposed for new parks remain in an essentially pristine condition, with healthy populations of wildlife and virtually unaltered floral communities. Except for scattered cabins and threading trails, subsistence users have left the landscape practically free of visible human impact. Thus, several thousand years of continuous subsistence use has left us with environments worthy of preservation as the most wild and beautiful in our nation.²⁶

During the winter of 1930-31 Bob alternated his Wiseman studies with dog mushing trips. One 10-day circuit took him to the Dietrich River branch of Middle Fork, about 60 miles north of Wiseman. Jesse Allen and Kenneth Harvey invited him along to recover cached sheep from their fall hunt. Bob discovered both the joy and dangers of winter travel—the rush of the dogs through starlit and twilit arctic landscapes; the menace of overflow on frozen rivers, where a breakthrough on crusted snow or thin ice can wet and freeze a foot in minutes. In tent camp one night:

I thought of my friends on the Outside who were spending the night comfortably in steam-heated rooms in the heart of steam-heated cities. We spent that night scarcely less comfortably near the Arctic Divide, though the thermometer dropped to 40 below and we had only a thin canvas shelter. But ours was a single oasis of warmth and comfort in thousands of square miles of freezing wilderness.²⁷

At mid-passage of their journey Albert Ness showed up with a borrowed team to get Jesse, whose wife had fallen seriously ill. Jesse rushed back alone with an empty sled; Ness stayed on to haul the meat. It was an emergency "met by the community in a way typical for this frontier," considered by all involved as merely "normal neighborliness," no thanks or pay expected.²⁸

In March 1931 Bob joined Ernie Johnson on an expedition to the Clear River headwaters. No one locally knew whether it headed at the Arctic Divide or a south slope ridge. They would find out.

Following the usual route via Yale Cabin and Glacier River, the men and two teams aimed for Ernie's cabin at the Tinayguk-North Fork junction. After caching some food there, they mushed up Clear River toward the head of its lower canyon. There they set up a base camp in deep snow so dry that a person without snowshoes sank instantly to the waist. Camp routine started as Ernie stomped out a tent space with snowshoes and tied the tent ends and sides to spruce trees and brush. Bob cut and spread spruce boughs for a floor and rolled out caribou-hides and bags. Then they got the stove going. They melted snow for water in 5-gallon tins, two for dogfood and one for themselves. The camp work—setting up, securing the dogs for the night, feeding themselves—kept them busy until late evening. But a warm tent and a pot of boiled meat capped the long day pleasantly.

They had books, for both of them were voracious readers. Good talk, however, was their basic fare once the work was done. Bob caught Ernie's views and philosophy in another of those long letters to the folks. They had stimulating discussions about socialism and personal liberties, and the freedom of bush living. Ernie was no socialist (as many Wiseman residents were), for he feared the anthill effect. But he was critical of the capitalistic order. "We've got to get some system ... which will stop this amassing of fortunes, otherwise in a few years the whole world will be peonized to a handful of men." He admired the Natives for their lack of hypocrisy and their avoidance of false modesty. If he got $100,000 all at once he would not leave the country. He would get better equipment and go Outside for a wife, then come right back. "I wouldn't quit this life in the hills....I know what the life outside is like and it don't appeal to me. I've lived this free life in here too long." His idea of working for someone else was summed up as "getting down on your knees and wearing out your pants legs...." Ernie thought there might be a hereafter, but since neither he nor preachers knew what it was he did not feel a need to attend church. He was contemptuous of the "modern, high-power publicity explorers" of the period: "Jesus Christ, do they call that exploring. Why, they had everything they could ask for except women....They ought to get out in the hills here where they have to live on themselves, and can't radio for help every time they get in trouble." As Bob confided, conversations with Ernie seldom ended in "tedious agreement."²⁹

Next morning they reconnoitered with light gear, leaving the constricted canyon and breaking out into "a great, sunny amphitheatre" about 6 miles long and 3 or 4 wide. At its upper end it appeared that Clear River issued from one of three gorges. But when they got there they found the river coming out of a long, hidden valley from the east. Great walls and domes rose 3,000 feet straight up. Pinnacles and jagged gorges embellished the scene. The serrated skyline at the head of the valley was built of summits towering nearly a mile above them, "and over everything the fresh snow, and the blue sky, and the clarity and sparkle of the midwinter atmosphere." As they proceeded up the valley, they found 10 unique gorges, each, according to Bob, worthy of National Monument designation, each a bit of perfection. "Taken all together with the main valley they formed a whole beyond even the characterization of 'perfect'." After other revelations of stunning beauty in this intricate and deeply gashed country, they tracked Clear River's head to a point that was later determined to be well south of the main divide.

Nothing would ever top Bob's first journey with Ernie Johnson up Clear River. It had become a series of transcendent days, each more amazing than the last. Finally, as the sated travelers started back, vistas that would have been great and memorable anyplace else became merely pleasant.³⁰

A break at Ernie's cabin gave them time to refit. Then the men broke trail up Tinayguk River and went over a pass to Flat Creek in the Wild River drainage. The climb over the last ridge to Wild River was the toughest mile of the trip. Breaking trail at 100 yards a clip, Ernie would tramp the snow out once, then back to the sled and out again. Through the trough in the snow Bob would pull the dogs with all his strength, but they still wallowed breast deep in the dry fluff, having to rest every 30 feet. The steep drop-off to the river required roughlocking the sled runners with wrapped chains, and the men braking as hard as they could. When the chains caught on snow-covered snags Bob chopped them out. Once he chopped into the runner itself, prevented from chopping through only by the steel at its center. In his letter Bob reminded the folks at home of his inept axemanship, then described Ernie's reaction: "Indicative of Ernie's rare patience, his only comment was an amazed: 'Jesus Christ!'."³¹

At Spring Creek on Wild Lake, they were greeted by Ludie Hope, an immense Koyukon Indian woman who rushed out of her cabin and embraced Ernie and instantly made Bob feel right at home. After 16 days in the wilds he felt that he had stepped back into civilization.

The Wild Lake camp took them in, with Ernie renewing old friendships and Bob making new ones. Sammy Hope, Ludie's Eskimo husband, showed off their adopted son Henry, half Eskimo, half Japanese. The Hope family had a good time, living by a philosophy summed up by Sammy: "One day's as good as another as long as we got life and enough to eat and a little laughing now and then."³²

R.H. Creecy, "the Koyukuk's only negro" and a Wild Lake miner, was disliked by some, though well liked by others. He told tall tales of his own heroism, which was frowned upon, and housed his dogs in the government shelter cabins while on the trail, a distinctly unsocial act. But Bob found him to be a most interesting person. He had served under Maj. Gen. Nelson Miles in the old frontier army. During the Great War he had been jailed for criticizing Woodrow Wilson, who, Creecy averred, had promised to keep the United States out of the war, then got them into it. When he was called pro-German for making such statements, Creecy replied: "When my country does wrong I'm going to criticize. That's what the real hundred per cent American will do " Though lacking formal education, Creecy had been around and he had an active mind. Among the views he shared with Bob was this one: "We say (concerning the Natives) 'those poor, innocent devils, they don't know enough to develop their resources.' But we come along and squander all our resources till we haven't any left. Now who's the ignorant devils?"³³

Lake Creek miner Gus Wagner had been driven out of Germany in 1904 for ultraradicalism. Though he had lost his family in the process, he thought it better that it had happened so, because otherwise he would probably have died in the war. He had no personal ties and his only interest was gold.

By contrast, Wagner's partner, Hans Leichmann, was filled with intellectual curiosity. He subscribed to German- and English-language publications and read scholarly books. He delighted in classical music. On a later visit to Wiseman he and Bob listened for hours to Bob's symphonic phonograph records. Hans found life at Wild Lake unnatural because most men had no mates. But he would not change with a working man Outside. "You have so much freedom, and you work for yourself".

Both of the Germans were socialists. Ben Sirr, who worked for them, was a bitter antisocialist. He stopped taking two popular publications of the day because "they're too damned socialistic." A small man, constantly talking, he was an unusually active worker at 65. His great talent, which made his various viewpoints academic in the northland, was to find dying people on the trail and save their lives.

After 3 days with this diverse, interesting, and pleasant company, Bob and Ernie headed back to Wiseman via Bettles.³⁴

In the last of his major journeys during the 1930-31 residency, Bob joined Ernie for their earlier planned summer circuit through the Alatna and John river drainages. Ernie rendezvoused with Bob at Wiseman during the July 4 celebrations that attracted everyone from the distant creeks and camps for feasting, games, and endless dancing.

On July 5 the men traveled down the Koyukuk in a whipsawed boat that Ernie had made, powered by a 10-horsepower kicker. As they made their way up the Alatna they mingled with Eskimos who had left Alatna village for their summer fishcamps. Farther upriver, they encountered a team of prospectors.

From a base camp on Kutuk River, they hiked toward the Arctic Divide, past Arrigetch Peaks and on to the high country, to map the intricate drainages that fell away toward arctic seas and the Yukon. At one point, high on a ridge, Bob mused:

When we got a thousand feet above our Unakserak valley camp we left all the mosquitoes behind. It was now between six and eight in the evening, and rays of the sun were so pleasantly warm and peaceful that it was hard to believe there could be confusion and anxiety anywhere in the world.³⁵

On the way back down the Alatna, they found the old site of Rapid City. To Bob the rotting cabins spoke of the horror that certainly gripped unprepared stampeders marooned by early freeze-up, their dreams of quick fortune dead, their isolation from family and accustomed comforts complete, perhaps permanent. And yet, he thought, those who finally made it back "to the desired safe and gregarious life of ordinary America" would surely in later years describe that lonesome winter as life's great adventure.³⁶

The John River, swift and clear, with striking scenery, seems to have appealed more to Bob than the muddy, meandering Alatna. The men and pack dogs ascended in Ernie's boat as far as Hunt Fork, whose headwaters they had glimpsed from the Alatna highlands. Switching to back- and dog-packs, they proceeded up the fork toward the passes across the divide. Following one of the plunging creeks they came upon

... a gorgeous lake, a mile and a half long and fresh as creation. Great mountains rose directly from its shores and disappeared about 3,000 feet above the water into low-lying clouds. How far they jutted above the zone of visibility we could not even guess, but seeing the sweep of the mountains end in oblivion gave an impression of infinite heights beyond the experience of man. Nothing I had ever seen... had given me such a sense of immensity as this virgin lake lying in a great cleft in the surface of the earth with mountain slopes and waterfalls tumbling from beyond the limits of visibility.³⁷

Days more of exploration allowed them to tie together visually and on the map the mountain landmarks of previous experience in a great swath of the central Brooks Range from the North Fork to the Alatna. Then they returned to the Koyukuk and motored up its sunny valley toward Wiseman. At a point a few miles below the town, Ernie allowed as how they could easily make it all the way before dark. But they happily agreed that they should have one last camp—making an even 50 nights on the trail. Bob knew that there was plenty of time to leave this "wilderness," where good people lived the good life, for the outer world of growing misery and danger. They savored Ernie's lamb stew, then sat together in gathering darkness on a log by the fire.

We didn't say very much sitting there. You don't when it is your last camp with a companion who had shared the most perfect summer of a lifetime. We just sat, with a feeling warmer than the crackling fire, exulting in the sharp-edged pattern which the mountain walls cut against the northern sky: listening to the peaceful turmoil of the arctic river with its infinite variation in rhythm and tone: smelling the luxurience of untainted arctic valleys: feeling the wholesome cleanliness of arctic breezes blowing on cheeks and hair.³⁸

The later trips of 1938 and 1939 play again these many themes. Confined mainly to the Doonerak Mountain vicinity of North Fork—with sorties into the limestone canyons of the upper Anaktuvuk River and the headwater creeks of Hammond River—Bob resolved many geographic questions raised by earlier explorations. As before, times of adventure and scrapes with death alternated with moments of ethereal beauty and quiet contemplation.

Like many philosophers before him, Bob Marshall found the wilderness a place of peace and purity, a pattern for the lost Eden of man's origins. He realized that only a minority of the world's teeming millions could or ever would find their happiness through direct experience with primeval nature. Yet he believed that perpetuation of the dream of Eden—"of freshness and remoteness and adventure beyond the paths of men"—benefitted and could be shared by all people.³⁹

Throughout his life Bob associated and corresponded with people who shared his vision of preserved tracts of wilderness. As the destructive pace of the modern, mechanized world increased, he and those like-minded others focused their energies on founding The Wilderness Society to save representative fractions of virgin country from otherwise inexorable invasion and destruction. In time, with the aid of founders and supporters like Robert Sterling Yard, Aldo Leopold, Dorothy Jackson, and Olaus and Margaret Murie, the Society would become a national force, engendering a movement that allied many conservation and other constituent groups, resulting eventually in passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Bob Marshall's contribution to this movement was profound: as benefactor, as strategist and philosopher, as organizer and coordinating correspondent, and as propagator of the faith through his experience-based scholarly and popular writings. During the last decade of his life, the central Brooks Range vitalized his work, provided him the ideal of what wilderness should be and what it should mean to the Nation. Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, established by Congress in 1980 to perpetuate the country's wilderness character, bears the stamp of Marshall's ideal.⁴⁰

With specific reference to Alaska, Bob Marshall became chief spokesman for the Society. He believed that Alaska, as the last great frontier expanse of the Nation, should be protected from the usual developmental intrusions and progressions that had wracked the rest of the country. In 1938, for example, the Society opposed a proposal for a road through Canada to Fairbanks, declaring that easy international road access would upset both the fragile subsistence economy and the biological integrity of the Interior. Bob argued that the wilderness and recreational values of an undeveloped Alaska were worth far more to the Nation than agricultural settlement would be. The marginal environment and the distance to markets made proposals for agricultural development infeasible.⁴¹

In Bob's view, the development of Alaska's resources should be retarded for social as well as economic and biological reasons—especially in northern Alaska, where both Native and pioneer people had evolved lifeways that would be lost in the modern hurly-burly. Promoters and speculators would destroy the last chance for a balanced, nationwide planning outlook, wherein Alaska's highest value would be realized through preservation. Commenting on a report to Congress on Alaska's recreational resources and facilities, Bob argued:

When Alaska recreation is viewed from a national standpoint, it becomes at once obvious that its highest value lies in the pioneer conditions yet prevailing throughout most of the territory. ... [T]hese pioneer values have been largely destroyed in the continental United States. In Alaska alone can the emotional values of the frontier be preserved.⁴²

The 13 months that Bob spent in and around Wiseman in 1930-31 gave him an opportunity to check the impressions of northern civilization gained during his brief visit of 1929. As he had found joy exploring in the Koyukuk wilderness, so did he find joy in exploring the attitudes and behavior of Koyukuk people.

Titles of main parts and chapters of his book, Arctic Village,show an analytic, scientific mind at work. In the Marshall Collection, box after box of file cards show the indefatigable thoroughness of his research. From daily associations with his friends, painstakingly recorded in journals and on note cards, came a rich portrait of a unique community.

He delved into the physical setting and history of the place, the people as individuals and as community, economy, sex, recreation, and philosophy. His study is rich in the anecdotes and perspectives of both Natives and whites, and the communal blending that allowed them to live in basic harmony. It was a world that he captured, a panorama of humankind in exquisite and detailed miniature. In his own characterization, Wiseman exhibited "... the independent, exciting, and friendly life of the Arctic frontier ... 200 miles beyond the Twentieth Century."⁴³

It is tempting to dip deeply into this repository of a world now mainly gone, but the interested reader can do that with a library card, or through a rare book dealer, for unfortunately Arctic Village has not yet been reprinted. Periodically, through the winter of his residency, Bob wrote more of those long letters home, distilling the essence of his Wiseman experience. A few excerpts from these letters and the journals give the spontaneous flavor of Bob's research while the study was in progress; a review of his book conclusion pulls together the larger patterns he saw in Wiseman society.

After setting up in a cabin rented from Martin Slisco, next door to his roadhouse, Bob began his rounds, visiting people individually and in such gathering places as the roadhouse or the store. He was what a modern anthropologist would call a participant-observer in community life. He helped where help was needed, learning by doing. His extensive library and phonograph-record collections became community resources, as did his up-to-date knowledge of the Outside world, known only through publications and fragments of news by most Wiseman residents.

One of the first friends Bob got to know well was George Eaton, whose cabin in Nolan was the scene of long discussions. George had been in Alaska since '98, coming over White Pass in mid-winter. He partnered with Smith Wanamaker and Jess Allen mining a hole on Four Below. One day he shared a poem he had written for a social affair at the pioneers Hall. It was the story of an Alaska miner who made a stake and married a fair woman of Seattle; but he could not settle down and ended up breaking her heart: "The devil's deep voice called me, And damned if I could resist...

The devil was my leader
I obeyed each and every command
And drank, sported and gambled
With the rest of the fallen band."

When Bob praised the poem, especially the part about the devil's deep voice calling, George went on:

That's the part [ex-missionary] Mrs. Pingel didn't like at all, but it's the truest lines in the whole poem. Of course you understand that poem hasn't nothing to do with me really. ... A person has to change things a little to put them in poetry. But I'm atelling you, Bob, Alaska's broken up more lives than any god damn place in the world. There's Pete Dow and George Huey and myself and god almighty only knows how many thousands more in here lost their homes by coming to Alaska.⁴⁴

On an October dog team trip down the Koyukuk with Nolan minor Bobby Jones, Bob met the Stanich brothers, Sam and Obran. Central European immigrants, they mined on Porcupine Creek opposite the deserted site of Coldfoot. Bob's visit provided excuse for a holiday so the brothers could talk with Bob and show him their new hole, their new cabin, their remarkable garden vegetables, the whole establishment that they had made. Bob described them as simple, modest people, but strong, clear-eyed, and justifiably proud of the life they had built in the wilderness of a strange land: "We did this all ourselves ... without anyone else's help."

After 2 days' listening to their life story m working in smelters and mines outside and in Alaska, steadily laboring at the heavy rock work of their Porcupine Creek mine since 1916, building a modest fortune—Bob reflected on what "economic security and freedom can do for men."

Outside I can plainly picture Sam and Obran. With their lack of education and modest amount of intelligence they would be unskilled laborers, half the time unemployed, struggling desperately to merely exist. ... But up here, though they work more laboriously, and go through greater physical hardships than they ever would in industrial civilization ... they live with every comfort they crave (except women) ... and are conscious always of the joy of being their own bosses and guiding their own destinies.⁴⁵

Bob was fascinated by the variety of topics that might be discussed in a random gathering at Wiseman. In one 2-hour session at Slisco's Roadhouse he noted 21 subjects, from the conservation of matter, through Koyukuk weather, to the best way to cook a porcupine (Vaughan Green's recipe: "Place the porcupine and a rock in a kettle of water and boil. When the rock gets tender enough to stick a fork in it throw out the porcupine and eat the rock.").

Bob delighted in copying verbatim the utterances of the old miners, "...most of them cut off from the main stream of civilization for 30 or more years":

Billie Gilbert (referring to some hair-splitting)—"That's a distinction without a difference." Harry Foley—"Worry never made me gray-haired. It was early piety, getting down on my knees in church too much." Harry (in another vein)—"It's nice to sit on the sidelines and look at life as it goes by and wonder what it's all about." ...

Of their life in here opinions vary. Martin Slisco says: "Gold mining is the cleanest living you can make. You're not robbing anyone or hurting anyone to get it; you're just taking it clean from nature."

Billie Gilbert ... is less enthusiastic. "Of course everybody in here has some idiosyncrasies. They wouldn't be in here if they were normal. Outside at least a person has a chance to see something and hear something and learn something even if they're not making any money."

Albert Ness is unqualifiedly enthusiastic. "I have absolutely no desire to go outside. In here we have no police, no press, no church, no priests, no tenements, no big business men, no crimes or any of the other things with which they're cursed outside."

The prevalence of socialists in Wiseman astounded Bob. Martin Slisco and Carl Frank thought the capitalists ought to be beaten or hanged. Pete Radicevitch stated: "We won't get socialism until people are hungry. Their minds aren't in their heads; they're in their stomachs." Militarism was another sore subject. Many immigrants had fled Europe to escape conscription. One of these, Pete Radicevitch, who had served one stint in the Serbian army, had this to say:

You hitch up a horse to a wagon and put bridle on him and whip him to drive him where you want him to go, it's just the same as you put man in army. The rulers, they get the poor producer in the army to kill himself and they wear the nice uniform and roll the mustaches.

Religion came up often, usually resulting in spirited debates. On one occasion Ace Wilcox cited the spirits of animals that taught them "where to find trails which haven't been used for years." In the same way, the spirits of men transferred their knowledge to new generations. This explained human progress and the phenomenon of geniuses like Thomas Edison, who "must have gotten the spirit from many men." Martin Slisco, scarcely able to read and write, rebutted Wilcox: "No, I tell you how I figure it. When you die you dead and nothing left only a little dust, maybe a pipeful perhaps." When Ace countered with the notion of some psychic spirit, Martin replied:

You believe that craziness? It's like that Bill Waah who used to be in here. He got a letter from his wife that she had a kid and he hadn't seen her in five years. But he tell everybody he have dream nine months before that he sleeping with wife and baby must have been born that way by dream. She have two more kids while he gone and he think they born too because he have dream.⁴⁶

From his first contact with Wiseman people, Bob had been impressed with their sharp minds. He attributed this partly to voracious reading of magazines and books during the long winters, and partly to the selection process in a difficult environment where intelligence and foresight were essential to survival. His administration of Stanford-Binet intelligence tests to a cross-section of age and racial groups confirmed the early impressions. In every group, the tests registered a majority of above-average results. Children of Native and mixed parentage were all above normal in their attainments. While attempting to find the limits of one bright Native child, Harry Jonas, Bob pushed too hard on a vocabulary test. Harry's reproach demonstrates a clever mind: "You do something wrong to me, you make me don't know."⁴⁷

Bob's thumbnail descriptions of people and events enliven his scholarly efforts. At a roadhouse dance he jotted down appearances and actions. The men, clad in normal working clothes, usually chose the records: but occasionally a woman, in neat but not fancy dress, would play a special favorite. Men and women grouped separately while waiting for a dance. Given the larger numbers of men in the crowd, the women danced almost constantly throughout the night. Kobuk Mary, Tishu's mother, was at the time attending first grade, along with her granddaughter, little Mary.

At the age of 48, Mary, "like most Eskimo women of that age... looks to be 80."

Her skin is dry and parchmentlike, she has blue tattoo marks allover her chin. But she is light as a feather on her feet, dances superbly, has a delicate figure something like Peggy Rankin and indeed when I dance Look For the Silver Lining with her I might think it was Peggy if I had more imagination and didn't look down at her.

Her daughter, Tishu Ulen, is a remarkable girl. She is strong as an ox and once in a single day carried 75 pounds for 33 miles over a snowy trail. But she is as quiet and refined as she is strong ...

Over here is Mamie Green, shouting some pert remark across the floor to one of the men. She is a contemporary of Tishu's, both are about 22. At the age of 16 she was married to Vaughan Green, deputy U.S. Marshal for the district. He was 47. Since then one of the favorite biennial pasttimes of the Wisemanites has been guessing who might be the father of her child. This has happened three times so far and the only thing which seems certain is that Vaughan has been the father of none of them. But he cheerfully lives the fiction that he has and everybody is happy, most of all Mamie....She dances and flirts better than any woman in camp and might fairly be considered the reigning belle of Wiseman.

But not for much longer. Little Lucy Jonas is coming right along. She is only 14 now but in a couple of years she will have the requisite poise and maturity. ... She is in the fifth grade in school and doing remarkably well considering that six years ago when she came over from the Arctic Ocean she couldn't speak a word of English. In winter she lives luxuriously in the Jonas Igloo, built of poles and mud and branches, in summer less elegantly beside some moose which her father has shot, the whole family establishing home wherever the animal expires. Lucy's Mamma, Mrs. Jonas or Kal-habuk as she is called in Eskimo, is built along the lines of a cider jug. She looks young for an Eskimo of 33, probably because she has preferred semi-starvation to work. Despite the loss of one eye she is quite good-looking. Considering that she was 27 when she first came among white men she has picked up their dances remarkably well.

That homely little white woman over there is Mrs. Pingel. She dances about as you would expect from an ex-missionary of 63 who took up dancing at the age of 50.

Mrs. Wheeler, the other white woman, is a grandma. She has one paralyzed leg but she drags it gamely through every dance. She says when she can't dance any more she will be ready to die. ... She is one of the kindest women in the world, has given the old woman-starved miners of the Koyukuk just the sympathy they needed and has been almost like a mother to the eskimo girls just starting to raise families. ...

Knute Ellingson, who has fallen in love with practically every woman, native and white, who has been in the Koyukuk during the past 31 years, had this to say about her in comparison with Mrs. Pingel. "She's done more for this camp than any woman who's ever been here. To hell with this 'come to Jesus' stuff.⁴⁸

Bob worked hard at learning the Kobuk Eskimo dialect to increase his rapport with Wiseman's Natives. "In this language just the slightest mispronunciation may have disastrous effects on your meaning."

For example, Kobuk Mary who has been one of my three chief teachers, had a cold in the eyes. I knew that Con-no-wit-bit meant, "how are you feeling" and I got from one of my other teachers, Harry Snowden, that e-dik meant "eyes." So very proudly I greeted old Mary one morning with con-no-wit-bit e-tik, unconsciously substituting a "t" for a "d". To my chagrin Mary responded with most raucous laughter and told me not to let Harry teach me any more bad words. I finally discovered what my mistake was, that e-tik in king's English (which assuredly wasn't the English used in explaining my error) means "rectum" and that I had gone up to Mary and asked: "How do you feel in the rectum."⁴⁹

On Election Day, which was an excuse for holiday and hilarity, miners drifted in from the far camps to vote on who should be their territorial delegate to the U.S. Congress. Bob stood by the Pioneer Hall voting booth and recorded the good-natured banter between proponents of Republican James Wickersham and Democrat George Grigsby. Nobody took the election too seriously, as these random remarks indicate:

It's a sure bet anyway that neither of them cares what happens to us.

Whatever way the vote goes, things will be just the same as ever on the Koyukuk when it's all over and the world will keep turning once in 24 hours.

All these politicians have the same motto: follow me and you'll wear diamonds, otherwise I'll put you in jail.

Whichever one's elected, we know both of them ought to be in jail.⁵⁰

Even today, as regards government and its agents, one may hear similar sentiments expressed on the Koyukuk —and most other parts of bush Alaska!

In the Koyukuk camp, far from paternalistic arms of government, the community solved its own problems, as this passage from Bob's letter attests:

After the votes were counted there was a meeting of Igloo No.8, Pioneers of Alaska. This is the one fraternal order of the community but unlike most organizations of that sort it is almost completely democratic. Anybody who came to Alaska prior to January 1, 1906 can join. There are no secrets and no member is ever favored, no non-member ever discriminated against for that reason. All its property is shared by the whole community, members and non-members alike. This includes a hall where the biggest dances are staged, a large phonograph, a library and a fund for taking care of the sick who are broke. Since there is no civil organization in the community the Pioneers function as a voluntary cooperative for performing many of the tasks usually done by the local government. They supervised the building of the airplane field, raised funds to buy a wireless station, protested to the Post Office Department on the abominable mail service. It was the result of this latter action which principally occupied this meeting which I was invited to attend. Also to my surprise they elected me as an honorary member.⁵¹

Bob's reaching out to the Native people of Wiseman was warmly reciprocated. His family letter of January 27, 1931, is devoted exclusively to his Eskimo and Indian friends. It is a priceless and sensitive documentation of lives, attitudes, and character, centering on the families of Big Jim, Big Charlie, and Oxadak [Aqsiataaq]. For this reason it is included in its entirety as an interlude in this chapter.

*****

ROBERT MARSHALL
WISEMAN
ALASKA

January 27, 1931.

I.

Dear Family et al:

Since nothing very thrilling has happened during January, other than the return of the sun after an absence of a month, I shall devote this letter to making you better acquainted with some of my Eskimo friends.

Of course the place to begin is at the cabin of Big Jim and Nakuchluk, for this is the center, social, spiritual, and economic, of the native population of Wiseman. I think the economic is most important, for I can't see any other sufficient reason for Jim's immense prestige among the natives here, which makes most of them look up to him for leadership in all the important problems which confront them. He is not a medicine man: there are none in Wiseman. He is not the oldest native here: that superlative belongs to Oxadak. He is not the best musher: that honor goes to Riley. He is not the ablest hunter: Harry Snowden beats him in that respect. And of course Big Charlie and Jonas have the pretty daughters. But one thing Jim always has possessed has been an amazing amount of energy which has sent him out to the trap lines, out on the hunt, down the river hauling freight, when the other natives were idling around town. In addition, his word has always been scrupulously kept, so that the store has given him large credits. Consequently, Jim has invariably had more food, more worldly wealth in general than any of the other natives. With the prevalent Eskimo custom of potlatching, dividing up whenever one has more than the others, Big Jim has been the principal support of the entire Eskimo community. Many winters Jonas, who is perhaps the laziest man in the world, has fed his whole family of six, principally on the meat, which Big Jim has shot. In addition to this economic prestige Jim is wise, kind, and without favoritism, so it is quite natural that he should be the leader, and his large, clean cabin the communal center of the Eskimos of Wiseman.

Perhaps some night, after supper and half an hour of chewing the rag around the roadhouse, I decide to pay Big Jim a visit. So I start across the town. First, down the main street, across the Wiseman Creek bridge, with yellow light pouring out on the snow from a couple of cabins to my right, and moonlight flooding the whole frozen valley of the river to my left. Then at the store I turn and cut diagonally back from the river, passing more snowcovered cabins with cheery lamplight in the windows, and also several deserted ones, looking even by moonlight very black and cold. All the while the bright waves of the aurora flicker in the sky overhead, and the stars twinkle in the thirty below air like shuttering magnesium powder.

I open the door to Jim's cache, which serves for the storage of all non-perishables as well as for a vestibule, and then open the inner door and enter the house. Jim smiles cordially and says a hearty Konnowitbitch (how are you?), and of course I reply Nakurunga (I am fine). Nakuchluk laughs, says Alapas (it's cold), and I say Alapas apie apie (it's too cold), and then everybody laughs and they all continue with what they were talking about when I entered.

My Eskimo vocabulary is still so limited (only about 700 words) that it is quite an effort to follow the conversation at all, and try as I will, I continually lose the train of thought altogether. So I will take the easier course and describe what I observe after I repose myself on the floor, perhaps beside Cupuk.

At one end of the single room of the large cabin, which measures 14 x 32 feet, all the women are seated on the floor, Nakuch1uk is working on some skins, scraping them thin with an amazing collection of homemade instruments, some iron, some bone, some obsidian. She sits with her legs straight out in front of her, her body bent forward, her head bowed over the skin on which she is working. She is a little, dried up old woman, wrinkles all over her face, but with the sweetest childish smile. All the while she works she hums, except when she breaks into the conversation, which is often.

Beside her, smoking an 18-inch long pipe, with legs also straight in front of her, sits old Utoyak, most elderly woman in camp. She is probably about 70. She is very quiet, seldom smiles, seldom even sings. Although she has lived intermittently among the Whites for a dozen years I have never heard her speak even one word of English. I think she is entering dotage, and I imagine that her mind strays most the time over the windswept tundra to the north where she wandered for more than half a century. She is the most tattooed woman in camp, with five blue lines running from her lower lip to the tip of her chin, whereas her closest rival, Nakuchluk, has only got three to beautify this part of her face.

Beyond Utoyak sits Kalhabuk, youthful mother of four strapping Jonas children, and wife of the Lazy Jonas. She is the most powerful woman I have ever known. When the store burned down four years ago, and all the people around carried out everything they could in the few minutes before they were driven out, Kalhabuk emerged several times with an hundred pound sack of flour on her shoulder and a fifty pound sack under one arm. I am sure she could lick three out of four men in Wiseman in a fight. But the test could never come off, because she is the most placid of mortals, and takes everything as it comes along in the greatest good humor, including Jonas' indolence. If you ask her why she doesn't make him work she replies vaguely: "Oh, that's all right." She exerts almost no parental authority over her children. She is simply crazy over her daughter Lucy, and would, I believe, sacrifice almost anything to make her happy. She sits there with a cynical smile on her face, unless she is laughing or yawning, and peacefully smokes her pipe.

Between me and Kalhabuk sits Cupuk. She is about 26. She married Louis Sackett, a native from Alatna, who soon after ditched her and left for the Kobuk. Her face is homely, her back deformed, her temper rather fiery, her I.Q. low, so the poor girl has had rather a hard time picking up another man. Externally she keeps up a jolly, lively appearance, and as I sit beside her she jokes, and nudges me, and whispers about licentious dreams, but I know that underneath she is terribly depressed.

In the center of the room, facing the women, Big Jim, Oxadak, and Arctic Johnie sit on chairs. Big Jim is about 65. He has closely cropped gray hair, bright eyes, a protruding jaw with a little stubble on it. On either side of his mouth are two holes into which he used to insert ivory ornaments for the dance. One hole has all closed up, but you can observe soup oozing through the other when he eats. His clearly enunciated voice is always the dominant one in the conversation. His wrinkled forehead and a worried look in his eyes make you feel he must have known great tragedy, until he smiles when you forget everything except his sincere geniality.

Oxadak is a couple of years older. He is Utoyak's husband. He speaks hardly any English either, but is much jollier than his wife. He has a deep, base voice, in striking contrast to the high pitched voices of the other Eskimos. Arctic Johnie, his adopted son, is a surly looking native of perhaps 35 years. He seems solemn and morose, and this impression is accentuated by his very dark skin, the other Eskimos here being as light as dark complexioned Whites. He dresses exquisitely, mostly in furs, and seems to take great pride in his personal appearance. About ten years ago he brought down his wife, Louise, from the Arctic and she refused to go back with him. This November he came in with his wife, Annie.

I sit beside Cupuk and watch them all: Big Jim and Oxadak talking in loud, guttural voices together; Nakuchluk working; Utoyak smoking her pipe; Kalhabuk smiling across at me; Cupuk whispering about the dream she had last night; all women, now chattering together, now singing in a low voice, now breaking into the conversation of the men. Very frequently everybody in the room rocks with laughter. Sometimes Big Jim tells me in English what the joke was about. Here is one typical story, in the exact words which he used to explain it, which caused everybody to roar, made Big Jim pretty nearly break down laughing before he could finish it, and almost compelled Nakuchluk to choke. Remember that him, as the Eskimos use it, means it as well as him.

"Long time ago, me young man, six men go hunt. Take him along fish, take him along seal oil, pack them over. Pretty soon no more grub, all gone, he no last long, somebody get him little bit of flour from ship. No steamboat. Ship.

"Make camp, old man get him over close to fire all time, no one else get close. Take off parky, all time close fire. Turn one side to fire, turn other side to fire, no keep him warm. Young man fix it up, mix him flour in frying pan, no grease in it, put him on fire. Says, 'Here, old man. You all time too close fire, you hold him pan.' Old man says he no savvy make hot cake. Young fellow give it to him right away, says: 'You hold it.'

"Pretty soon hot cake burn him on bottom. Young fellow says: 'You turn him. Move him.' Hot cake no cook him on top at all. Old man shake him little bit higher, little more up, up, up, up, up above him head, (all the while Jim talks his whole attention is concentrated in acting out what he is telling, the old man shaking the frying pan and gradually raising it until it is high above his head, and at the same time nervously uncertain of how he should flap the hot cake over) pretty soon throw him up, pretty soon (hot cake) fall, hit him over head, old man turn head round, pretty soon he (hot cake) roll him down back of head. Hot cake stick him there on neck behind, no parky, no nothing. Everybody laugh then, old man roll down in snow, take him out. Old man no mad, he laugh too."

Stories like this, of funny or ridiculous experiences, both of themselves and their friends, form one of their favorite subjects of conversation. Hunting experiences, and especially current discussions of where the game is now are of special interest. So too are geographical discussions, how the rivers fork, where the passes lie, where the niggerheads [tussocks] are especially bad. But the favorite topic of all seems to be gossip, for they are for the most part very catty, and always are down on at least one of their number about whom they can't make mean enough remarks.

Often late in the evening Jim will bring in the bass drum, while Oxadak and Johnie will take the little ones, and then everyone joins in singing until the rafters fairly ring to the stirring music of Tunga Chunga and AYah Yah E Yah.

II.

When Big Jim was still a young man in his native Sellawik country along Kotzebue sound, just north of the Bering Straits, he fell under the influence of the Missionaries. Their teachings became the dominant force in his life. All the complexities of nature, all the perplexity of how the infinitely varied world he knew came to be, all the fear provoking superstitions, were simply resolved in a perfect faith that a beneficient God, not so different in character than Jim himself only infinitely greater, had created the universe for the happiness of mankind. In a severe life in which young friends were continually being carried violently to death, in which beloved parents died and apparently rotted away, it was very consoling to learn that after death everybody would be reunited in an existence infinitely happier than that on earth. "We know nothing about all this, me no know how earth come, till me learn God business. Now me learn God business, everything fine."

But Jim's religion, which eases his mind of worries, and teaches him to live a life which sincerely strives to follow the admonitions of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, is far from a puritanical one. He decries the missions which forbid the natives to dance. He likes to see people happy all the time. He drinks when he can get something, though unlike almost all the other drinking natives, he almost never gets drunk. He smokes, dances, sings, has sexual intercourse, and isn't ashamed of any of them. He doesn't even resent his wife going to bed with whomever she wills when he is away. These liberal beliefs he claims to owe to the famous Archdeacon Stuck (first climber of Mount McKinley). I imagine if Jim were asked to name the three greatest people in the history of the world he would enumerate God, Jesus and Archdeacon Stuck.

Jim's morning program when he is out in the hills is as follows: "Just get up, pray first and sing little bit. He no forget anything you pray him, God. Some people forget him pray, no help him God. White people, native people, all same (to) God. All of us just like brothers. Then me build him fire. Pretty soon sing some more, singing good morning, sing pretty hard, open him lung, feel pretty good. Me never sick, sing hard morning. Feel fine. Nakuchluk sing too."

He is entirely fearless of any of the many dangers of the North. He is so exceedingly competent that despite sixty years of wandering in the wilderness he has never seriously frozen himself, never even suffered a single major injury. About five years ago he killed a bear near Coldfoot with an axe. When I asked him if he wasn't scared he replied: "Dogs scared, me no scared. Me scared of bear, he kill me all right. Me no scared, he no kill me."

Although Jim is no medicine man, he has many practical home remedies. Here is his attitude toward boils.

"I see him boiling business sickness lots. He bust, he no all come out, he grow again. You cut him, you no clean him good, bime by he come back again. You keep him rotten all time, put on rag, put on soap, chew up sinew, put him on, keep him warm with cotton, then pretty soon he get very rotten, you clean him good knife then, no more come out. Old man, me father and me father's father all teach him that. Call him boiling business."

Which in other words simply means, wait until the boil is ripe before lancing.

Both Jim and Nakuchluk have taken the kindest interest imaginable in me. Jim says: "You know me boy, Johnie? You all same me boy." And Nakuchluk says: "Me be your mamma." So they have done the loveliest sort of unexpected things, brought me old trinkets which they took from the Arctic, made fancy gloves and fur boots for me, shown me how to make fire without matches. Especially Jim has delighted in teaching me how to talk, how to sing, how to dance in Kobuk fashion. He is a severe teacher in that he insists that what he teaches be learned exactly right. He may take [a] few minutes to get me to say a single word just correctly. He makes me watch his lips, shows me where his tongue is placed for each sound. If I make the slightest mistake he shakes his head and says: "No good. No good at all." But when I get it right he beams allover, as if he'd just gotten a silver fox in his trap, and he encourages me to further effort with his happy "auriga!" He had a terrible job teaching me to dance, my rhythmical sense being so poorly developed, but he would encourage me with remarks like: "Learn to sing, dance together just like telegraph. Hard work at first. Pretty soon you learn him, no more hard work, fun all time."

III.

Ike Spinks told me that I must be sure to get the story from Nakuchluk of how Peluk, her first husband, disappeared. Ike said the only way to get it really right was to wait until Big Jim was gone some night, and then go to bed with the old woman. I didn't think it was necessary to adopt such heroic measures, but I did think she might be less inhibited in telling her tale if Jim wasn't around, so I came over one evening when Jim was off to the Mosquito Fork. This is the story I got, about one quarter from her Eskimo, about one half from her English, and about [one] quarter from Cupuk's excellent translations.

The whole trouble commenced one spring, some thirty-three years ago, when an unknown Eskimo, encamped on the tundra along the Arctic Coast, heaved a stone at his dogs who were barking. Now it chanced that the trajectory of this missile, instead of carrying it to the ribs of one of the raucous canines, collided with the skull of a passing Eskimo named Mukollik. Mukollik dropped unconscious to the ground, and his loving wife, Missonik, rushed posthaste to Peluk, who was a great Medicine man.

Please do not think I am exaggerating his prominence. I will quote you one little example of his miraculous ability, just as his own wife Nakuchluk told me about it, to prove to you his potency. "Man sick. Peluk put big bugs on him, big bugs. Pretty soon he take them off, swallow them himself, bime by vomit them up. Man get all better again, pretty soon he all well."

As soon as Peluk saw Mukollik he realized his case was very grave. But extraordinary conditions may sometimes be cured by extraordinary measures, so he prescribed this unusual treatment, that he, Peluk, should have sexual intercourse with Mukollik's wife. Nevertheless, Mukollik died.

Now Tunach, the devil, was exceedingly wrath for he did not approve of adultery with the prospective widow as a treatment for a fractured skull. So he gave Peluk to understand that he had better beware. Then Peluk explained to Nakuchluk that Tunach would surely get him if she ever let Peluk get out of her sight, that to circumvent Tunach she must always follow Peluk wherever he went. Peluk also told Nakuchluk that if Tunach ever did capture him he would try his best to get back, but that she must never allow any men to live with her or he could not return.

In the autumn of that year Peluk and Nakuchluk headed for the Arctic divide to try their luck on the Koyukuk. They crossed over at the head of John River, and food having run short, spent some time there snaring rabbits and ptarmigan. One day they spied some caribou on the hillside a short distance above them. This was rare luck, and Peluk hastened to get his gun. He left Nakuchluk to attend to the snares, but cautioned her to keep an eye on him constantly.

She watched him mount the hill, but as he approached the caribou they started to walk away. Pretty soon they disappeared behind a little hummock. He followed them, and she continued working on her snares, expecting him to reappear at any moment. But he didn't. The short December day drew to a close and still no Peluk. She spent a sleepless night in their skin shelter, and at first daylight started out to hunt for him. But the wind had blown during the night, and Peluk's tracks were all covered over, so she saw not the faintest trace of him. The next day she set out again, looking for him, and the next day, and the next. But all in vain. Peluk had vanished as completely as the flowers of summer.

A few days later a couple of hunters from the Arctic passed by her camp. They joined her in the hunt, and slept that night in her shelter. Next morning when they went outside they saw Peluk's fresh snowshoe tracks coming almost to the shelter, and then abruptly ending. There were no back tracks. Tunach had snatched him again when he was almost to safety.

The hunters wanted her to come along with them, but she refused to go. Maybe she could still find Peluk. Maybe he would try to come back again. She would stay there without a gun, living on what ptarmigan and rabbits she could snare, and hunt for Peluk every day.

"Me look round, me look round lot, me look round every day, me no find him. Me no find him at all nothing. Every morning, me wake up, me go outside, put him ear on snow, listen, maybe me hear him come. Him no come. Me hear nothing, me hear nothing, only wind, only wolf howl, only ice break him. Me snare few ptarmigan, no more rabbit. Dog die, no nuff ptarmigan (for) me (and) dog. Me get pretty poor, pretty near me die too. Bime by sun come up, pretty soon lots people come along. Me pretty glad, me so glad me forget Peluk."

Of course they came into her shelter, men and women both, and she told them the story of her misfortunes. While they were talking they heard a sound outside, like the wind, and saw a man's shadow on the snow.

"'Ha! Peluk come home!' everybody say. Me run out, look, nobody, just black shadow. Bime by me look again, no shadow at all, nothing. Me never see Peluk again, me never see him no more."

IV.

One night when I was over alone with Big Jim, learning to sing, there was a frenzied knocking at the door. Jim opened it, and there were Bessie and Jennie, almost choked with crying.

"My Charlie dying," Bessie wailed. "He coughed up blood, he's bleeding from the lungs, come quick."

Then she and Jennie started back on the run to their tiny cabin, about 50 yards away, and Jim and I followed. One the way, Jim made a very practical division of labor. He said: "Me make praying business, you give him medicine."

And so it was arranged. When we got inside the cabin Jim immediately flopped down on his knees, and, with bowed head, commenced an earnest prayer for Charlie's recovery. Charlie was sitting at the edge of his bed, bent over an old butter can which was used as a cuspidor, and now and then spitting out a little blood. It was a slight hemorrhage, and on the spur of the moment I could think of no medicine to give him except to have him lie down, as quietly as possible, and to loosen everything tight about his clothing, which was almost nothing. When these simple operations were completed I joined Jim on the floor, and helped with the "Amen" in which Jennie also joined, but Bessie shook so with sobbing she could not enunciate a sound.

I have never seen such a picture of complete, woebegone misery as Bessie presented. You would have thought she was watching her husband and daughter being burned at the stake. No, it was worse than that, for in such an event she would perhaps have mercifully fainted. Now all she could do was stand and howl and shake, with a look like a woman of ninety on a face which chronologically was only 33 years old. After a while, when the bleeding had stopped, she managed to splutter out a few phrases.

"Oh, my poor Charlie. —— Why did I ever come to Wiseman. —— If Charlie dies I rather be dead. —— That's how I lost my two little children already. Marie was sitting right beside me sewing. All of a sudden she started choking. —— Whole lot of blood come up, just like this. —— In a few minutes she was dead. —— I wish I was never born. —— I wish I was in Bettles. Oh, my poor, poor Charlie. ——

Then she would lay her head on Charlie's chest and just sob again, until I would have to impress on her that it was essential that Charlie be kept quiet.

Meanwhile Charlie took the whole matter with stoical indifference. He wasn't the least bit excited about the blood, assured Bessie that he felt a whole lot better since he had coughed it up, that the cold which had been bothering him for two months would now be cured in no time. He said to me, with philosophical resignation: "Funny thing, my Bessie. Me get sick, anyone get sick, she act just like crazy. She love me too much, I guess. Funny thing."

And Bessie, with great heaving of her breasts, sobbed out: "I can't help it."

V.

After that evening I came on exceptionally intimate terms with the Suckiks, as they call themselves for that is Big Charlie's Eskimo name, and the last name which the whole family has adopted. Bit by bit, I have picked up both their biography and their philosophy.

Big Charlie was a native of the Kobuk country, where as a boy he grew up largely on caribou, seal oil, berries, and fish. In 1898, when he was sixteen, he and his father set out on an all summer's hunt across the Endicott Range to the Koyukuk. It was here that they met the first white men they had ever seen. I will let Charlie tell the story.

"First white man I ever saw down below Bettles, '98. Me and old man come over from Kobuk down head of John River. We see white thing like smoke against hill, and we go see what it is. Pretty soon we see man, look different any man I ever see. He say: 'Hello I don't even savvy hello. He give me tobacco, and I smoke that fine. Pretty soon hemotion like this (making beckoning motion). Then me and old man follow. Then he walk a little ways and motion again, and we follow some more. Pretty soon I says to old man: 'Maybe he want us to go with him.'

"Then we follow him, and pretty soon we see big boat in slough. We never see anything like that, white smoke coming out and everything, and we scared. But he go on board over gangplank, and pretty soon he go down in cabin, and come out with tobacco, and throw it at us. We know that, and when he motion some more we think he all right, so we come on over gangplank. Then he take us down to cabin and make motion, and long time we no savvy nothing. But then old man says to me: 'Maybe he wants us fetch him caribou skins, he give us tobacco.'

"Then he take us to other cabin, and we set down at table. I never see him table before. Funny thing. Then man come in and bring all sort of grub, set him on table. I know nothing about that sort of grub. I don't know nothing about use him fork, I no savvy plate. I no know which way to hold knife and fork. Pretty soon I eat bread and tea, I know that all right. Pretty soon white man put something yellow on bread. Pretty soon I swallow it, pretty soon it go down just like strong whisky. I feel it go all the way down to stomach, it burn like fire in stomach. My papa all scared, he try doctor me up this way with hands, blow on me. Pretty soon I all better.

"Stay four days, pretty soon I like white man's gun. He show me bullets, 30-30, and I think he too small to kill anything with. I think his gun bum, no good for nothing.

"Us fellows no savvy white language for long time. Pretty soon we find native boy, he savvy quickly, he tell us few words. Then we know few words, pretty soon we learn real quick."

The year before Charlie came over from the Arctic, Bessie was born somewhere down the river near the mouth of the South Fork. Her people were Koyukuk Indians, and she had the childhood which most Koyukuk girls must undergo of terribly hard labor before she was ten years old, packing huge loads of wood, working on the gee-pole, curing the meat which the men cooked. I have heard the life of the Koyukuk girls described by a white man who has lived a great deal among that race "as part way between how we treat our children and our dogs, but a whole lot nearer the dogs."

When she was still a tiny baby her father, Big William, had taken sympathy on his brother, Big Betas, who had just lost his only child, and had given Bessie to him and his wife to raise. At eleven she went to work at the roadhouse in Bettles, and for five years she stayed there, waiting on tables, helping in the kitchen, dancing all night long, drinking heavily, smoking, giving the men who stopped there frequent sexual gratification. She learned there, both the white language and the white customs.

Meanwhile Big Charlie had prospered exceedingly well in the Koyukuk. He was strong, energetic, intelligent, lucky, and made good money, mining in the summer; trapping, hunting, and freighting in the winter. He was scrupulously honest, and the old Northern Commercial Company often trusted him with the transportation of several thousand dollars in gold. At one time he had over $2,000 deposited at the Northern Commercial store, which was something absolutely unprecedented among the natives. He made his home in Bettles, living right next door to Bessie's home.

In the spring of 1913, shortly after the breakup, Charlie was starting out for a summer up the John River. As he was about to shove his boat off, Bessie came down to say goodbye. She had liked him very well for years, had come to think of him as a big brother, in fact called him brother. When she came down this morning Charlie said jokingly: "Don't you want to come along with me up John River?"

"Sure", she said instantly. She went right home to get their things, and left with him that day. They must have spent a very happy summer together, judging by their frequent fond recollections of little incidents. They returned in the autumn by way of the North Fork and Wiseman, where they were officially married in the white manner.

During the next four years they wandered allover, mining, hunting, trapping. Three children were born to them, and they were very happy. But in the spring of 1919 all of their children developed severe colds, and the oldest and youngest died within a few weeks.

This broke them up completely. For weeks they did nothing but bemoan their fate. They never again seemed to develop their old energy. Thereafter, Charlie never would do any work at all as long as there was something left to eat in the house, and he kept putting off things so consistently that the other natives got to nicknaming him Tomorrow Charlie. Bessie, who can make the most beautiful beaded moccasins, rarely indulged her art, except under the pressure of necessity, and spent most of her time dancing, loving Charlie, and fondling Jennie, the one child left her.

Today time has worn off much of their misery, and they are generally an exceedingly jolly family. They are continually joshing you, and they all have a hearty laugh. But they still remain as lazy as ever, making their living just as much as possible from handouts which the whites, who are mostly very fond of them, frequently give.

They are both passionately devoted to Jennie, who is 14-1/2 years old, and exceedingly good looking. Bessie shows me the magnificent bead work she can already do, Charlie points with pride to some drawings she has made. Both stress what a very good girl she is. Both delight in telling stories of her precocious remarks, just like any white parents. For example, when she was five she had asked her papa: "What make ptarmigans so wild? Do you think maybe little mice chase them all the time?"

Charlie asked amazedly: "Who told you that?"

To which Jennie replied saucily: "Don't ask too much question."

After nine years they still are made all happy, just by recounting that tale.

As I have said, they love to joke. Here is a typical conversation.

Bessie—This is some old shack. Look at the floor there.

Bob—Don't you get your feet all full of slivers when you get up in the morning?

Bessie—Sure, my big toes are just full of them. That's why I don't come up to dance anymore.

Bob (advancing with open knife)—Take off those moccasins and I'll amputate your big toes. Then you can dance again.

Bessie—You don't get fresh to me or I'll burn your whiskers off.

Jennie—"Where's the coal oil, Mom.

Bessie—That's right, we sprinkle a little coal oil on them, touch a match, and zing, it goes.

Meanwhile Charlie sits and chuckles, and the rest of us all laugh.

Although they are on good terms with all the natives of Wiseman, they and Harry Snowden alone remain aloof from the potlatch, and the custom of keeping continual open house. "I feel all sick if I can't be alone some time," Bessie says.

In religion they are even more unique, for they are the only ones who don't go to the prayer meetings which Jim conducts periodically. Both Charlie and Bessie are agnostics. When you ask Bessie what she thinks will happen after she dies, she just shrugs her shoulders. Charlie is a little more verbose on the subject, though no more plain.

"Long time ago, before you're born from mamma, you don't know. Then you born from mamma, you do know. After you dead pretty hard guess what happen. You guess, I guess, all same. All us fellows know, he dead and buried and leave him there. All I know, I want to have as much good time I can when I live, no worry about when I dead."

He is very tolerant on the subject of belief.

"Long time ago, even before white man come, native have story spirit leave body, go other place. Good thing to believe, I guess. Got to believe something. Belief don't hurt nobody."

As for himself: "I no believe nothing I no see. Other natives, they see devils and spirits and all sorts of people that really aren't real. I no see nothing ever. Maybe so, but I no believe it."

About the relation of man and wife they both talk frequently. Charlie says: "Too bad husband, wife can't always die together." Subjectively, he remarked: "My Bessie, me, just like two kids together. Have good time together all the time, never fight."

Bessie's comment on him was: "I think Charlie's the most wonderful man in the world. He's always good natured, never gets angry about anything. I'm not that way at all. I tell person just what I think of him, fly right off the handle."

One day, when Charlie was still in bed, Martin and I dropped in for a visit. Bessie was combing her heavy, black hair, which reached to her waist.

"Are you a barber?" she asked Martin, laughing.

"Gee whiz, you ain't going to cut your hair. You look fine as it is."

Bessie laughed some more.

"Don't worry, Martin," she said, "I'm not that crazy yet. There's no sense in it."

"That's the way I feel about it. You're real, old fashioned woman that way, and the way you love Charlie."

"Sure, I'm old fashioned woman. If you no love husband, what's use to have husband at all."

"Doesn't that make you jealous, loving him so?"

"Of course! The two got to go together. Where you has no jealousy, you can't has any love."

Charlie doesn't believe in the marriages so prevalent in Wiseman, of a man in the late thirties or forties wedding a girl in her early teens. "Old Man, young girl marry, no good. He wants sleep all time, she wants dance all time, they can't be happy that way. Young man, young girl marry, they have same laughs together, same jokes, same troubles, same happy, same everything, then they get along fine all the time."

His advice on courtship was this: "Me tell you Martin, any time you like him girl, you no go after him. No good, that kind of girl for man. You want him girl, him go after you, him all right, that kind. Long time ago me young boy, me savvy girls plenty."

He believes in the essential sameness of the human race, both as regards place and time. "Allover just the same: some people fine, some people no good, some people just like dog, no heart at all. Native, White, Arctic, Koyukuk, Yukon, Outside, all over, all the same. Long time ago, maybe one man meet other man in woods, kill him with bow and arrow, long time ago. Today some man all same, only maybe they scared to kill because Marshal arrest them, otherwise all same."

Their attitude toward child education is frequently discussed. It can be summed up in one short remark of Bessie's.

"I never punish Jennie. Charlie and I never spank her in our lives. If she do something wrong I just tell her it's not nice and she don't do it any more. Punishing children all the time is no good. It just makes them mean."

VI.

I had planned to write you about Harry Snowden, lone wolf among the natives here, only Eskimo old bachelor in the Koyukuk, who maintains that if "young kids get married together, all same cat, scratching and fighting together all the time." I wanted to tell of my visits to the igloo where three Arctic families live together, and where upon entry I am immediately knocked down by four little kids who can't speak any English, but who delight in stroking my whiskers, riding on my back, and generally clambering allover me. Especially I wanted to write of the great fight between Arctic Johnie and his beautiful wife, Annie, which caused the latter to leave her husband and set up an independent household for herself and children, as well as breaking the entire native population except the neutral Suckiks into two fiery factions. But I have already drawn this letter out to an indefensible length, so I must reserve those tales for personal narration to anyone interested.

BOB.

*****

These have been some of the raw materials from which Bob Marshall fashioned his sociological study of Wiseman. They give only a hint, a flavoring of the 372 pages that make up a narrative full of the philosophy, humor, and wonder of people—Native and white—thrown together on the edge of the world, forced to develop their own social contract.

Bob's Arctic Village narrative concludes with an excerpt from a letter he had received from Mrs. Pingel, who, with her husband, had left the northland for their farm in Iowa:

We are living among nice people who spend all their days here and have attained to a certain perfection in furnishing and upkeep of the modern home, while I roamed the hills in search of wild flowers and berries. While I walked to town to hoe my potatoes or get the mail, they dusted, polished, garnished. While I sat down by Big Jim or Nakuchluk or Jonas or Kalhabuk or Kaypuk or Dishoo [Tishu] or Mamie or Lucy, they sat around a polished front room table, playing cards. While the hills and the mountains, the valleys and the creeks talked to me, they only beheld their neighbor's house.

And now comes the measuring rod of what they call civilization. All the things they do must be done—the quilt blocks sewed, the house ready for invited guests who will invite them again; while for years we had the latchstring out to any old boy who was hungry. ...

People here are so impatient with our love for Alaska as a land of scenic beauty when they hear you have to walk to see it. And mining is madness as long as you haven't made a lot of money, the pleasure of hunting treasures in the bosom of the earth is folly unless you know where to dig and where to pick up gold. The wild flowers by the roadside as we walk to town are not interesting to them if thereby you must walk.

Oh, these people here have everything a person could wish for—modern homes, electricity, radio, all the good things like eggs, milk, butter, fruit, berries, gardens. I wonder what they would wish more in heaven. Still they are only half awake—dull, routine slaves, tied down to follow each other.

When I picture the life in the North and here I say—my stomach is better off here but my mentality lives its best up there. The big open spaces are alluring, the lovely air, the near-by rainbow, the friendliness of the people. How interested we are up there in everyday occurrences and each other; helpful, ready to do all we can.⁵²

Bob chose Mrs. Pingel's words as a kind of benediction that expressed the ultimate, operating principles of the Wiseman community, overriding the petty conflicts of the moment. As well, these words reiterated his theme of blended landscape and people.

His own conclusions touched on the meaning of life, the bases of happiness. After his immersion in the civilization of the North, he stated his personal belief that "...the average value of life rises higher above the dead level of oblivion to the people of the Koyukuk than it does to any of the other groups of American people whom I have known."⁵³

To the attainment of this condition he attributed specific factors:

• Personal and economic independence, the ability to shape one's own destiny—meaning emancipation from the interplay of economic forces and the restraints imposed by other men.
• The fact that one can always make a living—from gold if fortune smiles, from living off the land if it does not.
• Interesting work requiring "skilled manipulation, continual planning, and genuine mental exertion." Routinized jobs do not exist; work is inspirited by the "lure of the unknown."
• Besides independence, there is almost unlimited liberty to do and say as one pleases, short only of hurtful crimes against others.
• Because of the few people in the Koyukuk, each person "takes on a peculiar importance...is a vital element in the world...not merely one infinitesimal soul among millions." Relieved of the "neurotic strain of trying to be important" in the faceless mass, one is valued" just because he is alive. "
• Racial prejudice is eliminated because each person "fills an assured niche in his world."
• Adventure, a daily experience in the wilderness, "adds tone, vitality, and color to the entire functioning of life." As does Arctic climate, whose severe contrast between summer and winter provides variety—in effect, two distinct lifestyles each year.

Bob's final meditation ended with these words:

It is impossible ever to evaluate just how much beauty adds to what is worth while in existence. I would hazard as my opinion that beautiful surroundings have a fundamental bearing on most people's enjoyment. Consequently, I believe that the happiness of the Koyukuker is greatly enhanced and his entire life is made richer by the overpowering loveliness of the Arctic wilderness.

Most important of all, happiness in the Koyukuk is stimulated by the prevalent philosophy of enjoying life as it passes along. The absence of constant worry about the future and remorse about the past destroys much that tends to make men miserable. The fact that happiness is frankly recognized as a legitimate objective removes at once much futile pursuit of false ideals, and makes it possible for men to live openly as well as subconsciously for what they primarily desire.

Of course there are also factors which tend to make the Outside a happier place than the Koyukuk. The variety of goods which one may purchase, the every day conveniences unknown in the northern region, the diversified possibilities of entertainment, and the wider opportunities for personal acquaintanceship are clearly advantages for the outside world. Especially, the family life for which most of mankind seems to yearn has very little possibility of fruition among the white men of the Koyukuk.

Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the Koyukuk would rather eat beans with liberty, burn candles with independence, and mush dogs with adventure than to have the luxury and the restrictions of the outside world. A person misses many things by living in the isolation of the Koyukuk, but he gains a life filled with an amount of freedom, tolerance, beauty, and contentment such as few human beings are ever fortunate enough to achieve.⁵⁴

Despite this loving finale, Arctic Village caused some consternation in the Koyukuk after its publication in 1933. Bob sent copies to his friends and they quickly went the rounds. Some of his frank judgments and descriptions of people cut deep. Yet, on his return to Wiseman in 1938, he received warm welcome.

Ominous speculations by others and his own qualms proved unfounded. As a gesture for all the help he had received, he had divided his book royalties fifty-fifty between himself and the 100 people of the Koyukuk camp.⁵⁵ This helped the reception somewhat. But the key to his welcome back was expressed by Kenneth Harvey in a later letter to Bob's brother, George: "I like Bob's books as he printed the truth in them."⁵⁶

(John Mcphee's book, Coming into the Country, caused similar perturbations on the upper Yukon more than 40 years later. Yet, he received a similar welcome when he returned to visit the people of the Eagle-Circle region whom he had written about, and for the same reason. People protested: "I wish he hadn't said that about me, even if it is true." Even today there seems to be a generous tolerance for the truth, warts and all, among bush Alaskans. Perhaps Bob Marshall's idea of each person's "assured niche" explains this.)

Despite the handshakes and jokes and wisecracks when he returned to Wiseman (including pointed questions about whether he was going to write another Wiseman book), Bob's nostalgic reunion was marred. Wiseman had changed. Constant air traffic (2 or 3 times a week), tourists, radios, even automobiles had made their appearance. Wiseman, to a degree unthinkable just a few years before, had become "part of the world." Most important was the change in the people. In 1931, more than 80 percent of them had been old-timers of the Gold Rush era, freighted with "the distinctive mores developed in the romantic stampedes. ..." By 1938 half of the people were newcomers, "who lacked much of the tradition of the old gold rush." Moreover, many of his friends—the splendid companions of an unforgettable year—had died. Bob faced that common problem of not really being able to go home again.⁵⁷

Indeed, Wiseman and the larger Koyukuk camp had changed. Mining was in decline. Fur prices crashed during the Great Depression. The school closed in May 1941. Population barely held its own around 75 souls until World War II drew off all but a handful of whites and a sprinkling of Native families.

Irving McK. Reed reported after a mining survey in 1937 that "... the upper Koyukuk region as a whole is gradually reverting to wilderness." Lacking new gold strikes within a few years and government help on a road from the Yukon, he foresaw an end to mining in the region. This progression was far along when the wartime ban on gold mining came into effect.⁵⁸

Stubborn tenacity marked the remnant group. One old miner declared:

Goddammit, I like this country. I don't ever want to go out only to visit my folks once before they die. But I'd just as leave die here as anywhere. I'd keep better.⁵⁹

Wiseman store journals from the Twenties and Thirties show the drastic decline of the cash economy. In the Twenties each page, headed by a customer's name, contains scores of entries: purchases and remittances, along with supply-ordering and banking services provided by this, the community's all-purpose commercial and financial institution. By the mid-Thirties, transactions are reduced to two or three entries, or none at all, for many customers. Gold dust and furs, the principal media for cash transactions, are rarely noted. Instead, labor and other in-kind payments predominate: cutting and hauling wood, provision of fresh meat and garden vegetables. Standing balances remained the same from year to year. People lived off the land, and if they could not pay off their accounts, neglected them until better times, if ever.⁶⁰

Closing of the school and departure of teacher George Rayburn in 1941 symbolized the end of Wiseman's effective contact with the institutions of the outside world. Rayburn came to Wiseman in 1934 after a typical depression round of walkabout book-selling in rural Alaska, a degree at the A&M College, and working as a nurse in a Fairbanks hospital. Carl Frank took a liking to George while in town for treatment and invited him out to Wiseman to teach. He succeeded as a teacher, despite Joe Ulen's frequent opposition. The community came to rely on him not only for his teaching but also for his medical skills and operation of the community radio station. With benefit of some early medical courses, George was able to treat mining accidents, frozen feet, stab wounds, and the afflictions of his students. He often provided life-saving field treatment that gave time for air evacuation to Tanana or Fairbanks hospitals. Working through Commissioner of Education Anthony E. Karnes, he arranged for a doctor and a dentist to visit Wiseman, where miners, called in from the camps by his messages, received treatment of ailments that had plagued them for decades. As in earlier days, the school and its teacher had focused community energies. Pleas and petitions of Wiseman's people to keep the school and teacher Rayburn failed when the student population dropped to a half dozen children. The ensuing institutional vacuum was never filled.⁶¹

*****

During this transitional period, the upper Kobuk's Shungnak mining district followed a pattern similar to that of the upper Koyukuk. Except for a few experienced, equipped, and in-residence miners, chief among them the Ferguson family and Lewis Lloyd, mining was on the wane. In the early 1930s attempts to boom the district with outside capital—fronted by big-name mining engineers and managers from Fairbanks' failing fields—went the way of the Detroit Mining Company on Hammond River. High hopes pushed by speculative fever grounded on essentially the same logistical and geological reefs: high costs of transportation, low-grade gold deposits, and very late ice on Kotzebue Sound, which frustrated ocean transportation and cut the season to only a few weeks.

Lewis Lloyd continued to hope for good times, but was caustic about those hopefuls who thought gold lay scattered on the ground for the picking. Thawed ground and water-filled shafts frustrated even seasoned miners from other districts. Frank Ferguson joined in warning off the novices. The Shungnak fields were not a poor man's district. Wet ground required drills, machinery, and hydraulics. Where there was a patch of frozen ground, getting a boiler to it cost incredible amounts of money, time, and labor. He cited one 30-mile haul that employed 18 Natives for weeks.

In a 1930 parley with pilot Fred Moller, Lewis Lloyd asserted that he would stay on at Shungnak with Mrs. Lloyd until he died. He confided that only seven or eight men were actually mining in the district—most of them old-timers of advanced years. The rest, sunshine prospectors, came through the country lacking even grub to prospect, much less the equipment and staying power to carry a venture through to development and pay.⁶²

World War II drained the upper country of all but a few whites. Young miners entered the armed forces. Natives were recruited as scouts in the Territorial Guard. With the wartime ban on gold mining, older miners of the upper-country camps sought war-related jobs in Fairbanks, Nome, and other towns close to military bases, including the airfields that aided the ferrying of Lend-Lease planes to Soviet Russia. The upper Koyukuk was particularly hard hit, for mining, no matter how marginal, had remained the core of its economy, the reason for its settlements. The exodus forced closing of the Wiseman store, and Bettles almost became a ghost town.

Native villages on the upper Kobuk, with established populations and a broader resource base for traditional subsistence living, weathered the war better and even benefited from some of its spin-off. The influx of military personnel revived the market for furs and Native handicrafts. Government services and communications improved. A short-lived attempt to mine asbestos in the Dahl Creek area in the late war years provided some employment for Eskimos of Shungnak and nearby villages as equipment operators, supply haulers, and ore miners.⁶³

*****

The passage of years and the war nearly wiped out Bob Marshall's Wiseman altogether. A poignant effect of the war was the death of James Minano in an internment camp for people of Japanese descent.⁶⁴ According to Walter Johnson, who first visited Wiseman during the war, the average age was then about 65 years, including Hughie Boyle in his 80s and Carl Frank in his 90s. Most of the others "...who had come into the country at the turn of the century or shortly thereafter were dying or moving to one of the pioneer homes." The few still hanging on included R.H. Creecy, Vern Watts, Charlie Irish, Nick Ikovitch, Wes Etherington, Ace Wilcox, and Mr. and Mrs. William English, Sr.—Tishu Ulen's stepfather and mother.⁶⁵ Tishu and Joe Ulen continued on also, Joe providing radio-fix and message-relay services for military and commercial pilots flying over the Brooks Range wilderness. On occasion, military pilots in distress or short of fuel landed at Wiseman's airstrip and were treated to the usual frontier hospitality.⁶⁶

After the war, what was left of the old-time cadre, both those who had stayed through the war years and those who came back from war jobs, joined with a few newcomers to perpetuate the Koyukuk camp, whose population varied with the seasons between 25 and 50 souls. Mining continued on a small scale on most of the proven creeks in the Wiseman vicinity and at a few isolated sites. Importation of Cats and other earth-moving equipment soon made open-cut mining the principal mode of operation. Deforestation to fuel the old boilers had stripped the country of timber for miles around, so old-style drift mining was impossible except in isolated sites that had escaped the woodcutters. Marshall had noted this deforestation, and also the effect it had had upon water supplies for sluicing. The quick runoff over barren ground had shortened the sluicing season several weeks by the time he got there.⁶⁷

The postwar generation of newcomers represented the third wave of Koyukuk miners and settlers. The stampeders of the '98 Gold Rush and the first years of the century had been the first. Then came the people of the Teens, Twenties, and Thirties. Despite Marshall's forebodings, enough old-timers survived into the Forties and Fifties to pass on the essential traditions of the country, and in time even the postwar generation would join the parade of pioneers. These are the people who overlapped much of the past. They and the more recent immigrants they have tutored remember the historic people and places—which are still worked by today's miners, for the old prospectors knew their business. The historic site studies that follow this narrative owe much to the memories of these latter-day survivors and recruits. Their still-vital traditions and sense of being members of a century-old historical community recall those earlier days.