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

Wiseman's heyday lasted about 5 years, 1911-15. It was fueled by continuing production from Nolan Creek Valley and the $1 million taken from deep placers on Hammond River, starting with Vern Watts' discovery in 1911. Robert Marshall's history of Wiseman during this period is heavily loaded with whiskey and prostitutes. Of 400 tons of freight brought to Wiseman in the peak year of 1915, 60 tons was booze--400 pounds (including kegs, bottles, and packing) for each of the 300 whites and 75 Natives living in the area. That year 14 prostitutes plied their trade. One miner, John Bowman, reputedly blew $11,000 on one of them in a 2-week period. A reformer gave $2,500 to a "soiled dove" to improve herself with an education, but skeptics urged that "she knew too much for him already."

This flurry of high pay and high living ended quickly. Exhausted bonanzas, World War I wages in the States, and Prohibition hustled the boomers outside and quenched the appetites of those permanents who had strayed. Population and economy declined precipitately to low levels: less than 100 whites, with gold production less than $100,000 annually (much less than that some years) for the entire district.¹

Those who were left tightened up a notch or two and turned to the business at hand: keeping their community alive and functioning. One of the old timers, Albert Ness, put it this way to Marshall:

Always, after any stampede, it's not the successes who build up the country. They go home with the stakes they made. It's the failures who stay on, decade after decade, and establish homes.²

In 1911 Wiseman boasted two stores, the N.C. Co. and Plummer's General Merchandise, as well as a number of roadhouses, including the Wrights', original namesake for the community. Cabins and other business houses had been disassembled and moved from Coldfoot to Wiseman. The ARC trail was extended from Caro to the Middle Fork via South Fork and Slate Creek. The main trail from Tanana closely paralleled Henry Allen's route to the Kanuti, then ran upriver via Allakaket, Bettles, and Coldfoot to Wiseman--a distance of 273 miles. These trails were strictly winter dog-team trails for many years.

In 1912 a Nolan Creek miner put in a telephone system that eventually connected Wiseman with Nolan Creek and Hammond River. This was a great convenience, for these next-door neighbors were still a hard day's round-trip apart. Now the far-spread camp could set a date for a dance, alert its members of arrival of important mail or supplies, or mobilize for emergency.³

In 1918 the people of Wiseman petitioned Territorial Governor Thomas Riggs, Jr., for a wireless station. They based their request on Wiseman's position as the largest and most centrally located town "...in the heart of the present mining industry being carried on and developed throughout a vast section of country lying north of the Arctic Circle. ..." Citing the deficiencies of a mail service monthly in its intervals, they prayed further: "The great retarding factor in the present and future development and advancement of this great North Region is the lack of adequate and speedy communication with the outside world...."

The 153 signatories had George F. Bemis, The O.K. Jeweler of Tanana, forward the petition to the governor. Bemis, a friend of the governor's, recalled the latter's visit to Tanana the previous summer, "...at which time you kindly assented to recommend and also use your influence with Mr. Sulzer to have their petition granted at an early date." Reflecting the intimacy and intricacy of Alaska politics in this era when everyone knew everyone else, Bemis added: "If [Territorial Delegate to Congress] Wickersham had given his efforts to the needs of his constituents instead of spending his time abusing Alaska's friends, these people would have had relief long ago."

Riggs responded positively to the petition in a letter to Bemis: He had recommended the Wiseman wireless station in his annual report for 1918, and he would follow up with both the Army Signal Corps and Congressman Sulzer. The governor discreetly avoided comment on Delegate Wickersham's battles with the Alaska mining syndicate. As it turned out, the wireless station came to Wiseman in 1925, the same year as arrival of the first airplane.⁴

Marshall estimated a population of 150 permanent white residents in the Wiseman area in 1918.⁵ The petition seems to have involved them all. Of the 153 signatories, 15 are women, all but one of these a Mrs. No obvious Native names appear on the petition, but James Minano, a Japanese immigrant, resident of Coldfoot and married to an Eskimo woman, did sign. James and his wife Sucklarlalook had some children, and thereby hangs a tale.

Minano was an old Barrow friend of Frank Yasuda. The Minano family joined the Yasuda-Carter prospecting expedition in 1903, ending up on the Koyukuk, where James took a job in Coldfoot as a cook.⁶ By 1917 the Minanos' had four surviving children (an infant son had died at Anaktuvuk Pass during the prospecting). At that time the Territorial Government was responsible for the education of white children: the U.S. Bureau of Education supported schools for Natives.⁷ Territorial statutes required a minimum of 10 white children for establishment of a school district. The proposed Wiseman district had only 8, but with the Minano offspring there were 12.

On August 13, 1917, Daniel Webster of Wiseman forwarded a petition for a school district to the clerk of the district court in Fairbanks. That worthy, one J.E. Clark, responded testily to Mr. Webster's communication: Certain information was lacking in the petition, and, of greater consequence, four of the children were Japanese and two others were underage. Obviously the petition did not meet the careful definitions of law. To assure Mr. Webster's edification and future compliance, Mr. Clark enclosed Chapter 22 of the 1917 Session Laws, with key passages plainly underscored. He also returned the petition.

Daniel Webster--a man of means and reputation in the Koyukuk district, viewed locally as a reincarnation of his famous namesake and ancestor--took umbrage at this officious dismissal. He fired off a letter to the governor, citing previous understandings regarding the petition and affirming his desire to obey the laws of the land. Then he appealed for justice and equity in th eir administration:

There was no law to prohibit the Japanese from immigrating, if there was, it was not enforced. There is no law to prevent him from taking to himself a wife. And there seems to be no natural or moral law violated, after marriage, by propagation. ...

The facts are, we have the children in our midst, leading a civilized life, what shall we do with them? Neglect to provide them with privileges and thereby inflict the world with the results? "Forbid it Almighty God." The most lamentable thing that impresses my mind just at present is that the Clerk at Court had not been born a Chinese so as to have realized something of the contempt he is attempting to administer to others. If the Clerk at Court has erred ... I wish you to correct his error and offer friendly information to guide his onward course.

Consonant with these magisterial flourishes, Daniel Webster alerted the governor that he could expect a personal visit in Juneau upon Webster's return from Boston.⁸

The governor took quick action on the matter. By letter of February 25, 1918, he counseled the Clerk at Court:

There are certain equities in the Wiseman case, which have moved me to waive to some extent the strict legal technicality of the law as to "white" children. I cannot bring myself to think that it would be an act of justice ... to deny a school to eight white children in a community as remote as is Wiseman, when there are sufficient other children of school age ... to make up the requisite ten.

The Governor softened this intervention by recognizing the clerk's concern about discretionary precedents, advising a case by case weighing of substance over "the legal phase."⁹ This would not be the last time that government functionaries would know the wrath of the independent souls of Wiseman; nor would Webster's be the last articulate letter to higher office to proclaim some higher truth.

In due course, despite further delays brought about by the Alaska attorney general's review of the case, the Wiseman school district was authorized and a school was built in Cold foot in time for the fall 1919 term.¹⁰ For a few years, Coldfoot was more centrally located for school children than was Wiseman.

Correspondence between Wiseman school district officials and Lester D. Henderson, Commissioner of Education in Juneau, provides a refreshing model of personalized administration of a remote district needful of special assistance. For the decade of his tenure, Henderson filled the funding gaps caused by communication lags. He personally attended to emergency supply requests, sending wires to suppliers in the States, arranging steamboat and dog-team relays of supplies thus obtained. He mediated altercations between teachers and parents with letters full of wisdom and the counsels of patience. In return, the people of Wiseman--whose school was a central, perhaps the central, institution attesting their civilized attainments in the wilderness--reciprocated with earnest endeavor and honest employment of Henderson's largesse. Wiseman's decline as a mining camp seems to have unleashed enlightened energies that focused on the school. In truth, beyond personal matters and social affairs, such energies had few other targets. (In 1927, George Huey, a community pillar, proclaimed: "We have the best little camp in the North today. ...There is not a lawyer, a preacher or a doctor in the camp, and we don't need 'em.")¹¹

Henderson's first efforts resulted in money to build a school and hire a teacher. The Wiseman School Board appointed a local woman, Jessie Howard, to start the term because Juneau could not provide a teacher in time. When teacher Vanda Coffey did arrive from Fairbanks with a 9-month contract, Jessie had already taught a month. Both Jessie, by teaching, and Vanda, by contract, were owed $200 for that first month. Henderson forked up the extra $200, "thus making it possible for you to pay the respective parties the amount specified."¹²

When Henderson appealed to the community to make up the difference in a deficient appropriation for the school's firewood, Daniel Webster, Clerk of the Wiseman School Board replied:

The School Board met...and decided to have a chopping bee at Coldfoot to cut the wood and pile it for the school-house, on Oct. 8. Fifteen men turned out and we cut ten cords of wood and in the evening had a very good dance.... We decided to hold a raffle...to raise money to have the wood delivered to the school-house and worked up for the stove. The articles donated for the raffle are one morris chair, one caribou and one crate of potatoes ...¹³

With Daniel Webster's death in 1922, W.D. English became clerk of the Wiseman School Board. George Huey, acting clerk in English's absence, posted the sad news to Henderson:

Mr. Webster's death was a great loss to our isolated community. He was a man of sterling worth and integrity there is not a person in the community who is not under some obligations to him for some act of kindness or assistance rendered during his life. We shall always miss him. It seems as something vague and unreal had happened to our community With best wishes for the cause of education.¹⁴

Vanda Coffey's marriage to Jesse Allen in 1923, followed by her resignation, caused real distress. She was a teacher liked by the entire community. W.D. English relayed the parents' wishes regarding a replacement:

...they suggest we get a teacher who has had previous experience in Alaska and who is not adverse to settling in a quiet community. It is also the opinion of the parents and others interested in the welfare of the school that we endeavor to get a teacher of about middle age.¹⁵

Henderson agreed to these conditions and initiated recruitment of such a teacher. Then the school census stopped everything. Only six children remained, most of them bearing the name Minano. Henderson was forced to close the school for the 1924-25 term. George Huey immediately challenged this action, tying it to other signs of neglect--poor mail service, no road. The radio outfit and an operator had arrived in Wiseman; the little community of 63 people was expending its own slim resources to construct the wireless building and erect the antenna masts. Soon, one senses from Huey's words, the folks of Wiseman would have some pretty direct things to say to the outside world. "This little neck of the woods has produced more gold than the Government paid for the whole of Alaska, and is justly intitled to some little consideration from the powers that be. ..."¹⁶

But winter intervened and the wireless waited until next year. Through winter and spring letters between Wiseman and Juneau crossed somewhere on the dark and frozen tundra: Henderson regretting the closure; Wiseman importuning for answers about school next year. The correspondence got completely out of sequence in the long intervals between mails, with Henderson's first answer getting to Wiseman after the second and third letters had been sent from there. On January 9, 1925, Huey wrote as Secretary-Treasurer of Wiseman Igloo #8, pioneers of Alaska, bringing to bear the influence of that Alaska-wide organization of old timers. Citing no response to School Board letters, he asked, "Why this silence?" Clarifications and resumption of good relations had to wait upon the wireless.¹⁷

An exchange of telegrams and relaxation of the law distinguishing between Native and white schools led to reopening of the school in 1927, in a rented cabin at Wiseman. (The Coldfoot school building was not moved to Wiseman until spring 1928.)¹⁸

A school board election brought in Ruth Allen (who was the former teacher Vanda Coffey) as director, H.S. Wanamaker as treasurer, and E.C. "Joe" Ulen as clerk.¹⁹

Joe Ulen, the radio operator in Wiseman, tangled with the new school teacher, Miss Jean B. McElroy. She rented his cabin and refused to sign a $600 fire-insurance agreement. Ulen, moreover, cared little for her teaching methods. Another man, contracted to cut Miss McElroy's fuel, provided green wood only.

Miss McElroy was having a bad time. To compound matters, all of her students except for a Minano child were Eskimos. Ulen sympathized with the Natives: he was married to one, a young woman named Tishu, who figures prominently in the pages that follow. Miss McElroy was perceived by some parents as being less than sympathetic to the Eskimo children. In her letters to Henderson she cited serious trouble with an old woman, who evidently baited her in the classroom. A "native element" within the white community controlled the school, she said. On the other hand, some of the whites resented paying taxes for what was in fact a Native school.²⁰

Former teacher Ruth Allen tried to mediate, writing a "To Whom It May Concern" letter that attested Miss McElroy's skill as a teacher and her conduct of an efficient and happy classroom.136 Miss McElroy felt trapped. The Bureau of Education could not pay her transportation Outside, and she could not save enough money to get out herself without teaching another year.²¹

Finally, the incompatibilities between Miss McElroy and selected members of the community prevailed. Though most of the community remained passive to avoid trouble, the school board requested a new teacher. Henderson responded by recruiting Clara B. Carpenter. Miss McElroy, disappointed but proud of her efforts in a most difficult assignment shipped out to the States, bearing the sympathies of many, who nevertheless put the peace of their community first.²²

It had been a microcosm of village life, this decade of school history. The best and the worst had been called forth in these formative years: from chopping bees and countless other voluntary efforts to vindictiveness and quick resentments. When push came to shove the community closed ranks and ejected one who could not fit in, whatever the fine points of equity might be.

Acculturation, as it turned out, was a two-way street. Miss McElroy, idealistic but unprepared, could not find the combination to Wiseman's tight little society. Its hidden hierarchies and subtle racial adjustments snared her. Many another teacher or visiting functionary since has been similarly surprised in Alaska's bush communities.

The first decade of school history ended on a happy note. Clara Carpenter's appointment healed community divisions, producing a resurgence of unified effort during the 1928-29 school year. The moved and reassembled Coldfoot school building and a refurbished teacher's residence gave Clara a comfortable and functional school plant. This resolution, both personal and physical, coincided with Lester Henderson's transfer from the position of Commissioner of Education. In his last letter to the Wiseman School Board, he justified an extra $88.65 for the Wiseman school budget to share community costs in "rebuilding [the] school house and fixing up the teacher's dwelling":

In view of the spirit, which the residents of Wiseman have displayed in this matter and of the expense to which they have already been placed, I can see no reason why the Territory should not assume this deficit.... I wish to take this opportunity to ...convey my thanks ...to the school board and to the residents of the community in general for the splendid cooperation which they have rendered me during the period of my incumbency in this office.²³

Presence of Eskimo children in the Wiseman school is part of a larger acculturation story that evolved parallel with the mining booms and their aftermath. Relationships between Natives and whites in the upper country varied from place to place--partly because some Native groups were more receptive than others to Euro-American ideas and technology, partly because the geographic spread of the region isolated and insulated some groups more than others. The core of the region was far beyond the easy transportation and dominant white populations that enhance the influence of missionaries, teachers, and government agents. Thus, their ability to impose ideas and dictate cultural change was inhibited at the center, greater at the periphery along the Yukon and the Arctic Coast. Many Natives did respond positively to the jobs and technology brought by miners and traders, and to the ideas of missionaries and educators. But in the upper country the Natives exercised a large element of choice in these responses.

As previously noted, the general life-style in the far north camps and communities allowed little distinction between Natives and whites based on wealth or hierarchies of work. particularly after 1915, most people lived pretty much alike, combining cash and subsistence economies to make ends meet. Moreover, the upper Koyukuk mining area lacked the wealth of furs, which, in richer places, segregated Natives into a fur trapping-subsistence economy. In sum, sparse population and marginal resources drew Natives and whites together in a mutually supportive blend of life-style and labor. Isolation buffered change, slowing and diluting the directed change of outside agents--giving Native people the chance to pick and choose, to balance change with ongoing elements of traditional life. And since most of the whites in the upper country concentrated on their mining and commercial enterprises, only incidentally harvesting wildlife, there was minimal competition on the land between them and traditionally oriented Native people. This allowed Natives to be opportunistic: they could take jobs with the whites, or they could hunt and fish, or they could do both.

What emerged was an upper country society in which social distinctions between Natives and whites were not absent, but were muted because of continuing interdependence, including frequent intermarriage. Many Natives became proficient workers, and some became partners with whites, in mining, transportation, and mercantile enterprises. At the same time, because these "imported" activities occurred seasonally or at marginal levels and could not sustain families year-round, traditional hunting and fishing expeditions kept families close to the land. Children, accompanying their parents, learned traditional ways of travel, harvest, and survival. Thus recruited, they carried on those traditions.

The upshot of these combinations on the south flank of the divide, was a more comfortably blended Native-white society than that found in most parts of Alaska. Out of this functional context evolved Native people competent in both the modern and the traditional worlds.

The Nunamiut people, north of the divide, had a different history. Gold mining played only a minor role in their home territory. Because of the attractions of coastal trading and the decline of caribou after the turn of the century, the Nunamiut began to leave the mountains, a few going to the Kobuk and to Wiseman, but most of them relocating along the Arctic Coast. When some familes began returning to the high Brooks Range in the mid-1930s, they came back to an area and a pattern of life that would remain isolated from steady white influences until about 1950.

Thus, whether in the societal combinations of the upper Kobuk and Koyukuk rivers, or in the high mountain valleys of Nunamiut country, the buffering effects of isolation would help perpetrate strong traditional components in both Eskimo and Indian societies. These were certainly not pre-1850 people. All of them, including the Nunamiut during their coastal interlude, had absorbed large doses of Euro-American disruption, culture, and technology. But relative to more accessible regions, Native people of the upper country had more time to adapt under less intense acculturative pressure.

Among the whites who shared the upper country with the Natives during this period, there was more of a live and let live attitude than usual. Most of these whites were not oversocialized themselves, and were, like many of the Natives, far removed from steady institutional pressures to become so. As a result, the usual progressive attitudes of the day respecting material and spiritual uplift applied only marginally to most resident whites, some of whom had rejected any rigorous adherence to them. Missionary impulses at Allakaket (Episcopal), Shungnak and Noatak (Friends), and among the Nunamiut (Presbyterian) spread thinly across a vast area, competing with, rather than utterly dominating and erasing traditional views and values. As with so many other Euro-American approaches to this far-margin country, religion had to settle for half a loaf, in a kind of partnership with place and people. For example, when Society of Friends missionaries on the Kobuk attempted too strict a regime to counter secular influences in the 1920s and 1930s, the flock faded away, leaving only the older, sanctified members.

Archdeacon Hudson Stuck understood the need for accommodation between Euro-American and Native values. To his missionaries at St. John's he conveyed the philosophy that: "The wise teacher, the wise missionary, will not seek to keep boys at school who should be out in the woods serving their apprenticeship." In 1917 he preached to the assembled people of Alatna and Allakaket:

Reading and writing are good things, and the other things the school teaches are good things, and that is why we put the school here to teach them, but knowing how to make a living on the river or in the woods, winter and summer, is a very much better thing, a very much more important thing, and something that the school cannot teach and the fathers must. Let us have both if we can, but whatever happens don't let your boys grow up without learning to take care of themselves and of their wives and children by and by.

It is recorded that old Chief Moses came up to him and thanked him, saying that "he was alwayus trying to tell his people the same thing."²⁴

*****

Biographies of Arctic Coast and upper Kobuk Eskimos describe the early migrations of members of these societies into the upper Koyukuk mining area. Long established trade patterns and travel routes between these people and the Koyukon Indians had set the scene for these movements. The Koyukon, having withdrawn southward toward river trading posts, had effectively vacated the country north of Bettles. In this unexploited territory game abounded in comparison to conditions on the Kobuk, where caribou populations were crashing. Arctic coast Eskimos, some of them associated with Japanese trader Frank Yasuda, were drawn and pushed toward Koyukuk game and mining camps by ties to Yasuda and the weakening whaling industry on the coast. Opportunities on the Koyukuk included market hunting for the miners and wage jobs in mining and freighting.²⁵

Oscar Nicotine, an old timer of Alatna, born in 1901 of Kobuk parents, remembered being carried on his Mama's back as an infant:

She was packing me around Gold Creek mining camp, thirty miles out of Wiseman. I saw those miners working. They work and never stop, no matter how hot the sun. They don't think about mosquitoes, nothing. They just want that gold and get it, too.²⁶

Turak Newman, who lived most of his life in Beaver, was born in Barrow in 1897. He and his family came south with the Yasuda-Carter prospecting party. In 1906 they wintered at timberline on the North Fork of the Koyukuk:

We built an igloo, and off and on Frank [Yasuda] came up. We had a lot more game than we needed. Frank generally took, oh, a couple sled loads down to the miners at Wiseman and Coldfoot. There were a few people there at that time. He traded off for flour, sugar, rice and tea. That is the way he kept us in supplies.²⁷

Turak's mother made fur clothing and traded it to the miners "for a little rice, tea and sugar." She had poor light for sewing, but when she got candles "there was light in the evening."²⁸ Turak continued:

Well, in 1908 during the summer, Big Jim [an Inupiat Eskimo from Unalakleet] and Peter Nectune [Oscar Nictune's father] came over [to the Chandalar] and ...told my father, "It's easier to live over in Koyukuk. I'm working on the scows for the Glenn brothers. I can work there all summer; wife can go down to Allakaket with you and fish. I'll come down in the fall and supply you with store goods there. You'll have some fish so we will live all right that way.²⁹

This last arrangement illustrates an adaptation still prevalent and critical in modern Native life. Subsistence activities must coincide with seasonal availability of wild resources. In the mixed cash-subsistence economy of village Alaska, wage jobs often conflict with wild-harvest seasons. One cannot be two places at once, so a division of labor allows some people to hunt and fish, others to work at a wage job. After the season is over, wild harvest and store-bought goods are shared. Often these roles rotate so everyone gets time on the land.

As documented earlier, the Kobuk migrants to the Koyukuk were especially admired for their attentiveness to work and their eagerness to get white man's religion and education. Frank Tobuk--born in 1900 on Hunt Fork of John River while his family was out hunting--shared this enthusiasm, but with reservations.

In a late-life interview, Frank commented on the difficulty white people had pronouncing Eskimo names. His father's name, Duvak, became Tobuk. Frank's own Eskimo name, Dalakaduk, became Aklanuk, but with customary politeness he acquiesced, "That's close enough, I guess."

Frank's father worked for the steamboats for awhile at Bettles, mostly longshoring in the summer. In winter and spring the family followed traditional hunting and fishing rounds. Then the family moved to a Kobuk Eskimo camp called Alatna, at the mouth of that river, for better fishing. Across the river from Alatna, Archdeacon Hudson Stuck founded St. John of the Wilderness Mission in 1906. The goal of the Episcopal Church was to provide religious, educational, and health services for both Eskimos and Indians at this central location on the upper Koyukuk. Soon the upriver Indians came in from Arctic City and their South Fork camps to establish Allakaket village around the mission. With Frank and his brothers and sisters in school, the old patterns changed. He recalled that once the mission came,

...our family didn't travel out to winter camp or spring camp much any more. Mostly all we ate was fish and rabbits. No big game in Alatna then. Dinook [his mother] and Tobuk wanted us to be in school so we were tied up. Can't go nowhere.³⁰

In these few recollections is a congregation of acculturation influences and responses: migration for job opportunities, population and settlement-pattern changes, a combined Eskimo-Indian community (even if in separate across-the-river villages) drawn together by mission services, and a young boy's regret that school kept him away from hunting camp. Other passages from Frank Tobuk's life story tell of the confusion he experienced from the mix of Eskimo, Athapaskan, and mission exposures all at the same time. Yet, in retrospect, he recognized the benefit of living and working with different kinds of people His mature life reflected the diversity of his upbringing: traditional hunter, worker on steamboats and scows, winter dogsled guide, employee of Wien Airlines at Bettles Field.

Tishu Ulen's life story touches all facets of upper Koyukuk social and cultural evolution. A spry 80 years old at this writing, with a steel-trap memory of people and events that made Wiseman history, she has shared her recollections with this writer on a trip to Wiseman and in subsequent interviews.

Tishu was born about 1905 in the Chandalar Lake vicinity, where her Kobuk Eskimo family was traveling about ("trucking around" in her phrase) hunting and fishing. The Chandalar Indians had by this time moved farther east, leaving the west Chandalar country open to Kobuk people ranging afar from their game-depleted home territory.

Tishu's mother, Mary, later divorced her Eskimo husband and married William English, a white man with stores in Bettles and Wiseman. Tishu herself married Joe Ulen, the Signal Corps telegraph operator in Wiseman, when she was 18 and he was 36.

Tishu was baptized by Hudson Stuck and as a child often attended services at St. John's mission in Allakaket. She went to school at Cold foot and had particularly fond memories of teacher Mary Glenn, who had married the Koyukuk scowman Bill Glenn. Tishu knew biologist Olaus Murie and Margaret Murie, recalling their 1924 marriage and their visit to Wiseman en route to a honeymoon in the Brooks Range where Olaus was studying the caribou.

Tishu and her mother roamed the upper Koyukuk country by dogsled, hauling freight on the Bettles-Wiseman trail and to the remote mining camps, and making long hunting and fishing trips. On these journeys Tishu, a strapping woman in her youth, hunted and cared for the dogs; Mary butchered the game and cooked. Later, Tishu ran Joe Ulen's mine on Nolan Creek, supervising a crew of white miners.

When Noel Wien flew the first plane into Wiseman in 1925, it was Tishu who raced with Jimmy Tobuk to touch the plane first on its river-bar landing strip. Some years later, in the Thirties, the Wiseman mail pilot flew -her to Wild Lake to visit ex-Wiseman friends who were mining there. When Tishu started to climb out of the plane, Ernie Johnson, who would guide Bob Marshall into the North Fork, grabbed her and carried her to her waiting friends--"I never touched the ground!" Frank Smith mined at Wild Lake on Spring Creek. His Indian wife, Mary, cried when she saw Tishu, for Tishu and Mary's deceased daughter had played together as children.

One of Tishu's earliest memories was a trip to fish camp at Kotzebue with her mother and uncle. At that time the town was just an assortment of drab cabins. The place to be was down on the beach, where tent camps of Eskimos from Kivalina, Noatak, Kobuk, and Seward Peninsula villages--even some from Siberia--lined the beach for miles, each group in its own established camping place. (Even today these distinct fish camps still line the beach south of Kotzebue.) Tishu's mother, a woman noted for assertive character, even irascibility, would not stand for the missionaries attempts to stop Native dancing. She, in Tishu's words, "jumped the hired Eskimo police" who tried to enforce religious restrictions and curfews, and the dances went on. Tishu remembers disliking the dreary, damp weather of Kotzebue Sound, longing for quick return to the mountains.

Mary taught her the intricate stitches of Eskimo sewing, ripping out seams unless they were perfect. Tishu became expert, making waterproof mukluks for trade to the miners. Later she sewed canvas hoses for the miners, triple stitching them for strength until her hands were raw. A long hydraulicking hose brought her $18.

Tishu's far-ranging hunting and trapping rounds (she sent her daughter to school on proceeds from lynx trapping) required a good dog team. She ran five big dogs, mixing tallow with snared rabbit meat to keep them going, with a dash of garlic for flavor and worming. Tishu selected out any bad-tempered dogs: she could not afford disabling fights on distant trails, nor did she want her children chewed up.

When ex-nurse and medical student George Rayburn came to Wiseman as the school teacher, Tishu assisted him in emergency medical treatment for the burns, breaks, and crushings of outback, heavy-labor life. When George extracted a barb-up safety pin from the throat of Lucy Perrin's baby, Tishu was there, holding the baby's head.

As storekeeper, Tishu knew everyone and got in the middle of the squabbles of village life. When a volatile Irishman named Billy Burke got drunk and a little wild, he chased his nemesis, the frail Agnes Wanamaker, into the store and began pushing her around. Tishu broke up the fight. Agnes would declare: "There was no gentlemen present: I had to be rescued by a woman."

Burke was later found crying alongside the road, because someone told him he had hurt Tishu in the melee. When she told him she was OK, he was all smiles again.

Happy memories abound in Tishu's recollections. On the big holidays people from the far camps assembled in Wiseman for feasting and dancing (as they still do) and the pioneer Hall of Wiseman's Igloo #8 filled with groaning tables, which were later cleared for the all-night dances that made up for months of isolation.

Tishu helped Bob Marshall in his sociological research at Wiseman and figures prominently in Arctic Village. She still has a cabin in Wiseman and visits the dwindling population of old timers left from the Thirties and Forties.

She is a favorite of the younger people who now occupy many of the old cabins and carryon the Wiseman story. Her half-brother, Bill English, Jr., grew up in Wiseman, partaking of the mixed Eskimo and modern life styles of his parents. He only recently retired as chief pilot for Wien Airlines.

Tishu's life has spanned the last phase of traditional times to the ultra-modern present: from her birth at a nomadic hunting camp, through the early years of mining, trading, and missionary work, to the radio-and-airplane breakthrough that shrank the country she once crossed by dog team. Today, ensconced in a comfortable apartment in Fairbanks, she watches TV and shops in a supermarket.

One episode symbolically illustrates that span. On a Christmas Eve 1952 flight from Fairbanks to Wiseman, Tishu and pilot Dick McIntyre were forced by fog to land on the ice of Middle Fork some miles from town. Tishu's Eskimo survival skills pulled them through a night of minus 40° cold despite lack of tent and sleeping bags. At first light they flew to Wiseman and joined the festivities.

Hers is a world view enriched by the combination of traditional and modern perspectives. On a cold November drive back from Wiseman in 1983, she shared one of those older perspectives with the writer and our companions. A phenomenon called a sundog by meteorologists highlighted the southern horizon as we drove. In form it was a truncated halo caused by the arctic sun's refraction through an overcast of high stratus clouds: the bracketing arms of the halo extended like curved sticks from sun level down to the horizon. She told us that Eskimos call these the sun's canes, needed at this time of year because it is getting colder and the sun is getting weaker.

In a philosophical moment she confided to her sister-in-law, Shirley English:

Today I have more comfort than I used to have, but I like the old ways best and sometimes I pine for the way it was. ... We had to make do with a little bit, but we were active and happy. ...

In the old days we never hurried. Life moved by the sun. We didn't need to look at watches. Our work followed the order of the seasons....We worked hard, but we played hard too. In winter I used to take my kids out to see the sky lit up by red and green northern lights. We'd clap our hands and say "Shhh," a hissing noise, to make the northern lights dance.³¹

Another archetype of the North was Tishu's friend Nellie Cashman, white haired and elderly when Tishu knew her, but still a force to be reckoned with. She was more than a notable frontier woman. Her varied contributions to the mining booms of Arizona, Canada, and Alaska over half a century made her a symbol of all that was admired in frontier life. Once she found the edge of civilization, she could never leave it. By 1908 Nellie was already an established miner on Nolan Creek,32 evidently coming into that camp with the deep-placer boom. In January 1924, just a year before her death at more than 70 years of age, the Valdez Pathfinder ran this story:

After mushing on a seventeen-day trip from the Koyukuk, Miss Nellie Cashman, super pioneer woman of Alaska, and mine operator, arrived recently in Anchorage. Despite her slight figure and years of pioneering in the North, Miss Cashman in making the trip has maintained her record for being the only white woman in Alaska who at her age, travels over the roughest country in any weather by dog team. Miss Cashman was one of the first white women in Alaska, coming first to Wrangell, in the southeastern district, before the north had been extensively explored. She went into the Cassiar Country and has pioneered in many other gold rush camps including Dawson and Nome ... ³³

A year later, under the heading "Pioneer Woman Prospector Goes on Last Stampede," the Pathfinder reported her death in a Victoria, B.C., hospital.³⁴ Her experience in gold camps had begun in Arizona a half-century earlier, after she and her sister migrated from Ireland to Boston and later to San Francisco. Having presided over her sister's marriage in San Francisco, Nellie spent nearly 20 years in Tucson and Tombstone before going to the Cassiar and Old Caribou districts in British Columbia. Then followed nearly 30 years of Yukon strikes and camps, beginning with her organization of a mining company in the Klondike in 1898.³⁵

During the Arizona years, Nellie supported her widowed sister and five children, then, following her sister's death, raised the orphans as her own. Fulfilling those family tasks, she turned over most of her various fortunes to charity. Indeed, she became a one-woman organizer of charitable institutions.³⁶

Her death was deeply mourned across Alaska and the Yukon, as well as in Arizona, for she had been an Angel of Mercy in all the camps, curing scurvy, getting her way with merchants to provide relief and succor for the afflicted. Admiration mixed with softer sentiments, for she was tough on the trail, leaving the best men dog-drivers panting, then setting up camp and fixing grub while they rested. Her hope and enterprise never flagged. She came to her end on a business trip aimed at expanding her placer operations on the Koyukuk. Now, this remarkable woman was "resting in the Last Roadhouse."³⁷

*****

Since the early explorations, only the geologists of the USGS had viewed the central Brooks Range through scientific eyes. Even for them, pure science remained subordinate to basic mining geology and reconnaissance mapping. Alaska's more accessible regions had attracted biologists, paleontologists, vulcanologists, glaciologists, and ethnologists, but the upper country remained, as in most things, a neglected region.

Broader scientific investigations in this mountain fastness awaited some functional stimulus. The mixing of imported reindeer with the native caribou of Alaska provided a small nudge in that direction.

Modern biological studies began in the central Brooks Range with the arrival of the Murie brothers during the winter of 1922-23. Olaus, the older brother, and Adolph, his assistant, had been raised on the Red River in Minnesota, where natural history had been their boyhood pastime. Olaus had been hired by Dr. Edward W. Nelson, chief of the U.S. Biological Survey and an old Alaska hand himself, to study the relationship between wild caribou and domestic reindeer.

Reindeer had been introduced to Alaska from Siberia by Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson in 1892 to provide a stable food supply for Native people. Spreading from the Nome region, reindeer herds became an important staple or supplement of village food supplies, with one herd proximate to the upper country of this study based at Shungnak from 1907 to the early 1940s. Reindeer, a smaller and less robust animal than the wild caribou, tended to join caribou as they passed by on migration. Dr. Nelson feared the effects on caribou of cross-breeding with the inferior domestic deer. He wanted scientific data on caribou ranges and migration patterns so reindeer-industry regulations could be designed to keep the two varieties of deer apart. Claus had already studied caribou herds in the Tanana Valley and around Mt. McKinley when he invited Adolph to join him for an all-winter Brooks Range caribou survey in 1922.³⁸

Basing at Fairbanks, the brothers assembled dogs, sleds, and supplies. While waiting for good mushing conditions, they made what became lasting friendships with professors and students of Alaska's newly established land grant college. Finally, in late November they took off for the Koyukuk. In Adolph's words, "These were the blessed days before the advent of the airplane in the north." It was a time of winter journeys by dog team and summer cross-country hiking. Except for a small stash of staples, the scientists lived off the country. At remote camps and cabins, Natives and sourdoughs welcomed the travelers, whose coming into the country the hard way was prove-up enough for them. Both their unbounded hospitality and their knowledge of wildlife helped the brothers in their work.³⁹

The Muries mushed from Nenana to Tanana crossing, then across country to Alatna-Allakaket on the Koyukuk. After Christmas and New Year's celebrations there--where they joined assembled miners, Eskimos, and Indians in all-night dances, and returned trader Sam Dubin's false teeth, found in a mail-shelter cabin en route (Johnny Tobuk, the Eskimo dance caller, hung them on the Christmas tree)--they headed up the Alatna River. An attempted crossing to the Kobuk foiled them because of brush thickets, lack of game, and unbroken trails. So they headed up the Alatna and Kutuk rivers to collect sheep specimens. Then, in the mode of Eskimo hunters, they ridged-and-valleyed eastward along the mountain axis to Wiseman. Thence they took the Chandalar trail back to the Yukon River, returning via Fort Yukon and Circle to Fairbanks. The 1,500-mile trip was accomplished with simple but adequate gear, including a small silk tent and a Yukon stove. January and February temperatures averaged nearly 40 degrees below zero, and dropped to minus 68 degrees during one cold spell. Yet they managed "easily and routinely."⁴⁰

In his summary report, Olaus described the Alaska-Yukon caribou as primarily a mountain animal, despite its seasonal resort to lowlands. He showed that areas of caribou concentration "... practically outline the main divides between river systems." The mingling of the Yukon-Tanana plateau herd and the Brooks Range herd, which at that time migrated south along the Koyukuk-Chandalar divide, "... takes place by means of the only mountainous routes available--near Rampart, where more or less rugged topography reaches the Yukon from both sides."⁴¹ His recording of Eskimo and Indian information on caribou population and range fluctuations, and responsive Native hunting patterns through the years, was a significant contribution to knowledge of long-term caribou cycles.

Aside from scientific contributions, this trip and one taken two years later by Olaus and his bride, Margaret, provided valuable perspectives, both social and esthetic, about the upper country. Bob Marshall read Olaus Murie's writings and later consulted with him and Margaret. This association helped to lure Marshall to the central Brooks Range. In time it led to a team effort by Marshall and the Muries that resulted in joint development of a wilderness philosophy and, eventually, formation of The Wilderness Society in the 1930s.

The Muries' writings on the Brooks Range combine the prosaic of scientific documentation and travel logs and the inspirational of people in tune with appealing physical and social environments. At the brink of the mountains, Olaus looked back on December 21, 1922, at the barrens just crossed:

...wide, almost level stretches of tundra and gently sloping plains. These opens somehow impressed me profoundly. I wanted to linger and assimilate the full beauty of them. I do not know in what it consists, the charm of it all. Perhaps the dogteams trotting along, threading a ribbon trail across it, belonged in the picture. I thought of herds of caribou dotting such a scene. Certainly the wildness of it and the expanse of it seemed to require some wide-ranging animals and perhaps therein lay its charm for me. I seemed to want to roam over these plains myself, like the caribou, and feed on lichens, face the winds, and travel on and on.⁴²

The brothers based part of their trip out of Pooto Hope's cabin some 30 miles up the Alatna. Pooto, an Eskimo whose father carne from the Noatak, had the only cache of whitefish available for dogfood. He and his family traveled with the Muries up the Alatna and Kutuk rivers, where Pooto's expertise in hunting the wary mountain sheep helped the brothers bring both meat and specimens into camp. He provided historical data on caribou movements, remembering, for example, that when he was a boy caribou had been plentiful on the Alatna, wintering there after migration from the Arctic Slope through the Endicott Mountain passes. During that period of plenty, he related, many Eskimos came into the Alatna country from the arctic side, returning north in the late spring. He told the brothers that he had hunted moose on the upper Colville River, that grizzlies were common north of the mountains, but not black bear. His lore, combined with that of other Natives and prospectors, gave time depth to the brothers' own single-season observations.⁴³

One touching story shows how close the Murie brothers and the Pooto Hope family had become after weeks of living, traveling, and hunting together. Pooto's old wheel dog had finally given out after 15 years of faithful service. Normally, Pooto confided, he had no trouble shooting a worn out or injured dog, but this one was a member of the family, dear to them all. It was a pregnant hint and Olaus took it, volunteering to do a good and painless job of it. Pooto eagerly accepted. After Pooto and his wife, Annie, gave the aged female one last rabbit feed, Olaus took her far down the river, as Pooto requested, "...so Annie she don't hear."⁴⁴

From a vantage point on the upper Kutuk near their sheep hunting site, Olaus described the panorama:

...We could look out over the mountain mass and were impressed by the expanse of it, a maze of peaks, higher and higher, stretching off to the backbone of the range, which the Eskimo pointed out to me in the distance. To the west of the Alatna, opposite the mouth of the Kutuk we saw a jagged mountain mass which the Eskimo call, "Ar-re-ga-ger-nich," meaning "hand," referring to the sharp finger-like peaks.⁴⁵

Having broken many miles of trail through deep snow, having faced the howling winds of mountain gaps, Olaus wrote this of the Alatna's winter weather:

On the lower portion [of the river] there is very little wind and the snow falls evenly to a great depth. Above Helpmejack Creek high winds are frequent, in fact windy weather is the normal condition. The wind was practically always down stream, from the north. In many places on the river and on Takahula Lake we traveled over a rough surface of fantastically carved snow drifts. Sometimes it is practically impossible to travel against the storm.⁴⁶

Margaret Murie had come to Alaska as a child. She grew up in Fairbanks, where her stepfather was a U.S. Attorney, and where she met Olaus Murie, a reticent Norwegian, who would in time win her heart. After becoming the first woman graduate from Alaska's new college (with Olaus' coaching in mathematics), she rendezvoused with Olaus at the Yukon River village of Anvik in August 1924. They married in the mission church. Then they steamed up the Koyukuk in Teddy H., Sam Dubin's little sternwheeler, en route to an extended honeymoon in the Brooks Range, where they tracked the caribou together.⁴⁷

Margaret's recollection of that trip--the friends made, the adventures, the beauties of the country and its wildlife--depict a legendary yet real Alaska--deep Interior Alaska before its modern denaturing and shrinkage. Through her writings she has shared an Alaska of realized dreams, lived by people at home in their place.

Teddy H. brought together a small host of people important to this history--Sam Dubin himself, a burly, bearded, bear of a man with a faint Russian accent--premier trader on the Koyukuk since the N.C. Co. had sold out; lanky Frank Smith, "a Bret Harte" character--boat cook in summer, Wild Lake miner in winter; and Otto Geist, a young German immigrant--boat engineer and budding scientist, who would collect specimens for Olaus and go on to become an Alaskan savant in his own right. Teddy H. was a little box of a boat with four staterooms and a tiny pilothouse perched over the engine room, freight hold, and crew's quarters below.⁴⁸ As was usual in riverboat navigation, a Native pilot, David Tobuk, guided Teddy H. through shifting bars and channels.

At Alatna, Teddy H. unloaded cargo for Dubin's store, then crossed to Allakaket to drop supplies for the mission and Indian village. Two women missionaries ministered to the well being of the villagers, and one of them, nurse Amelia Hill, mushed to the outlying camps in winter.

Low water grounded Teddy H. repeatedly, so passengers roamed the woods shooting rabbits to replenish the boat's larder. Finally, the steamboat blocked by emerging bars, the Muries transferred to a small gas boat for what they hoped would be the last leg to Bettles. The delays en route had not been wasted. Claus had probed the Native crew's knowledge of the country ahead. And he and Otto Geist, by now an eager scientist's apprentice, had collected specimens and prepared them for shipment.

The Muries finally reached Bettles, but only after descending through all low-water transportation stages -- from steamboat to gas boat to scow to poling boat to hiking the last few miles through brush and swamp. By the time they got there, slush ice was beginning to run in the Koyukuk.

At Bettles they met Bill English, Tishu's stepfather and storekeeper for Sam Dubin: they stayed in one of Jack Dodd's roadhouse cabins. While they waited for mushing weather, Margaret met Pooto Hope, Olaus and Adolph's guide two years before. She joined Fred and Mary Smith, as well as Ludie Hope, wife of Pooto's brother Sammy, for grayling fishing. On September 30, a fair day, she climbed Lookout Mountain and gazed northward, as Lt. Henry Allen had done just 39 years before. In her dairy she wrote:

...from the top of the mountain there were spread the Koyukuk Valley and the Endicott Mountains in blue and white tranquility, broad brown and green valley, twisting river, high snowy peaks: soon it will surely 'be a picture in black and white. ... We came home at sunset time: the air is tingly smoky cold these days, the mountains where lies Wiseman, far upriver, flooded in sunset pink.⁴⁹

With freeze-up came final preparations for winter travel. Olaus and Margaret headed upriver for Wiseman: Otto Geist and the Smiths would soon follow as far as the mouth of Wild River, then branch up that stream to Frank's mine on Wild Lake.

Except for sunlit patches, the "black and white" of winter landscape dominated as Olaus and Margaret sledded northward. Resting the dogs after a long climb, Margaret viewed the northern forest, "...more lovely than I had ever seen ... spruce trees, black in shadow and emerald in the light, willows full of purple shades and alive with gossiping red polls. There in tall poplars were some pine grosbeaks, yellow and red caps lighted up by the sun ... very busy about their own affairs."⁵⁰ At Roy King's fox farm and roadhouse they took rest and refreshment after a 19-mile day of hard going. Roy took part of their load and went ahead in his own sled the next morning, leaving guide tracks for them to follow along the treacherous river trail. The trail to Wiseman provided more hospitable encounters with wintering miners and trappers, including one with South Fork Henry, a reclusive trapper whose excited German-English dialect "was quite unintelligible" until he had refreshed his talking skills. At Coldfoot, the only residents left, the Minanos, brewed hot tea and put them up for the night. Next day they got to Wiseman. Martin Slisco took them in at his roadhouse, a large cabin flanked by two smaller ones connected by enclosed passageways. Olaus' friends from the earlier trip crowded in; and though they were at first tongue-tied by the presence of such a young white woman--there were none like her in the Koyukuk camp--the clamor of questions, explanations, and news from outside soon filled their small room.

That night at dinner, Margaret was the only woman with 10 men. She asked, "Are there no women here at all, then?" Judge Huey told her that there were seven white women in camp, all at the Nolan Creek mines. He had already phoned Louisa Pingel to come keep her company. (Louisa, an ex-missionary, had married miner Henry Pingel; she and former teacher Ruth Allen visited Margaret the next day.) After talk of dogs, a critical subject where they furnished the only transportation, conversation turned to life in this Far North camp. Smith Creek miner Bobby Jones summed it up:

You know, we've all been in the Koyukuk so long we're afraid to leave it; we cuss the blame place and still we're so darn fond of it we keep on staying and digging and freezing and forking over all our dust to Sam, to get enough to eat to keep on digging and freezing and cursing the country ...⁵¹

Olaus' caribou study got off to a fast start. A large herd wandered through the Wiseman vicinity the next morning--their first appearance there in many years. Claus took two specimens, which also provided meat for the Muries journey to Bettles River, where hundreds, perhaps thousands of caribou were reported. Having noted the Koyukuk's thick growth of "caribou moss" or lichen on the upriver trip, Claus speculated that the barren-ground caribou vacated large sections of country for years at a time so their slow-growing forage could recover. Somehow, the caribou knew when to leave an active range and return to one that had lain fallow. This cycle of grazing and recovery explained the caribou's extended and shifting migration patterns and their survival in the spare Arctic.⁵²

From their tent camp on Bettles River, north of Wiseman, Olaus and Mardy, as he called her, roamed the winter scene together in the intervals between his long marches after the caribou. With increasing cold the sound of trees cracking could be heard. No longer were the snowy peaks a jagged horizon to the north; they were straight up. One afternoon, awaiting Claus' return, Mardy and her dog Ungiak paused on a mountainside:

...the slopes flanking the river looked like chalk drawings, chalk-blue lines and ranks of trees filling all the little gullies, reaching up toward the tops of all ridges, giving way at last to the chalk-white of snowy summits; these two colors. Yet an hour later as we came running and sliding down to the valley, the western sky was flame-red as it so often is in the Arctic in winter, dyeing the mountaintops a rose color, lifting the forest into inky black contrast.⁵³

Return to Wiseman coincided with the presidential election of 1924. The territorials had no legal vote, but they held a mock election anyway--combined with a dance at the Pioneers' Hall, a sheep raffle ("An Eskimo hunter had learned the money-making schemes of the white man."), a midnight supper at the roadhouse, and a resumption of dancing until 5 a.m. periodically, Joe Ulen checked the election returns from the States at the Signal Corps office (he could receive signals by then), a great change from the former month-long wait for election results.

The disparity of sexes--45 men and only 5 dancing women, two of them Minano daughters--was solved by Deputy Marshal Vaughan Green, "...who announced 'tag dance' nearly every other dance. There would follow a mad rush by all the stags, and a raucous melee, in which we women changed partners about every five steps...."⁵⁴

The next day was filled with visits and invitations. Gifts and goodbyes prepared the Muries for departure to Fairbanks. The frontier party and its aftermath made Mardy regretful that "... we had not had enough of this Koyukuk, of these people who had so taken us into their lives. ...[They] were living in grace and comfort far north of the circle. They had serenity."⁵⁵

Years later Olaus and Mardy came back to the Brooks Range. Together they witnessed one of earth's primordial scenes, here painted in her words:

Just before dinner I walked up the slope behind camp toward the mountain, and stood and searched the western landscape, for Olaus was sure the caribou had all been somewhere to the west all this time, having their calves. White caps still dotted our lake, but the landscape was quiet; nothing moved except one of our gulls, startlingly white against the blue sky. After the wind, it all seemed breathlessly still, as though we were all waiting for something.

[After dinner came the cry, "caribou, caribou..."] By now the great herd covered the flat, and the sounds it made were fantastic....Olaus and I kept going uphill, trying to get above for a good look, and finally we collapsed on a high slope, on the grass, and settled down to look and listen. They were traveling steadily along, a great mass of dark-brown figures; bulls, cows, calves, yearlings; every combination of coloring, all bathed in the bright golden light of this arctic night. The quiet, unmoving landscape I had scanned so carefully from the ridge before dinner had come alive--alive in a way I am not competent to describe. The rightful owners had returned. Their thousands of hoofs, churning through the gravel and water of the creeks and the river, had been the great mysterious "train" we had heard and puzzled over....Collectively, they make a permeating, uncanny rumble, almost a roar, not to be likened to anything else I can think of. But the total effect of sound, movement, the sight of those thousands of animals, the clear golden western sky, the last sunlight on the mountain slope, gave one a feeling of being a privileged onlooker at a rare performance--a performance in Nature's own way, in the setting of countless ages, ages before man. ...⁵⁶

Shortly after the Muries began their trip to Wiseman, Otto Geist and Frank and Mary Smith followed their tracks to Wild River, en route to Frank's Wild Lake claims. The two men had worked together on Sam Dubin's Teddy H. that summer, but freeze-up put them on the beach. Otto had no hope of working for Dubin as a store clerk that winter. The trader had been caught with a large inventory of furs when prices tumbled the previous spring; low water in the Koyukuk had doubled his freight costs. His business was limping and he could afford no extra help.

Otto wanted to stay longer in the north country, but not loafing through the winter and spending all his money in Bettles. He and another young German named John Summers decided to pool their cash with Frank Smith to grubstake a winter mining venture on Frank's Wild Lake claims. They would split the take three ways.⁵⁷

After 33 days of extreme cold and hardship, making innumerable relay trips by freight sled over the river ice to haul their mining equipment and supplies, the party finally reached Wild Lake and the site of Smith's tiny cabin near the mouth of Spring Creek. Immediately they started building another cabin so the four people and their supplies could fit indoors; Frank and Mary tent camped in minus 50 and 60 degree temperatures until it was done.

That job finished, the men began hauling clay and rocks out of Frank's 90-foot shaft on nearby Lake Creek, accumulating their dump for spring sluicing. Smith and Summers dug in the hole; Otto manned the steam winch to pull up the bucket. On Sundays Otto cut wood on surrounding hillsides and hauled it to the cabins and the shaft for use as heating and thawing fuel. He also had to haul snow, then melt it to replenish the water in their little steam boiler. They used a combination of wood fires and steam thawing in the drift.

Chop wood, build fires, melt snow and ice, operate the winch and empty the bucket on the dump--that was Otto's winter routine, day after day, and the hours spent working in the cold and dark were long ones. But there always was the happy thought that when spring came they would run the material through the sluice and leave the Wild Lake country as rich men ...⁵⁸

As winter progressed and their frozen meat and fish gave out, humans and dogs became desperate. Mary Smith set out miles of snare lines and caught hundreds of arctic hare--their frozen carcasses had to be hauled in by freight sled, another of Otto's Sunday jobs. After months of fried, stewed, broiled, baked, chopped, and grilled rabbits--a total of more than 2,500 of them--even Mary's cooking variations could not stave off monotony and nausea. Since rabbits lack fat, and a diet of meat alone means progressive lassitude, sickness, and starvation, Mary added remnant bacon grease, then dog tallow to the rabbit dishes. They made it, but they felt like rabbits themselves before spring brought the first fresh bird meat.⁵⁹

Finally came breakup, and sluicing began. After many days of hard labor they cleaned up the sluice, picked and sifted the concentrate, and came out with a grand total of $300 in gold--only $100 apiece. Otto had put his entire $1,600 summer's pay into the partnership. He gave up mining at that moment.

After a wild ride down the ice-and-debris choked Wild River in a whipsawed boat, Otto worked another season as engineer in Teddy H., then went on to become one of Alaska's leading archeologists and naturalists, finally dying in 1963 on a visit to his ancestral home in Bavaria.⁶⁰

The paltry result of Otto's venture was not unusual. Creeks in the Wild River section--as in other drainages of the upper Koyukuk--contain many sites of similar busts. Upper reaches of the Wild Lake creeks, particularly Spring and Surprise (earlier called Summit), illustrate the primitive mining techniques of men remote from heavy equipment. Remains of automatic boomer dams and long walls of piled rock begin to hint at the incredible hand-labor required to remove overburden and get to pay gravel and bedrock in these high creeks and gullies. In 1937 Irving Reed visited and compiled the history of mining on these creeks draining Mathews Dome. Typical was Austin Duffy's venture on upper Summit or Surprise Creek, whose gradient put him a half mile above the lake at a point only 1 1/4 miles back from it:

...in early days [he] put in a dam and built a cabin. He piled out rocks and boomed in the creek bed 6 or 7 feet deep for 120 feet. It is said that he had to quit work on account of lack of supplies and that bedrock was not reached in his cut.⁶¹

Pockets of gold did exist, and a few ventures paid well. But time after time a season's work on dams, rockpiles, and shafts produced $93, $45, or $10.⁶² Just climbing up to these sites is a pretty good workout, not to speak of hauling supplies and working the ground month after month. Contemplation of the physical results of that work, including hundreds of feet of rock walls reminiscent of Inca ruins, stretches one's definition of faith and hope as practiced by gold miners.

In the larger view, the Alaska of the 1920s was "on the skids" and "going backward." Ernest Gruening called the period "The Twilit Twenties." He summarized Alaska's problems with a quotation from Isaiah Bowman: "Civilization needs continuity of effort in place." Such was not the condition in most of the territory. The exodus of population caused by exhaustion of easy placers and the high wages of World War I industries was not followed by a new wave of immigrants after the war. Rather, the lusty and expansive economy in the States during the 1920s kept people there. They were not prodded by hardship to seek fulfillment of desperate dreams in the distant territory.

Alaska's dwindling population and fading economy, including a precipitate drop in mining, broke continuity and set remote sections adrift, particularly those in the Interior. Except for completion of the Alaska Railroad from Seward to Fairbanks, federal programs and initiatives atrophied. Alaska Road Commission appropriations plummeted, and what limited funds did come through had to be used mainly for maintenance. This meant few new ARC roads and trails even in the economically active regions. The upper country remained isolated by lack of any but winter-trail overland connections to the outside world. An internal road-and-trail system completed in the Twenties connected Bettles to Wiseman by winter sled road, and Wiseman to the Nolan and Hammond diggings by wagon road. Beginning in the mid-Twenties a significant part of territorial (and local) transportation funding supported construction of airfields under ARC supervision. This effort responded to Alaskans' instant and enthusiastic adoption of the airplane as a means to jump over roadless expanses. In 1926 the citizens of Wiseman contributed $1,613.25 in money and labor for construction of their airfield. Others would be located at Shungnak on the upper Kobuk, at Bettles, and at the Bettles River and Chandalar mining camps.⁶³

The upper country's rudimentary transportation and communication system, completed by about 1930, would remain essentially unaltered until after World War II. It comprised small steamboats, barges, and scows on the rivers; isolated, internal road-and-trail systems, with tenuous winter trails marked by occasional shelter cabins extending to the Yukon River and to Kotzebue Sound; and scattered wireless stations and airfields. The winter-trail extensions to the periphery became marginal as the airplane became more prevalent.

Another modification occurred in the Wiseman area when in 1929 Sam Dubin bought a Caterpillar tractor and brought it to Wiseman. Once the mysteries of the machine were solved (after a winter of breakdowns), the tractor wreaked a revolution in local transportation. Hauling freight on sledges from Bettles to Wiseman and the camps, bringing in wood, and performing all manner of hired jobs for miners, this one machine would in time put Jack White's horse scows out of business and generally replace dogs and manpower for the heavy work of the community. According to Walter Johnson, who later drove the machine for the ARC and became co-owner of the store in Wiseman, this tractor became "an amazing source of power" in a place where nothing like it had existed before. The Cat still stands behind Harry Leonard's cabin in Wiseman, a bit rusty, but salvageable. Even today, there are those among the old timers who plot to "rev up" the old Cat and put it back to work.

The Cat made life easier in the way of labor. But in an economy as marginal as the upper Koyukuk's its economic impact was profound. Teamsters, dog-sled freighters, wood haulers, and mine laborers lost their jobs to the machine. And most of the money grossed by the Cat went outside for imported fuel. So the net result was fewer jobs and less money in the community.⁶⁴

Other examples show that machines fitted uneasily into Alaska's frontier conditions and economy. Airplanes put dog-sled mail carriers out of business; and, in contrast to the all-weather mushers, pilots waited when the weather closed down. As the mail carriers faded from the scene, ARC-maintained mail routes and shelter cabins became less essential, and less maintained. Trails deteriorated, inhibiting trail travel. Roadhouses that served travelers went out of business. Many people in remote camps were effectively stranded by the neglected trails and the cost of air travel.

Both airplanes and the railroad worked to destroy river commerce and the culture that had grown up around it. Steamboat freighting and riverway trading began to decay. Woodcutters and the scores of camps and roadhouses along the steamboat routes withered on the vine. The sense of community that linked the riverine camps and villages ended when people flew directly to Fairbanks, missing the leisurely visits with friends and trading partners along the steamboat routes. People paid for progress as they embraced it.⁶⁵

The amazing effects of the Alaska Railroad on Yukon steamboating stemmed in part from a natural phenomenon. Because of the breakup sequence on the Yukon, the lower river stays closed a month longer in the spring than the middle and upper reaches. For this reason, as soon as the railroad was completed to Nenana on the Tanana River, the Koyukuk trading firm of English, Feger, and Dubin shifted from the St. Michael upriver supply route to the Tanana-Yukon downriver route. Others in the Interior, short-seasoned by its fleeting summers, followed this example. In a flash, Nenana on the Tanana became the freighting entrepot for the Interior. Now the mouth of the Yukon could open when it liked. St. Michael and rows of pulled out steamboats were soon rotting on the beach.⁶⁶

The Great Depression brought a flurry of New Deal programs to Alaska, but they hardly touched the upper country. It was out of sight and out of mind even in Alaska. Moreover, depression had been its condition long before 1929, so nothing much had changed.

By Presidential Order in 1933, the price of gold rose from $20.67 to $35 an ounce. This stimulus aided the big mining companies with major dredge operations in the Nome and Fairbanks districts, but could not propel out of the doldrums the marginal mines of the upper country. Its rich paydirt apparently exhausted, its logistics prohibitive for any outside-capital development that might discover new riches, the region continued through the Thirties with the small-scale mining and subsistence pattern set during World War I. World War II produced another exodus for war-industry wages, and gold mining was declared unessential to the war effort, killing what little remained of the mining economy. Nor did the postwar years bring recovery. By 1952, for example, only 21 people lived in Wiseman and the surrounding area.⁶⁷

A general pattern of low-level stability prevailed on the upper Kobuk during the inter-war period. Small-scale mining continued in the Cosmos Hills. Commercial, governmental, and missionary activity serving the upper-river Native villages--freighting, trading, health services, and schools--produced a more diversified economy and more stable communities than on the Koyukuk. With improved health services after World War I, a steadily increasing Native population allowed miner-entrepreneurs like the Ferguson family to gradually expand their transportation and trading businesses in the Kobuk-Shungnak area.

A dearth of wage jobs forced most Kobuk Eskimos to depend heavily on fur trapping for cash to buy coveted store goods. When fur prices crashed in the early Thirties buying of store goods declined. But fur trapping and trading, however paltry the profits, continued anyway, for furs were the sole source of cash for most Native families.

With the coming of hard times Native people reverted to greater dependence on traditional fishing and hunting, as observed by anthropologist J. Louis Giddings in 1940. Lack of caribou in the Kobuk Valley had earlier forced some Kobukmiut eastward to Koyukuk-Chandalar country. Those who stayed on in the Kobuk villages responded to the lack of big game by taking long hunting trips into the upper Noatak country--an unpopulated area during this period, because the Noatagmiut of the high mountains had gone downriver to Noatak village and most of the other Nunamiut had evacuated to the Arctic coast. Caribou and sheep met meat and clothing needs, and a sideline of wolf, wolverine, and fox trapping brought in a little cash.

The relative diversity of resources on the upper Kobuk and in easily adjacent drainages--minerals, timber, fish, wildlife, and fertile gardening soil--gave the Kobukmiut enough alternatives to weather hard times and make a reasonable living.⁶⁸

The flexibility and mobility of the Kobuk people during this period exemplifies an ancient pattern. Survival over the centuries in a spare environment required a constant readiness to shift from one combination of resources to another, wherever those resources might be found. It took a huge geography in the Arctic to find new combinations when starving times hit the home territory. This need for access to alternatives is a living part of the Native heritage today, especially in those traditional villages where subsistence livelihood remains strong. It is a culturally ingrained form of insurance. 'After all, the modern world has its cycles, too, just like the caribou. Tomorrow may bring hard times. Then the people may have to range widely--over the mountains, down to Selawik, across the portage. Lines on maps do not change this reality. For this reason the people do not like lines on maps.

Two major episodes in the middle and late Twenties symbolized the geographic and economic realities of the upper country. In combination they marked the transition from dreams of Eldorado to the vague potential of a future based on oil. Paradoxically, the old-style Argonauts brought new combinations of technology and capital to their quest for golden riches; the harbingers of black gold, which would spawn giant combinations of technology and capital, brought only dog teams and canoes--and the scientific tools in their heads.

The last spasm of the dying past began in 1926 when the Detroit Mining Company, a European and American financed firm under the field direction of English promoter William Royden and mining engineer L.S. Robe, tried to bring big-time mining to Hammond River. Royden and Robe were well known in Fairbanks mining circles. They had money, 75 bench claims, and a dream. They would surmount the lack of mining water with a 60-mile long pump-and-pipeline system tapping the North Fork drainage. They built special boats and scows to haul heavy machinery, hundreds of tons of it, to Hammond River. They flew in 35 men from Fairbanks and built a town on the Hammond. They mobilized political support for extending the railroad 400 miles to the Wiseman district. Once on track with the placer mining, the company would extend its operations to copper, coal, and even the rumored oil of the Colville headwaters. Newspapers proclaimed revival of the Koyukuk district. The old days of individual miners grubbing out gold by hand would soon be over. At last, with capital at hand and large-scale production imminent, the upper country would get its long-sought road and break the transportation barrier that had held it back.

But then reality set in. Low water on the Koyukuk grounded the new tunnel-drive boats and the scows. Cabling them over the bars ripped out their bottoms. This plus the short season frustrated hauling of machinery, pieces of which--giant boilers, pumps, and winches--ended up scattered along the river from Bettles to the mining sites. The airplane, useful for prospecting, could not help in hauling the tonnage needed for this scale of development work. Neither road nor railroad penetrated the far north. Season after season, the Koyukuk persisted with its low-water perversities. Attempts at winter freighting broke down on terrain and costs. Mining creeks ran dry, foiling large-scale hydraulicking operations. The pipeline remained a pipe dream. Detroit Mining brought out a couple of good pokes from its Nolan Creek claims, but only enough to keep the promotion alive. Newspaper accounts shifted from the "bright future" promised by outside capital to the old storyline from the Koyukuk: Christenson and Ulen sluiced a dump on California Creek; the Stanich brothers did well this year on Porcupine Creek, as did Workman and Wanamaker on Smith Creek; Billy Burke has found pay on a bar of Bettles River. The district is struggling to exist; population decreasing; freight costs going up as volume goes down. Without some transportation relief this fine old camp will die. After four seasons of frustration, Detroit Mining folded, leaving a scatter of machines, boats, scows, and buildings rotting on the banks of the Koyukuk. The river continued to flow as always--deep one day, shallow the next. And the old timers continued to mine as they always had--before the promise of outside capital broke into their world, tarnished, and went away.⁶⁹

Partly as a result of the Detroit Mining venture, which stimulated air transport in the Far North, a new breed of airborne prospectors began searching the mountains. One of them, Fred Moller, became known as the Flying Prospector. He asserted that the virgin areas of the Brooks Range and the Arctic Slope held "a dozen Eldorados" until now hidden by inaccessibility.⁷⁰ In truth, most mineralized areas had been thoroughly searched already by the old breed of foot sloggers, but much of that early prospecting history had been lost. For new generations of the eternally hopeful, the speed and convenience of the airplane, paired with the great extent of vacant country, encouraged the illusion of untracked valleys, virgin territory. That illusion persists today.

A Fairbanks company, Arctic Prospecting and Development, modified a Swallow aircraft with a light-weight Fairchild engine using a cam instead of connecting rods, allowing extra long-distance flights over the vast country.⁷¹ Another prospector designed a light-weight testing drill so that it could be flown to distant prospects.⁷²

Noel Wien flew four members of the Arctic Prospecting outfit to Walker Lake in spring 1928, landing on the ice. He relayed half a ton of supplies in two flights from Alatna, logging 10 1/2 hours of flight time for the 645 miles flown. He noted turbulence in the Endicott Mountains and warned that the lake basin should be approached from the south.⁷³

These rapid adaptations of a new technology to an old quest would be perfected and transferred to the search for North Slope oil during World War II and after.

Meanwhile the USGS began the last and most ambitious of its old-style explorations in northern Alaska. During his 1901 traverse to the Arctic Ocean, geologist Frank Schrader had found the North Slope to be a great sedimentary basin. Coal deposits and oil seeps and pools had been reported by many others. In 1914, Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, a private scientist who volunteered his findings to the USGS, obtained a sample of petroleum residue from the Smith Bay-Cape Simpson area. Tests of this and other samples from various North Slope locations indicated that the asphalt-based residues came from rocks hard enough to show well defined structures. As a result of these clues, it seemed likely that deep reservoirs of oil might be found. In February 1923 President Warren G. Harding issued an Executive Order establishing the Naval Petroleum Reserve No.4 in arctic Alaska. The Navy Department called upon the USGS to provide geographic and geologic information about the new reserve that would allow its proper administration. Immediately, Alfred Hulse Brooks, Director of the Survey, wrote a paper summarizing the current state of knowledge about the tract, and pointing the way for field studies and laboratory research. His charge to the leaders of the multiyear exploration was to provide a regional-framework geology based on extant data and original information gathered in the field. Because so much of the immense tract was unknown, basic topographical and geographical studies were an essential part of the project.⁷⁴

All of the experience gained in three decades of Survey work in Alaska came to focus during this great exploration from 1923 through 1926. Of the many expeditions that ranged along the Arctic Coast and followed the rivers of the Arctic Slope, the most important for this history was the one led through the Brooks Range passes to the upper Colville drainage by Philip S. Smith and his co-leader J.B. Mertie, Jr. A subsidiary expedition into the upper Noatak, headed by W.T. Foran and plagued by hardships, is of anecdotal interest.

In the Twenties, the laborious overland-and-overwintering expedition style was still the only way to conduct geological reconnaissance and mapping in the Brooks Range and upper Colville area. Not until development of World War II-era fixed-wing aircraft logistics and later arrival of the helicopter, the "automatic mountain climber" of today's geologist, could modern transportation match the effectiveness of foot-slogging geology. The man on the ground could zig-zag and scramble through all kinds of surface terrain, tracing the lines of structure that would point to potential oil reservoirs deep below the surface. Thus the irony of the Smith-Mertie expedition, using pioneer methods to wedge open a modern industrial history amazing in its technological sophistication, must be enjoyed with qualification.⁷⁵

The Smith-Mertie expedition winter-camped in 1924 at timberline on an upper Alatna tributary, the Unakserak River. During February, members of the party had transported winter and summer supplies and four crated Peterborough freight canoes by sleds and dog teams from Tanana. This wintering strategy gave them a jump on the short summer season; a summer-only traverse to the remote Colville headwaters would have left little time for exploration. In April the party moved over the Arctic Divide to the Killik River, setting up camp at the mouth of April Creek. From both camps, geologists and topographers surveyed several thousand square miles of hitherto unmapped and undescribed country.

At breakup in late May, the party broke out the canoes and loaded them for travel. Smith and topographer R.K. Lynt quickly floated down the Killik to the Colville, then turned westward upstream and investigated a large part of the upper Colville basin, including about 20 miles of the Etivluk River. Later they turned eastward down the Colville, portaged into the Ikpikpuk drainage and floated north to the Arctic Ocean.

Meanwhile, Mertie and topographer Gerald FitzGerald slowly descended and surveyed the Killik, ascended some miles back into the range on the Okokmilaga River, mistakenly thought to lead to Chandler Lake, then descended the Colville to a point that gave access to a portage route near present Umiat. Both parties came together on the Ikpikpuk, then split again, with Mertie's group descending the Chipp River to the coast, whence they all proceeded to Barrow.⁷⁶

The 1924-26 USGS exploration of the Naval Petroleum Reserve succeeded in providing "...a reasonably adequate but still very generalized picture of the major geologic features of the Reserve."⁷⁷ Both the geology and the geography of the reserve were mapped to reconnaissance scales. The geologists recognized and described the faulted and overthrust structure of the Brooks Range. Though Smith and Mertie had very little stratigraphic information, the widespread occurrence of oil shales and indicators of favorable structural features led them to express conditioned optimism about retention of petroleum in pools at a depth within reach of drilling. Not until World War II would their recommendations begin to be carried out for further geologic field studies and drilling for stratigraphic and structural information. But they had alerted the Nation to a potential that would lead in 40 years to one of the more significant oil finds of all time, and an Alaska changed forever.⁷⁸

The explorers had experienced the usual mix of hardship, adventure, boredom, and flashes of inspiration during their long journey. On April 1, Mertie stood at the 3,400-foot summit of Survey Pass, which divided the Alatna and Colville drainages: "It was a clear day and the view from the crest was stark and barren but beautiful."⁷⁹ Smith wrote that the Brooks Range" ... is extremely attractive because of its sculpture, which has produced ragged mountain masses interrupted by steeply trenched or glacially opened-out valleys. ..."⁸⁰

The seemingly endless period of waiting in winter camp for breakup produced the frictions of men crowded together in wet tents, storm-bound and frustrated: "Every little cough, sniffle or paper rattle got on one's nerves. We thought spring would never come. I kept pondering the beauties of solitude." Every stomach pang, frequent given the dried foods, brought visions of appendicitis.⁸¹ When the weather allowed, the men cleared the tents to do camp chores or go on mapping trips. They had to start shooting the dogs as the animals' utility and food supply diminished. They wanted to keep one strong, well-fed team so FitzGerald could keep on mapping. One evening they took 18 dogs out:

Poor devils! It seemed a shame after they had worked so hard for us. They were not like horses. After the first one was shot, they understood what was going to happen to them. I would rather kill a dozen horses than one dog!⁸²

They became obsessed with the need for something green, some sign of life. Finally it came, and Smith caught the moment:

Early in May the rigors of winter had largely disappeared. Much of the snow on the adjacent hills had melted.... Soon afterward birds that had wintered in more southern regions put in their appearance, and flocks of ducks and geese could be heard whirring northward over the camp....[S]uddenly, May 19, a loud roar announced the breaking of the ice on one of the small streams in the neighborhood.⁸³

The trip down the Killik nearly wrecked the expedition. Standing waves in the high-water rapids foundered canoes and soaked cargoes. Rocky shallows meant endless dragging, which ripped the heavy-laden cedar boats. Mosquitoes soon came in their multitudes, driving the men to distraction. Yet they continued mapping, studying the geology, and exploring tributaries. When opportunity came they hunted for food, trying to save their rations for what now appeared to be the interminable trek to Barrow, nearest resupply point.⁸⁴

The mysteries of geology and the geologists' detective work of observation and deduction are caught in Mertie's field notes along "the big loops" zone of the Colville River:

The chert-limestone series is here about 4 miles wide. At the 4224 [elevation] hill, the chert and limestone are intimately mingled, sometimes interbanded in the seams, sometimes interbedded in thick beds. The limestone... is fine [and] for the most part silicious. Most of it is crystalline. There are some few beds of fine grained or dense black non-crystalline limestone. Much of the limestone, both crystalline and non-crystalline, has a strong organic odour. The limestone is highly fossiliferous...I wonder if this Lisburne limestone could have been the ultimate source of the oil in the younger formations near the coast.⁸⁵

The sense of scientific dedication pervades the pages of Smith and Mertie's field notes. Mosquitoes, arduous portages, fatigue, and the thousand frustrations of Arctic Slope rivers--whose meanders coil back upon themselves everlastingly--were simply the price of discovery. Late in August the surveyors walked the last few miles of ice-bound beach to the trading station at Barrow.⁸⁶

On August 5, the western party of the 1924 exploration, led by W.T. Foran, started southward from Wainwright on the northwest coast. After several days lost to river scouting and portaging, Foran's crew reached the Utukok River and finally attained its headward parts in late August. Thus, just as the Smith-Mertie party reached safety and succor at Barrow, Foran and his men stood looking at the north flank of the already snow-covered Brooks Range. Between them and the Noatak, as they would find to their dismay, lay some 60 miles of continuous portage over two major divides, one of them 4,000 feet above sea level.

Foran's trip diary conveys the dawning realization of their predicament:

August 22: Cold--Snowing....Still carrying all equipment and two canoes.

August 23: Snow & Cloudy....Small fork [of Utukok] won't float loaded canoes--packing half of equipment making light loads for canoes. Dragged canoes up river--both canoes leaking badly--will have to cache one soon and start back packing.

August 24: Bad weather--only made 2 miles progress. Back packing and dragging canoe slow process. Will have to move much faster or start back for Icy Cape. Can take no chances of early winter setting in.

August 25: Hot, Clear (No Mosquitoes). Held consultation of war. [F.W.] Belgard says he hired out as cook, not packhorse, [H.G.] Hughes declares himself boatman, and [H.] Lonseth rodman. Final arrangement is to cache about one ton of equipment & supplies and backpack rest of outfit. Men all satisfied. ... have decided to cross mountains instead of hiking back to Arctic coast.

August 26: [O.L.] Wix [topographer] and I mushed to top of high E.W. ridge with gap to east. This fork of Utukok ends at gap. Wide valley with bottom only two or three hundred feet below top of ridge.

The [valley] river is large and flows east. It will add several days on our estimate for crossing mountains.... Looks like about 20 or 25 extra miles of portaging with this valley to cross. Told rest of party the sad news but they are inspired by the good weather, mountain scenery and wanderlust and want to make the Noatak.

After several days of portaging, which put them out of reach of quick return to their cached food supply, they found themselves stranded in a maze of mountains. A scout southward by Lonseth discovered no pass for at least 20 miles ahead. On September 1, "Cold--Cloudy--Snow," Foran noted that it was late to be in these parts with only a summer outfit. "Grub situation getting serious" and no caribou in the neighborhood. Members of the party feared that they were doomed to starve or freeze to death. The men ripped their individual sleeping bags, making double bags so they could sleep together for warmth. Belgard had nothing to cook; the men could not get their minds off food. Belgard "murdered" some ptarmigan, but they added more flavor than substance to the starvation diet of men depleting their bodies with hard labor in deepening cold.

Finally, on September 4, Foran set up camp at a high lake and sent Belgard and Hughes back to the cache for emergency food. While they were gone, Foran and Wix scouted south through the mountains, ascending one ridge where Wix, exhausted, turned back. Foran continued south hour after hour, finally climbing a lofty peak on the crest of a high group of mountains. Looking into a deep valley, he spotted their objective, the Nimiuktuk River, a tributary of the Noatak. After hours of lost wandering in ice fog he finally got back to camp at 10 o'clock the next morning.

Still without food except for biscuits, the three men in camp alternated rest with the relay of supplies to the next ridge. Finally Belgard and Hughes returned from the cache with 60 pounds of food. They were tired and miserable from toil, bad weather, and no sleep.

September 8 they broke camp and began packing gear and supplies over the first mountain wall. At supper, high above the scrub willows of the creek beds, they rustled up plant stems to barely cook their food. It got so cold that their water froze as they tried to heat it. The men crawled into their double bags with all clothes on and shivered through the night. Next morning they broke up tent poles, tripod legs, and a canoe paddle to cook 3 days' rations.

Finally they scaled the last divide into the Nimiuktuk valley. After many relay trips across the pass, they set up camp a few miles downstream at a good wood supply of cottonwoods and willows. For one day the contrast in weather on the south side was "Like dropping out of northern Alaska into California." They celebrated with a big fire.

But their troubles were far from over. The creeks were freezing and low water plagued them almost to the Noatak. Dragging, packing--it was just one more leg of the endless portage. As the cold closed in the food disappeared, except for some dried soup and a few bacon rinds.

On September 16 the weakened men were able to climb into the canoe and float the last few miles to the Noatak. When a late-season seagull flew close to the boat, Foran shaking with fatigue and anxiety, aimed, held, aimed again and shot it. Wix, disappointed in his tiny share, accused Belgard of having wolfed down the seagull gizzard during the cooking. Talk of retribution with lead forced Foran to sequester the firearms.

After some close calls in the Noatak Canyon rapids and lower riffles--the worn canoe was gunnel down and heavy with water--they reached an Eskimo camp and gorged on the proffered raw and cooked caribou and biscuits. Coffee with sugar, the first in weeks, topped off the feast.

When they finally arrived at the Quaker mission at Noatak village, they ate steadily for 11 hours, then collapsed sick and groggy from surfeit. Despite the abundance of food, Wix and Belgard still fought over the gizzard; Belgard spread the conflict by accusing Lonseth of the crime.

On September 21, sick with stomach problems and edema from overeating, they struggled through the last miles of the lower Noatak against upriver wind and waves. The weather broke just long enough for them to get their sodden canoe across Hotham Inlet to Kotzebue. There the gizzard row ended when trader Paul Davidovitz told the still muttering men that meat-eating seagulls don't have gizzards.

All ended well after a stormy passage by tugboat to Nome, where they boarded the ocean steamer Victoria for Seattle. Foran signed off: "Exciting trip from start to finish." Philip S. Smith praised Foran's leadership and the indomitable pluck of the entire party.⁸⁷

*****

The Twenties drew to a close quietly in the upper country. Its bonanzas, such as they had been, were over. Improvements in mining technology and capitalization in other parts of Alaska had been unable to penetrate this remote region.88 In the larger perspective, its social and economic development had plateaued earlier and in the Twenties became eroded and entrenched, rather like the country itself. Those people who chose to remain persevered in their own ways at their own pace, largely untouched by the actions of national or territorial government, insulated from progressive trends to the south. The future was put on hold.

But events of local interest kept happening. Mercifully, the people did not accept the notion that their world was moribund. In time, some of them believed, they would get a road: a new strike would revive mining: a new round of excitement would ensue. Others, deprived of economic opportunities of modern sort, fell back on traditional ways, adaptively reviving the seasonal rounds of hunting and gathering. In a melded sort of way they all adapted and adjusted to a lifeway low on cash and modern institutions, substantial in dependence on each other and the wild resources of the country.

Into this arrested region came a pilgrim. He came as a forester to study the advance of spruce trees toward the Arctic Divide. Quickly that scientific inquiry became an excuse for an affair of the heart, the human and geographical exploration of the central Brooks Range. In the mix of few people and large country, the integration of environment and attitude, Robert Marshall divined a set of values that would enlarge the meaning of wilderness.

He came from a man-built world that he and a growing number of others viewed as a dynamo accelerating toward destruction, dragging a diminished humanity along with it. In the landscapes and people of the Brooks Range, in the fit between them, he found an alternative to the careening madness of the artificial world outside. For him and for his followers, wilderness became a sanctuary where people could revive their connections to the real world that had mothered them. In the deepest sense, his idea of wilderness did not stand opposed to that of its homeland people. Indeed, he challenged the perspective of Western culture, which had long viewed wilderness as a desert to be overcome. He infused wilderness with human values, both inspirational and pragmatic. In the lives of the natives of the Brooks Range--whether of ancient Asian or recent European descent--he found a remedy for troubled modern society. The Natives had never really left home; the whites had come back to it. In this view wilderness means homeland.

Marshall's concept has evolved to become perhaps excessively ethereal--doubtless a protective reaction to ever increasing human population and its remorseless effect of ever diminishing wilderness. But in the robust days of its youth, Marshall's idea of wilderness could not be separated from the people who lived in it and were shaped by it. He simply and profoundly wanted the essence of their experience to be generally available for others who needed it.

Given the trend lines of the modern world, he and others like the Muries knew that everyone could not, would not live in the wilderness. They sought preservation of wilderness landscapes so there would be some places left where the connection between people and the wildlands that had first nourished them could always occur. This was far from an exclusivist, elitist mission. Wilderness was not to be preserved from people but for them.