ssed the spot, had seen the abandoned
sled standing by recently broken ice, and had come on into town while we
slept and none knew of our return, with the news that some one had been
drowned. The mail for Fairbanks did but await the mail from Fort Yukon,
and the town rumour, instantly identifying the abandoned sled, was
carried across to Fairbanks, to my great distress and annoyance. The
echoes of the distorted account of this misadventure which appeared in a
Fairbanks newspaper still reverberate in "patent insides" of the
provincial press of the United States.

[Sidenote: FORT YUKON ]

The next Monday we started again, this time with a toboggan and with a
man instead of a boy for guide, and in three days of only moderate
difficulty we reached Fort Yukon.

Fort Yukon, though it holds no attraction for the ordinary visitor or
the summer tourist on the river, is a place of much interest to those
who know the history of Alaska. While it is purely a native village,
with no white population save the traders and the usual sprinkling of
men that hang around native villages, it is yet the oldest white man's
post on the Yukon River, save the post established by the Russians at
Nulato, five or six hundred miles lower down. The Hudson Bay Company
established itself here in 1846, and that date serves as the year one
in making calculations and determining ages to this day. It is a fixed
point in time that every native knows of. Any old man can tell you
whether he was born before or after that date, and, if before, can pick
out some boy that is about the age he was when the event occurred. The
massacre at Nulato in 1851 serves in a similar way for the lower river.

After the Purchase, and the determination of the longitude of Fort Yukon
by Mr. Raymond in 1869--who made the first steamboat journey up the
Yukon on that errand--the Hudson Bay Company moved three times before
they succeeded in getting east of the 141st meridian, and at the point
reached on the third move, the New Rampart House on the Porcupine River,
only a few hundred yards beyond the boundary-line, they remained until
the gold excitement on the Yukon and the journeying of the natives to
new posts on that river rendered trading unprofitable; then they
withdrew to the Mackenzie. The oldest white men's graves in Alaska,
again with the exception of Nulato, are those in the little Hudson Bay
cemetery near Fort Yukon.

[Sidenote: ARCHDEACON MACDONALD ]

Fort Yukon is