Read Coming into the Country Online
Authors: John McPhee
Coming into the Country (49 page)
The log church, close by the river, was the purview of the Reverend and Mrs. James Woolaston Kirk, who came into the country in 1899. Their first services were held in a saloon. Their first pulpit was covered with wolfskin. They brought with them a bell cast in Albany. (It is still here.) They did not espouse the Western Philosophy. They were from Philadelphia, and they meant to put some of Rittenhouse Square down on the bank of the Yukon. Dr. Kirk was tall, with opalescent eyes under brows that lifted like spires. Mrs. Kirk was spruce and petite and from the front row of a good long history of choirs. When the couple arrived in Eagle, the miners took one look and instantly got the picture, warning each other that the “minister” and his wife were obviously professional grafters. Mrs. Kirk was forming her impressions, too. She wrote that she was “heartsick when I saw those bold, degraded persons, calling themselves women, who were in the place bent on lowering all standards of morality. I never before saw iniquity in its unblushing hideousness, for wickedness does not stalk abroad in the big city, where the law protects the safety and morality of its citizens.” (In December of the following year, Margaret
Johnson was fined a hundred and fifty dollars “for the crime of keeping a Bawdy House,” and put in jail until all was paid â“not to exceed eighty-five days.”) Mrs. Kirk had with her a foot-pumped organ. She could swell a room with hymns. She also had the first dustpan and brush ever seen in the Interior. She had crystal and china and napkin rings. When miners came into her cabin, tears sometimes collected in their eyes. The miners were homesick. Winter and summer, life in the gold camps and on gold claims was spare and sometimes bitter. They came to her, confided in her, and asked her to play the hymns. “Once, I was worth three hundred thousand dollars, had a fine home and a noble wife,” one miner told her. “All are gone and I am here to get money enough to educate my two daughters, but if the whole camp was compelled to put up ten dollars in gold dust or be shot we would all have to die.” Mrs. Kirk prayed and played for him. A young man came to her once depressed and suicidal. She played the intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana,” and after a time he got up and went back to work feeling better. “Although the Fortymile and Birch Creek districts are among the oldest of the gold-placer producers of Alaska,” Alfred H. Brooks was reporting at the time, “investigations show that they are by no means exhausted and that, with the introduction of improved methods of mining, they will continue to yield good returns.” Brooks, whose name would rest in the Brooks Range, was the U.S.G.S. Geologist in Charge of the Division of Alaskan Mineral Resources, and he was quite right, of course, but the good returns did not apply to all. While Brooks was fostering new successes, the failures went off to Mrs. Kirk.
Johnson was fined a hundred and fifty dollars “for the crime of keeping a Bawdy House,” and put in jail until all was paid â“not to exceed eighty-five days.”) Mrs. Kirk had with her a foot-pumped organ. She could swell a room with hymns. She also had the first dustpan and brush ever seen in the Interior. She had crystal and china and napkin rings. When miners came into her cabin, tears sometimes collected in their eyes. The miners were homesick. Winter and summer, life in the gold camps and on gold claims was spare and sometimes bitter. They came to her, confided in her, and asked her to play the hymns. “Once, I was worth three hundred thousand dollars, had a fine home and a noble wife,” one miner told her. “All are gone and I am here to get money enough to educate my two daughters, but if the whole camp was compelled to put up ten dollars in gold dust or be shot we would all have to die.” Mrs. Kirk prayed and played for him. A young man came to her once depressed and suicidal. She played the intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana,” and after a time he got up and went back to work feeling better. “Although the Fortymile and Birch Creek districts are among the oldest of the gold-placer producers of Alaska,” Alfred H. Brooks was reporting at the time, “investigations show that they are by no means exhausted and that, with the introduction of improved methods of mining, they will continue to yield good returns.” Brooks, whose name would rest in the Brooks Range, was the U.S.G.S. Geologist in Charge of the Division of Alaskan Mineral Resources, and he was quite right, of course, but the good returns did not apply to all. While Brooks was fostering new successes, the failures went off to Mrs. Kirk.
When miners and prospectors, in the eighteen-nineties, had begun appearing in the country in rush quantities, there was âon the American side of the boundaryâlittle order and less law. The War Department, imagining a need for both, sent Captain P. H. Ray on a journey of reconnaissance in 1897. Ray travelled up the Yukon on a cargo-carrying riverboat that was
hijacked when it reached Circle City. The miners took the supplies, because they were otherwise going to starve, and they scrupulously paid a price they thought fair. (The boat had been saving its goods for Dawson, in Canada, which glittered with economic inflation.) Ray continued upriver. When he wrote his report, he said there were eighteen thousand people in the region, “which on our side of the boundary is without semblance of law, civil or military.” There was a need for Army installations, he said. “A turbulent element is coming into the country that will have to be controlled.” He recommended, among other things, a military garrison at the mouth of Mission Creek. It was a good siteâfairly level and well-wooded ground on a high bank of the Yukonâclose to the international boundary. Ray had scarcely left the country when twenty-eight miners platted a townsite on the same bend of the river where he had said the fort should be. If they were not the first real-estate speculators in the Territory of Alaska, they were somewhere high on the list. They might have called the place, say, Rustic Wilderness, but they happened to glance up at the white-headed birds that lived on the river bluff that would dominate the town, and decided to name it for them.
hijacked when it reached Circle City. The miners took the supplies, because they were otherwise going to starve, and they scrupulously paid a price they thought fair. (The boat had been saving its goods for Dawson, in Canada, which glittered with economic inflation.) Ray continued upriver. When he wrote his report, he said there were eighteen thousand people in the region, “which on our side of the boundary is without semblance of law, civil or military.” There was a need for Army installations, he said. “A turbulent element is coming into the country that will have to be controlled.” He recommended, among other things, a military garrison at the mouth of Mission Creek. It was a good siteâfairly level and well-wooded ground on a high bank of the Yukonâclose to the international boundary. Ray had scarcely left the country when twenty-eight miners platted a townsite on the same bend of the river where he had said the fort should be. If they were not the first real-estate speculators in the Territory of Alaska, they were somewhere high on the list. They might have called the place, say, Rustic Wilderness, but they happened to glance up at the white-headed birds that lived on the river bluff that would dominate the town, and decided to name it for them.
For a hero dead in the Philippines, the Army base was called Fort Egbert. Police work became the least of its preoccupations. The Army Signal Corps wanted to extend its great web to cover all America, including the upper Yukon. Communications in Eagle were nothing to write home about. After the Eagle post office was established, in 1899, the Post Office Department, in Washington, decided to establish a winter mail route across the Alaska Range from Valdez, on Prince William Sound, to Eagle, on the Yukon. A carrier, with eleven horses and a sack of mail, set out in October for the north. Eleven horses died. The carrier kept going, of course, and in the dead of winter he finally came walking into Eagle. The trip had cost the government three thousand dollars. In the sack were three letters. The Signal Corps meant to improve on that
with instantaneous messages, by overland wire, from Eagle to all the world. Laying the wire was a project weirdly analogous to the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, in that it required the clearing of a tortuous route north from Valdez (now the pipeline's southern terminus), with camps set up along the way and crews working the equivalents of overtime and double time. The crews were soldiers, earning thirteen dollars a month. Their boss was Lieutenant William Mitchell, twenty-one years old. He was on his way to fame in the air, to a court-martial, to a vindicating posthumous medal, but this was two years before Kitty Hawk, and all he had on his mind was how to move men and materials through several hundred wilderness miles where men and mules carrying heavy loads sank deep into muskeg. Mitchell's solution was to transport in winter what he would build in summerâa procedure new to the Army, and requiring Mitchell to become an expert in everything from Arctic clothing to the efficacy of sled runners. To protect morale, he prohibited thermometers. Work proceeded even at forty and fifty below. Mitchell was not lacking in flair. He was a Crockett on snowshoes, a beardless Boone. Travelling the line from crew to crew, he wore fringed hide clothing trimmed with extensive beadwork. His rifle was kept in a beaded sheath. He devised a parka of stuffed mattress ticking. He wore a beaver hat.
with instantaneous messages, by overland wire, from Eagle to all the world. Laying the wire was a project weirdly analogous to the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, in that it required the clearing of a tortuous route north from Valdez (now the pipeline's southern terminus), with camps set up along the way and crews working the equivalents of overtime and double time. The crews were soldiers, earning thirteen dollars a month. Their boss was Lieutenant William Mitchell, twenty-one years old. He was on his way to fame in the air, to a court-martial, to a vindicating posthumous medal, but this was two years before Kitty Hawk, and all he had on his mind was how to move men and materials through several hundred wilderness miles where men and mules carrying heavy loads sank deep into muskeg. Mitchell's solution was to transport in winter what he would build in summerâa procedure new to the Army, and requiring Mitchell to become an expert in everything from Arctic clothing to the efficacy of sled runners. To protect morale, he prohibited thermometers. Work proceeded even at forty and fifty below. Mitchell was not lacking in flair. He was a Crockett on snowshoes, a beardless Boone. Travelling the line from crew to crew, he wore fringed hide clothing trimmed with extensive beadwork. His rifle was kept in a beaded sheath. He devised a parka of stuffed mattress ticking. He wore a beaver hat.
Poles were set, and wire strung, in summer. Repair cabins were built at regular intervals, relay stations where necessary. Finally, in June of 1903, the project was complete. Mitchell before long departed. His construction was fated for brief use and long desuetude. Isolated bits of wire still hum in the wind. Cabins here and there remain intact. For the time being, though, in 1903, a town that would celebrate its nation's Bicentennial beyond the reach of television and telephoneâwithout public utilities of any kindâhad a telegraph line from which word of great moment could go in an instant around the earth.
“Have Charly Harper in custody.”
“Get typewriter from clerk's office and ship to this office.”
“Pawn takes pawn.”
“Queen to King's Bishop Four.”
“Knight to King Six. Check.”
“Ascertain if Alexina Byron is a proper person to conduct a barroom. The Judge is adverse to granting liquor licenses to women.”
The date of that last message was the eighth of August, 1905 âa wet summer in much of the country, very good for mining but with less rainfall locally and, in the Fortymile, consequent despair. In the desk of John RobinsonâDeputy United States Marshal, Eagle, Alaskaâwas a letter from an agent of the White Pass & Yukon riverboat company in Dawson, Yukon Territory, that said, “Dear Sir: I have your letter of May 31 advising me of four insane persons coming up on the Lavelle Young en route to the outside. I may say that we have no regular place for the accommodation of insane people; however, we have often taken out batches of insane people for the Northwest Mounted Police here, and if they are violent or apt to annoy passengers we construct cages for them on the main deck.” Robinson presumably shipped them out. After at least a dozen telegrams went up and down the country, Alexina Byron got her license to operate a barroom, although women were not to be served there. Eugene Miller was jailed that fall for indecent exposure, Frank Van Norstran for cursing and swearing and making unnecessary noise. Winter came down particularly hard. A few days after the first of December, Berber the tailor froze to death. On about the same dayâat any rate, on December 5, 1905âa stranger appeared on a sled on the Yukon, came up the bank, and mushed into town. The temperature was sixty degrees below zero. He was of modest height, with a wiry spareness that was somehow evident within his abundant furs. His hair was thin and was beginning to recede. His glance was level, prosaic. He asked where he could send a telegram. His voice was accented, attracting no interest,
for half the Tower of Babel was already in the goldfields. In the telegraphy office, he sat and wrote for some time. The moment did not call for a ten-word cryptogram. Nothing had been heard from him for two and a half years. He wrote, actually, a thousand words. Addressing the message to Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, in Christiania, Norway, he signed it “Amundsen.” The essence of what he had to say was that he had discovered the Northwest Passage.
for half the Tower of Babel was already in the goldfields. In the telegraphy office, he sat and wrote for some time. The moment did not call for a ten-word cryptogram. Nothing had been heard from him for two and a half years. He wrote, actually, a thousand words. Addressing the message to Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, in Christiania, Norway, he signed it “Amundsen.” The essence of what he had to say was that he had discovered the Northwest Passage.
His sloop, Gjöa, was frozen in sea ice nearly four hundred miles north. To get from the ship to Eagle, he had travelled a great deal farther than that: over passes among mountains of nine thousand feet, then following the routes of frozen rivers âthe Coleen, the Porcupine, and two hundred miles on southward up the Yukon. An Eskimo man and woman travelled with him as far as Fort Yukon, and a whaling captain whose ship was so badly damaged that he was on his way to San Francisco for another. Amundsen stayed in Eagle two months, going like everyone else to the well house for his water, and waiting for mail from home. His men were provisioned and safely encamped, and for him, meanwhile, Eagle was more comfortable than the shore of the Beaufort Sea. Neither in “The North West Passage” nor in “My Life as an Explorer” does he say what he thought of Eagle's collective cupboard, but he would have had his Alaska strawberries, his bacon, doughnuts, condensed milk, sweet chocolate. Butter cost as much as four dollars a canned pound, oranges about fifty cents apiece. A hundred pounds of sugar was thirty dollars, a hundred pounds of flour fifteen. The cost of a breakfast of ham, eggs, bread, butter, and coffee approached three dollars. At the Eagle Roadhouse all these years later, the cost of the same breakfast has gone up fifty cents. Alaska strawberries were dried beans.
The nine officers and the hundred and thirty-eight enlisted men of Fort Egbert apparently gave him an awestruck, warm reception. His tenth day in Eagle was December 14th. It would be the date, six years later, of his unprecedented arrival, with
associates and dogs, at the South Pole. Meanwhile, though, he had tales enough to tell. He had determined, on his voyage, the exact location of the North Magnetic Poleâthe other, and more scientific, purpose of his trip. He had spent two winters frozen in ice. He had come near burning the Gjöa to a crisp. In August, less than four months before, he had been trying to pick his way westward through shallow water that had never been sailed, and he felt such stress that he could not eat or sleep. One sounding would be more discouraging than the last. The bottom was a lethal maze. The hull barely slid above it, once with an inch to spare. The Gjöa thus crept westward, and on the western horizon one day there was a sail. “A sail!”
associates and dogs, at the South Pole. Meanwhile, though, he had tales enough to tell. He had determined, on his voyage, the exact location of the North Magnetic Poleâthe other, and more scientific, purpose of his trip. He had spent two winters frozen in ice. He had come near burning the Gjöa to a crisp. In August, less than four months before, he had been trying to pick his way westward through shallow water that had never been sailed, and he felt such stress that he could not eat or sleep. One sounding would be more discouraging than the last. The bottom was a lethal maze. The hull barely slid above it, once with an inch to spare. The Gjöa thus crept westward, and on the western horizon one day there was a sail. “A sail!”
It meant the end of years of hope and toil, for that vessel had come from San Francisco through Bering Strait and along the north coast of Alaska, and where its deep belly had floated, we could float, so that all doubts of our success in making the Northwest Passage were at an end ⦠. Instantly, my nerve-racking strain of the last three weeks was over. And with its passing, my appetite returned. I felt ravenous. Hanging from the shrouds were carcasses of caribou. I rushed up the rigging, knife in hand. Furiously I slashed off slice after slice of the raw meat, thrusting it down my throat in chunks and ribbons, like a famished animal, until I could contain no more. Appetite demanded, but my stomach rejected, this barbarous feast. I had to “feed the fishes.” But my appetite would not be denied, and again I ate my fill of raw, half-frozen meat. This time it stayed by me, and soon I was restored to a sense of calm well-being.
The sighted ship was a whaling vessel, and when the whalers met with the company of the Gjöa they guessed that Amundsen was at least fifty-nine and possibly as much as seventy-five years old. From the age of fifteen, he had had what he described as “a strange ambition” to “endure ⦠sufferings”
at extreme latitudes: “Perhaps the idealism of youth, which often takes a turn toward martyrdom, found its crusade in me in the form of Arctic exploration.” He was thirty-three years old.
at extreme latitudes: “Perhaps the idealism of youth, which often takes a turn toward martyrdom, found its crusade in me in the form of Arctic exploration.” He was thirty-three years old.
The Arctic tree line in Alaska and Canada does not even closely follow a degree of latitude but is a jagged graph made by the digital extremities of the boreal forest as they reach with varying success into Arctic river valleys. Amundsen's route from the Gjöa to Eagle happened to go up the valley of what has since proved to be the northernmost extent of trees. As he travelled southward (for the most part on skis), he was impatient to glimpse the beginnings of the forest, for he had not seen a tree in two and a half years.
I ⦠knew that on this day we should reach the wooded district, and I was very excited at every turn in our course. When at length the first fir tree stood out against the sky up on the ridgeâa very diminutive, battered little Christmas tree, hanging out of a creviceâit produced a wonderful sensation, reminding me that we were now out of the Polar regions and on more homely human ground: at that moment I could have left everything that was in my charge and scrambled up the rock to catch hold of that crooked stem and draw in the scent of the fir trees and the woods.
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