lay over one of the dreariest and most dismal
regions in all Alaska. It is one succession of lakes and swamps, with
narrow, almost knife-edge, ridges between, fringed with stunted spruce.
Far as the eye could reach to right and left the country was the same;
it is safe to say broadly that all the land between the Iditarod and
Innoko Rivers is of this character. We passed over it in mild weather,
but it must be a terrible country to cross in storm or through deep
snow. For ten miles at a stretch there was scarcely a place where a man
might make a decent camp. At a midway road-house was gathered the
greatest assemblage of dogs and loaded sleds I had ever seen together at
one time, each team with an Indian driver; they must have covered a
quarter or a third of a mile. It was a freight train engaged in
transporting a whole boat-load of butcher's meat to Iditarod City, the
cargo of a steamboat that had frozen in on the Yukon the previous
October or early November. All the winter through efforts had been made
to get this meat two hundred odd miles overland to its destination; but
the weather had been so stormy and the snow so deep that near the end of
March most of it was still on the way, and some yet far down the trail
towards the Yukon waiting for another trip of the teams.

Dishkaket was merely a native village on the Innoko River two or three
years before; but since three new trails from the Yukon come together
here--from Kaltag Nulato, and Lewis's Landing--and in the other
directions two trails branch off here, to the Innoko diggings at Ophir
and to the Iditarod, a store or two and a couple of road-houses had
sprung up.

From Dishkaket, after crossing the Innoko, we took the most northerly of
the three trails to the Yukon, the Lewis Cut-Off, a trail of a hundred
miles that strikes straight across country and reaches the Yukon eighty
miles farther up that stream than the Nulato trail and a hundred and
twenty miles farther up than the Kaltag trail. The Kaltag trail is the
trail to Nome; the Nulato trail is the mail trail simply because it
suits the contractors to throw business to Nulato. The Lewis Cut-Off is
the direct route, the shortest by about a hundred miles, but it was cut
by the private individual whose name it bears, and leads out to his
store and road-house on the Yukon; so a rival road-house was built close
by on the river and the prestige and advertisement of the "United States
mail route" thrown to the trail