12/22/03

Expedition to head of White River to Investigate copper deposits. Remains of camp of 98'ers at Copper Center. Crossing dangerous rivers and swimming horses. A Russian Village on the Nebesna. Copper nails and copper patches. Relics of Cooper expedition.

During the spring if 1902 I took one of the most perilous expeditions of my life into the interior of Alaska, and yet one of the most interesting. My syndicate had called on me to proceed to the head of the White River and investigate the native copper deposits in the vicinity of the Russell Glacier.

As assistants for the expedition I engaged Jim Davis, whom I brought from Juneau, Bill Anderson, an old timer of the Tanana, and Jim Fleming, who was just one of the rush. Our equipment consisted of fourteen horses, bobsleds, and a complete line of tools and supplies to last several months. Before leaving, I inquired of Anderson if there was anything else that should be added to the outfit. He casually glanced over the list.

“Hev yez eny mush?”

“Sure,” I said, “two sacks of it, oats and cornmeal.”

“Then,” said he sagely, “get some more mush.”

We left Valdez late in March. Spots of bare ground were appearing on the flat, and time was precious. If the ice should go out in Keystone Canyon, all travel by that route would be impossible for that year, so we worked long hours, but still it took several days to get our outfit over the range. Once on the other side it was colder and the going better. The snow was leaving fats, and by the middle of April we were dragging our sleds over bare ground.

At Copper Center, about one hundred miles from the coast, were the remains of the winter camp of the ‘98ers. There were still several log cabins in a fair state of preservation, one of which was a supply store and post office, but used only for convenience of the mail contractor, James Fish, who also owned a store at Valdez. He had the contract to carry the mail between Valdez and Eagle, a village on the Yukon, just below the international boundary, a distance of 405 miles. We camped in one of the log cabins, and next day built a wagon out of the wooden sleds, hewing the axles from logs and making the wheels from boards. It was a crude affair, but it held up under the load. What we could not pile on the wagon we packed on the horses.

Long before any trail had been built, the United States Signal Corps had strung a telegraph line to the Tanana River, which afforded communication with the interior. After the first few miles, the line, which was a fine copper wire, a mile of which was carried on a small reel, had been laid along the proposed trail on the ground, over bushes and tree branches. As our wagon trundled along, the wheels would pick up the loose wire and wrap it around the axels, much to the disgust of the driver, although it wound up prettily and grave the axles a roller-bearing action. We managed to clear this without disrupting the telegraph service.

For forty miles we got along fine and then trouble began. There was no suggestion of a road or trail, and we were meeting with obstacles that no wagon could long survive. Over broken timber, around rocky points, through swamps, and over nigger-head flats, our home-made wagon held up sturdily until one day a hind wheel dropped into a rut and the axle broke off short. The wagon was wrecked, so it was abandoned, and it can probably still be found beside the old trail which we blazed as we went along. From that time on we had to depend on our horses to pack the supplies. What could not be taken along we cached in the woods and covered with some canvas.

Crossing the Golkona was a problem (the last tow letters “na” mean “river”). The river was edged with ice, with an open stream four feet deep in the middle. Getting the pack train across the break was no easy matter, but we made it without any mishap. That night two prospectors from the Koyakuk and one from Forty Mile on the Yukon visited our camp and took supper with us, and agreed to carry my mail to Valdez. In crossing another river, the next day, one of the horses broke through the ice, and we barley saved him and the pack from being sucked under. Still plodding through mud, water, and nigger heads, one of the horses played out and we had to leave him to recuperate in the rich pasture.

The Chestachina, 178 miles from Valdez, is the largest river this side of Tanana. On the morning of May 11 it was running bank full, and at the place where we had to cross it was 1500 feet wide. A hundred yards back from the river the Signal Corps had established a camp, and from the soldiers I borrowed a canvas boat. With this we carried the outfit across and then returned and swam the horses. At this point Jim Fleming decided to leave us and strike out for the new camp on the Tanana, so I provided him with supplies. The next time I saw him he was a full-fledged millionaire.

Once again on our way and wading through mud, water, and nigger-heads, we camped to an ideal camping place by a clear stream. A heavy rain that night with five inches of snow in the morning induced me to remain there for a couple of days to rest and dry out. That evening, while Jim Davis was cooking supper, a flock of blue cranes flew over us more than a thousand feet up. I reached for my savage 303, and with a doubt that a shot could reach that far, I pointed it at the bird and pulled the trigger. With the second shot, one of the birds was seen to be fluttering down from the flock, and Bill Anderson, who was an experienced hunter and had been watching, shouted, “If he hasn’t hit one, w’y damne!” It fell two hundred yards away, and Davis killed it with a club. When dressed it weighed over thirty pounds, and we had meat for a week.

Day after day, we made slow progress, with heavy rains above and mud under foot. A very little sufficed to tire the horses, and as we toiled through a wide expanse of nigger-head flat, we eagerly watched for a dry place to camp. In the twilight one evening, as we emerged from a bunch of bastard spruce, cold and wet. I saw a dim light in the distance, which proved to be a Siwash wicky-up, and we approached the dulcet strains from a phonograph broke upon our ears: “Just because she had dem goo-goo eyes!” Copper River Indians are always glad to have men come to their camp, because it means flour, tea, and sugar, the three luxuries they are eager to taken in exchange for their furs, fish, and copper knives. They brought dry wood for a quick fire and helped with the tent, all the time chattering about a bad kinsman who had stolen their only horse. Chestachina Billy was willing to run back to the Signal Corps camp on the river for my mail, and he brought a cablegram from my wife, which he said had come by “white man’s string talk.”

My aneroid showed me that we were then at an altitude of 2500 feet. We were approaching the foothills of the great Arkansas Range, of which we had a fine view, as well as the Wrangell Mountains, with Mt. Drum smoking in the distance. Mt. Drum is the only active volcano in the interior of Alaska. It rises in the Wrangell Mountains as a smooth, round dome with a thin spiral f smoke issuing from its summit, with numerous cracks surrounding the dome from which smoke and steam spout perennially. If Mt. Drum should become active, it would follow the tactics of Mt. Katmai to the westward and blow the top off with a burst of gas, filling the atmosphere with sulphurous smoke, which curiously enough, I imagined that I could smell as a reminder that another Katmai could break out at any time and cover the country with ashes.

The Signal Corps of the U.S. Army blazed the trees as the telegraph “buzzer” was strung along, and had put up posts marking every five miles. This we called the government trail to the Yukon, but at the 190-mile post our route diverged into the foothills, through which we picked our way haphazard. In doing so, we met with plenty of trouble, and arrived at the banks of the Slana with half-drowned horses and packs thoroughly soaked. We found the river to be a large, sluggish stream, too deep for fording, and heavily timbered on both sides. We were not long in building a raft, and in swinging the float to the other side, Jim Davis endeavored to jump ashore with the rope but landed short and went in over his head. Jim was one of those rare souls who are able to turn an unpleasant incident into something amusing, and therefore he performed some antics to get out of the freezing water, which gave us the heartiest laugh we had had since leaving Valdez. We ferried our goods across and then swam the horses. In crossing, one unruly animal jumped into the stream before we were ready, but was glad enough to scramble out again when he found the temperature of the water not to his liking.

Above the confluence of the Slana with the Copper, the river becomes the Bazulnetas, the headwaters of the Copper River. The rivers had widened into lakes at that point, and the ground around was swampy. There was little firewood, and even that was green, but we needed rest and decided to camp. Some Indians had their shacks at the junction of the two rivers. There were six of them: the old buck Dick and his squaw, two daughters, an Indian named Batzulnetas Jim, and a boy about ten. There they spent their lives hunting and watching their fish traps. They had no firearms, but were expert with the spear, bow and arrow. The arrows and spears were tipped with copper, though they did not know where the metal came from except that it was brought from the Tanana. The lakes were high and the flood had washed away their fish traps and their only bridge, so that they had to wade in the ice-cold water up to their armpits in order to reach my camp. They brought salmon to our table, for which I paid them two cups of flour. I also gave them supper, and had Jim put on a pot of beans to give them in the morning.

We were now on the divide from which one lake discharged into the Copper drainage and the other ran off into the Tanana country and the Yukon. We chose Nebesna Creek as the one to follow, on which not even a game trail was discernable. The timber was dense, interspersed with thick willow brush, windfalls, bog, and thick moss down to the water’s edge. The horses were heavily loaded, and we had all we could do to make any perceptible progress. At last we reached the summit of a hill where we could see the mountains on the other side of the Nebesna. There we camped and were rewarded by the arrival of Indian Joe with the mail. I kept the Indian to show us the trail to the river. He took us through some fine grassland, surrounding which, in the form of an amphitheatre, the fringe of mountains with their snow-covered peaks gave us a view of sublime grandeur. Off to the west is a mountain of variegated colors, which contains an immense deposit of copper, owned by Washington men, of whom James C. Dulin was president.

We found a camping place on a small flat, nestled against the spur dividing Nebesna Creek from the big river of that name. Close by were the ruins of several cabins, all in line and backed up against the bluff behind like a village street. At the lower end were the remains of a larger log building which may have been the church and meeting house. Or, more likely, a Saloon! There was no indication of any windows, but roughhewn timbers were mute evidence of bygone floors and benches. The outlines of an immense fireplace were still to be seen, the rocks used for masonry being nearly leveled off to the ground. A long bar of copper, crudely hammered and dovetailed together to give it the required length, on which to hang a great copper pot, was salvaged from the pile of debris, while the pot itself was discovered a few yards away from the house. It was of flattened copper, and the handle had been broken off. Years of use by the early Muscovites had worn holes in its bottom, and two of them had been patched over with thin sheets of the red metal that were sewn on with threads of copper about the thickness of old-time ten-penny nails. I should have liked to bring these relics back to civilization, but the pack horses were too heavily loaded to undertake it, so I contented myself with bringing a handful of copper nails, which have long since been distributed among friends after my return to the States.

A short distance from the “community house” were the remnants of a rude fence which enclosed the graveyard, and a number of mounds, not yet crushed to the elements, some wooden crosses put together with copper nails, gave us the clue that the place had been an early Russian settlement, long before the real estate deal was consummated with Uncle Sam.

Searching among the old cabins, we unearthed a few dozen leaves of a diary of a member of the Cooper expedition, which had passed that way some years before my arrival. It related incoherently a drab story of the sufferings of the party after being stranded in an unknown country three hundred miles from the coast. By piecing the story together, it told of the terrible condition of the party, which was reduced to the necessity of eating decayed eggs, berries, and willow brush in the efforts to sustain life; how they had lost their firearms and ammunition in the rivers; and although in one of the greatest game countries in the world were literally starving to death. We were told later that the few that survived were finally rescued by some Indians, who took them to their village, and after feeding tem, showed the way to the Yukon River.

The sun was beating down upon as we crawled out of our sleeping bags at three o’clock in the morning, stirring the day shift of the mosquito army into action so that they might make life a burden to everybody except the cook, who secured immunity by keeping his head close to the outskirts of the column of smoke that came from the green willows we were using as a fire. It promised to be one of those rare days in June that the poets tell about, and after the morning meal we hastily packed the horses and soon were crossing the foot of the glacier on the ice and beginning the climb over the divide between the Nebesna and the great Ranana. About half way to the top of the divide we found ourselves in the snow, and had to lead the pack train up the bed of the stream we were following. Then the creek ran under the snow, which forced us to the bare spots on the bank. Now and then the horses would slip from the bank and get down in the water, wetting everything and necessitating taking off their packs and repacking on the bank in the wet moss. We were not traveling on solid ground, but passing over an old glacier. The horses were exhausted and it was getting late, with nothing in sight but ice. Although there was no wood or water, no food for the horses, and the night freeze was upon us, I decided to camp. We made supper of raw bacon and frozen beans, and then spreading our wet blankets upon the ice, we rolled in and shivered until daylight.

The morning came, but it brought no cheer. We were hungry, homeless, cold, and damp, and our blankets were frozen to the glacier. The horses had strayed, but were seen huddled together behind an ice hummock not far away. However, we perked up our spirits, munched some crackers and cheese for breakfast, and gathered the horses. They were too spiritless to remonstrate, and submitted to the diamond hitch without trouble. It was a woe-begons and bedraggled outfit that staggered up the hill to the saddle of the divide that morning and by good luck reached the top, altitude 4800 feet. The sun was just coming from behind the great Alaskan Range in all its glory, and the rays imbued the whole party with a cheerful refulgence. The sky was a beautiful rose color merging into blue, with a few rolling clouds on the western horizon, which seemed to reflect the sun’s brilliance on the ice and snow gradually merged into a welcome scene of green meadows, flowering streams, and forests of timber.