Alaska (106 page)

'After the gold stopped,' Matt said. 'You know how it is.'

'How's it with you, John?' Missy asked, for he, too, looked as if he had fallen upon bad times.

'You know how we dug that damned hole?'

'I sure do,' Matt almost groaned. 'You ever strike anything down there?'

'Lots of rock, no colors.'

'I'm sorry,' Missy said. 'You gave it such an honest try, but your claim was up so high . . . everybody knew the gold was down on the creek where the claims were already taken.'

The three oddly matched people, older now and sobered by their experiences, sat quietly cradling their cups, and after a while Klope said: That must have been a wild storm, the one that blew all the machines off the beach.'

It was.'

'We saw pictures. Looked pretty awful.'

'Dawson must be a ghost town these days,' Matt said.

'You wouldn't recognize it. Not one tent left.'

'Remember ours? The grease on the canvas? Those good sourdough flapjacks you taught us how to make?'

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As they reminisced about the old days with affectionate nostalgia, Missy said: 'You remember the Belgian Mare? Her cribs here burned twice and were blown away once, and we were sorry for her till we found that she had sweet-talked miners into building them for her and she didn't lose a nickel. After each disaster she hiked her prices and made a fortune. One day she just left. Yep, John, she just up and left. Eight girls stranded on the beach without a nickel.'

'Where'd she go?'

'Belgium, to buy a farm near Antwerp.'

The day was wasting, and it was obvious to Missy that John Klope had something more important to talk about than the storm or the changing fortunes of the Mare. A startling thought exploded in her mind: My God, he's come here to ask me to marry him! And she began to draw back, because in Matt Murphy she had met a man of almost ideal temperament. He was kind, he was witty, he could smell out rascals and identify good people, and she loved sharing life with him, even if he could never seem to find a steady job. But since there was always need for her secretarial skills, she was more than willing to share her income with Matt.

Klope coughed, edged about in his chair, and diddled with his fingers. Finally he said: 'Haven't you heard?'

'About what?'

'About me?' When they shook their heads, he said with embarrassment: 'I always told you there had to be gold down there.'

'But you never found it. You said so.'

'Not in the hole the three of us worked. But when I got down to solid rock and threw out my laterals . . .'

'You did that while I was still helping,' Matt said.

'Yep, and I found nothing. But I got so mad with all that work, and I was so sure about the ancient river I talked about that I dug me another hole, way down. Didn't you hear?'

'What happened, John?'

'Sarqaq kept with me. Maybe we'd find something. Back down to bedrock, me thawing, him raising the muck, and this time when I sent out my laterals ...”

He stopped and looked at his two good friends: 'First pan from the big crevice, nine hundred dollars ... in nuggets . . . not flakes.'

Yes, before that one lucky lateral was exhausted, John Klope, assisted by the lame Eskimo Sarqaq, took out three hundred and twenty thousand dollars of some of the purest gold produced along the Klondike. His persistence had led him to the deposits laid down by a river that had flowed two hundred thousand years ago.

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After Missy and Matt fell silent, emotionally exhausted from exploring all aspects of this tremendous stroke of good fortune, Klope was ready to make the awkward speech which had drawn him from Dawson to Nome on his way back to his farm at Moose Hide, Idaho: 'You two and Tom Venn were as much a part of that strike as I was. You kept me goin' in the bad days. Sarqaq, too. All the time I dug out that rich lateral and sent up that muck crawlin' with gold, I thought of you folks.'

His voice broke: 'You know, a man can't work underground for two years else'n someone believes in him. Here.' He thrust into Missy's hand an envelope, and when she opened it two drafts fell out, one to her, one to Matt, drawn upon a Canadian bank. Each check was for twenty thousand dollars. 'I'll mail Tom's to him in Juneau,' Klope said.

And he did one thing more. As he was about to leave the shack he took from his worn backpack a parcel, which he placed on the rude table: 'If you ever open another restaurant, you'll need this.' And when Missy removed the wrapper, she realized that Klope was placing in her care one of his prized possessions: the sourdough starter whose recorded history was now nearly a century old.

TWO DAYS LATER KLOPE WAS ABOARD A SHIP TO Seattl e, and as he left he epitomized all the lonely men who had come to Alaska in search of gold. He was one of the few whose dreams had come true, but only at terrible cost.

He had braved the Yukon Flats in a blizzard; he had fought his way up the frozen Yukon past Eagle; he had slaved in the shafts atop Eldorado; he had lost Missy, the woman he loved, and Matt Murphy, a partner he had trusted. But he did get his gold.

And it changed him not at all. He did not walk any straighten He did not suddenly read good books. He made no firm friends to replace the ones he had left behind, and his life had been altered neither negatively nor positively. As an honorable man, he had given twenty thousand dollars to each of the four to whom he knew he was indebted Missy, Matt, Tom Venn, Sarqaqbut when he returned to Idaho he would do no spectacular thing with what was left. He would not form a bank for assistance to farmers, nor endow chairs at any of the Idaho colleges, nor start a library, nor finance a hospital. He had left Idaho in those first heady days of July 1897, lived through times of cataclysmic changes, and now he was returning home in the sputtering aftermath the sim-643

pie inarticulate man he was when he had come to the arctic. There were thousands like him.

Missy Peckham had developed in the Klondike and Nome into a woman of towering strength, beautiful in her integrity, and Tom Venn had grown from a callow youth into an amazingly mature man, but they had achieved this through hardship and failure, not success, and the lessons they acquired would last them through life. John Klope, like so many others, would bring home only gold, which would slowly slip through his fingers, until in old age he would ask: 'Where did it go? What did it accomplish?'

The rigs along Bonanza and Eldorado were closed down. The shacks that had protected miners along the Mackenzie during the arctic winters were slowly falling apart, and the marvelous golden beaches of Nome were once again mere sand. When new storms howled in from the Bering Sea they found no tents to destroy, for all was now as it had been before.

No more will be said about gold in this chronicle. Exciting small finds would continue to be made near the new town of Fairbanks, and one of the most rewarding of all operations would be the deep quartz mine across from Juneau, but there would never be another Klondike, another Nome. Through some miracle never to be fully understood, at those favored points gold had somehow risen to the surface and been eroded away, abraded by sand and wind and ice to be deposited arbitrarily in one place and not another.

The metal that drove men mad behaved as crazily as did the men, and in those frenzied years at the close of the century, turned the world's attention to Alaska, but its effect on the area was no more lasting than it had been upon John Klope.

There were, however, three men whose lives were changed by the miraculous gold of Nome. Lars Skjellerup became an American citizen, and one morning, while at the beach watching the arrival of passengers from a ship anchored in the roadstead, he spotted on the near end of the lighter bringing them ashore a wonderfully vivacious young woman, and he was so captivated by her smile, her look of eagerness and her general demeanor, that when sailors manning the lighter shouted to Eskimo porters: 'Come!

Take the people ashore!' he ran quickly into the surf, offered himself to her, and shivered with a new excitement as she was lifted onto his back.

Step by careful step he carried her to the beach, his mind in a whirl, and after she was some fifteen yards inland she said quietly: 'Don't you think you could put me down now?'

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Introducing himself somewhat awkwardly, he learned that Miss Armstrong had come from Virginia to teach school in Nome. In the days that followed he haunted the schoolhouse, and when everybody including Miss Armstrong was aware that he was smitten with her, he made the most extraordinary proposal: 'I'm taking the job as Presbyterian missionary at Barrow. Would you honor me to come along?' And in this way a young woman who had fled Virginia for the romance of Alaska found herself a missionary's wife in farthest Barrow, where her husband spent most of his time teaching Eskimos how to handle the reindeer replenishment stock he and his wife had driven north.

Mikkel Sana deposited his money in a Juneau bank and returned to Lapland for a bride, but could convince none of those cautious Lapp beauties that he was really a very rich man. He finally persuaded the third daughter of a man who owned three hundred reindeer to take a chance, and what a surprise she encountered when she accompanied Sana to Juneau and found that the bank account really did exist. After she learned English, which she did in six months, she became the town librarian.

In Arkikov's life, a wife did not feature, at least not at first. Having been abused because he was not an American citizen, and having lost Seven Above, he was determined to repair this deficiency, and as soon as his claim was returned after Hoxey's arrest, he started naturalization procedures. Of course, since Alaska still had no regular form of civil government, this proved so difficult that twice he almost gave up, but his partner Skjellerup persuaded him to continue, and after Lars became the missionary in Barrow, the letters he sent to Seattle in support of Arkikov's petition were so persuasive that citizenship was granted.

When a revenue cutter officer who came to Nome explained that in America, as opposed to Siberia, it was customary for a man to have first and last names, Arkikov asked: 'Me get what name?' and the man said: 'Well, some people like the name of their occupation.'

'My what?'

'Your job. If you were a baker in the old country, you'd take the name Baker. A goldsmith becomes Goldsmith. What were you in the old country?'

'What country?'

'Siberia.'

'Me herd reindeer.'

Since it was widely known that this fellow Arkikov now had some sixty thousand dollars in the bank, he had to be treated with respect, and the officer coughed: 'We don't hand

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out many names like Arkikov Reindeer herder. How about keeping Arkikov as your last name and putting two American names in front?'

'Maybe. What names?'

'Two pairs are very popular. George Washington Arkikov . . .'

'Who is he?'

'Father of this country. Fine general.'

'Me like general.'

'The other pair is just as good. Abraham Lincoln Arkikov.'

'What he did?'

'He freed the slaves.'

'What you mean slaves?' And when the man explained what Lincoln had doneArkikov had never seen an American black the choice was made: 'In Siberia got slaves. Me like Lincoln.'

So he became A. L. Arkikov, Nome, Alaska, and in time he took an Eskimo wife, and their three children attended the University of Washington in Seattle, for their father was a rich man.

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X

SALMON

ast of Juneau, Taku Inlet, a splendid body of water which in Scandinavia would be called a fjord, wound and twisted its way far inland, passing bleak headlands at one time, low hills covered with trees at another. On all sides mountains with snow-covered peaks rose in the background, some soaring to more than seven and eight thousand feet.

A notable feature of Taku was the family of powerful glaciers that pushed their snouts right to the water's edge, where from time to time they calved off huge icebergs which came thundering into the cold waters with echoes reverberating among the hills and mountains. It was a wild, lonely, majestic body of narrow water, and it drained a vast area reaching into Canada almost to the lakes which the Chilkoot miners traversed in 1897 and '98. To travel upstream in the Taku was to probe into the heart of the continent, with the visible glaciers edging down from much more extensive fields inland, where the ice cover had existed for thousands upon thousands of years.

Taku Inlet ran mainly north and south, with the glaciers crawling down to the western shore, but on the eastern bank, directly opposite the snout of a beautiful emerald glacier, a small but lively river with many waterfalls debouched, and nine miles up its course a lake of heavenly grace opened up, not large in comparison with many of Alaska's lakes, but

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incomparable with its ring of six or, from some vantage points, seven mountains which formed a near-circle to protect it.

This remote spot, which not many visitors, or natives either, ever saw, had been named by Arkady Voronov, during one of his explorations, Lake Pleiades, as his journal explained:

On this day we camped opposite the beautiful green glacier which noses into the inlet on the west. A river scintillating in the sunlight attracted my attention, and with two sailors from the

Romanov,

I explored it for a distance of nine miles. It would be quite unnavigable for even a canoe, because it came tumbling down over rocks, even forming at times small waterfalls eight and ten feet high.

Since it was obvious to us that we were not going to find a better waterway on this course, and since grizzly

bears started at us twice, to be deflected by shots over their heads, we had decided to return to our ship with nothing but a fine walk for our labors when one of the sailors, who was breaking the path upstream, shouted back: 'Captain Voronov! Hurry!

Something remarkable!'

When we overtook him we saw that his cry was not misleading, for ahead of us, rimmed by six beautiful mountains, lay one of the clearest small lakes I have ever seen.

It lay at an elevation, I should guess from the nature of our climb, of about nine hundred feet, not much higher, and it was marred by nothing. Only the bears and whatever fish were in the lake inhabited this magnificent refuge, and we decided on the moment, all three of us, to camp here for the night, for we were loath to depart from such an idyllic place.

I therefore asked one of the men to volunteer for a hurried trip back to the Romanov to fetch tents and to bring with him one or two other sailors who might like to share the experience with us, and the man who stepped forward said: 'Captain, with so many bears, I think he should come too,' indicating his partner. 'And he better bring his gun.' I consented, for I realized that I, with my own gun, could protect myself in a settled spot, while they, being on the move, might attract more attention from the bears.

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Off they went, and I was left alone in this place of rare beauty. But I did not stay in one place, as planned, because I was lured by the constantly changing attitude of the six mountains which stood guard, and when I had moved some distance to the east, I saw to my surprise that there were not six mountains but seven, and in that moment I determined the name of this lake, Pleiades, because we all know that this little constellation has seven stars, but without a telescope we can see only six.

As mythology teaches, the visible six sisters each married gods, but Merope, the hidden seventh, fell in love with a mortal, and thus hides her face in shame.

Lake Pleiades it became, and on three subsequent visits to this eastern area I camped there. It remains the happiest memory of my duty in Alaska, and if, in future generations, some descendant of mine elects to return to these Russian lands, I hope he or she will read these notes and seek out this jewel of a lake.

In September 1900 one hundred million extremely minute eggs of the sockeye salmon were deposited in little streams feeding into that lake. They were delivered by female salmon in lots of four thousand each, and we shall follow the adventures of one such lot, and one salmon within that lot.

The sockeye, one of five distinct types of salmon populating Alaskan waters, had been named by a German naturalist serving Vitus Bering. Using the proper Latin name for salmon plus a native word, he called it Oncorhynchus nerka, and the solitary egg of that hundred million whose progress we shall watch will bear that name.

The egg which, when fertilized by milt, or sperm, would become Nerka was placed by its mother in a carefully prepared redd, or nest, in the gravelly bottom of a little stream near the lake and left there without further care for six months. It was abandoned not through the carelessness of its parents but because it was their inescapable nature to die soon after depositing and fertilizing the eggs which perpetuated their kind.

The site chosen for Nerka's redd had to fill several requirements. It had to be close to the lake in which the growing salmon would live for three years. The stream chosen must have a gravel bottom so that the minute eggs could be securely hidden; it must provide a good supply of other gravel which could be thrown over the redd to hide the incubating eggs; and most curious of all, it had to have a constant supply of fresh water welling up from below at an unwavering tem-649

perature of about 47°Fahrenheit and with a supersupply of oxygen.

It so happened that the area surrounding Lake Pleiades had varied radically during the past hundred thousand years, for when the Bering land bridge was open, the ocean level had dropped, taking the lake's level down with it, and as the different levels of the lake fluctuated, so did its shoreline. This meant that various benches had been established at various times, and Nerka's mother had chosen a submerged bench which had through the generations accumulated much gravel of a size that salmon preferred.

But how was the constant supply of upwelling water at a reliable temperature delivered?

Just as some ancient river had existed where John Klope's present-day Eldorado Creek flowed, but at a much different level, so another subterranean river, emerging from deep in the roots of the surrounding mountains, surged up through the gravels of that sunken bench, providing the rich supply of oxygen and constant temperature that kept both the lake and its salmon vital.

So for six months, his parents long dead, Nerka in his minute egg nestled beneath the gravel while from below flowed this life-giving water. It was one of the most precise operations of natureperfect flow of water, perfect temperature, perfect hiding place, perfect beginning for one of the most extraordinary life histories in the animal kingdom. And one final attribute of Lake Pleiades could be considered the most remarkable of all, as we shall see six years later: the rocks which lined the lake and the waters which flowed into it from the submerged rivulets carried minute tracesperhaps one in a billion partsof this mineral and that, with the result that Lake Pleiades had a kind of lacustrine fingerprint which would differentiate it from any other lake or river in the entire world.

Any salmon born, as Nerka would soon be, in Lake Pleiades would bear with him always the unique imprint of his lake. Was this memory carried in his bloodstream, or in his brain, or in his olfactory system, or perhaps in a group of these attributes in conjunction with the phases of the moon or the turning of the earth? No one knew.

One could only guess, but that Nerka and Lake Pleiades on the western shore of Alaska were indissolubly linked, no one could deny.

Still only a minute egg, he nestled in the gravel as subterranean waters welled up through the bench to sustain him, and each week he grew closer to birth. In January 1901, deep under the thick ice which pressed down upon the tributary stream, the egg which would become Nerka, along with the other four thousand fertilized eggs of his group, underwent

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a dramatic change. His egg, a brilliant orange color, showed through the skin an eye with a bright rim and an intensely black center. Unquestionably it was an eye, and it bespoke the emerging life within the egg; the unwavering supply of cold, fresh water welling up through the gravel ensured the continuance and growth of that life.

But the natural attrition that decimated these minute creatures was savage. Of Nerka's original four thousand, only six hundred survived the freezing gravel, the diseases and the predation by larger fish.

In late February of that year these six hundred eggs of Nerka's group began to undergo a series of miraculous changes, at the conclusion of which they would become fullfledged salmon. The embryo Nerka slowly absorbed the nutrients from the yolk sac, and as the interchange occurred, he grew and developed swimming motions. Now he obtained the first of a bewildering series of names, each marking a major step in his growth.

He was an

alevin.

When his yolk was completely absorbed, the creature was still not a proper fish, only a minute translucent wand with enormous black eyes and, fastened to his belly, a huge sac of liquid nutrient upon which he must live for the next crucial weeks.

He was an ugly, misshapen, squirming thing, and any passing predator could gulp down hundreds of him at a time. But he was a potential fish with a monstrously long head, functioning eyes and a trailing translucent tail. Rapidly in the constantly moving waters of his stream he began to consume plankton, and with the growth which this produced, his protruding sac was gradually resorbed until the swimming thing was transformed into a self-sufficient baby fishling.

At this point Nerka left his natal stream and moved the short distance into the lake, where he was properly called a fry, and in this condition he showed every characteristic, except size, of a normal fresh-water fish. He would breathe like one through his gills; he would eat like one; he would learn to swim swiftly to dodge larger predators; and it would seem to any observer that he was well adapted to spend the rest of his life in this lake. It would, in those first years, have been preposterous to think that one day, still to be determined by his rate of growth and maturation, he would be able to convert his entire life processes so radically that he would be completely adapted to salt water; at this stage of his development salt water would have been an inclement milieu.

Ignorant of his strange destiny, Nerka spent 1901 and 1902 adjusting to life within the lake, which presented two contradictory aspects. On the one hand it was a savage home where salmon fry were destroyed at appalling rates. Larger fish 651

hungered for him. Birds sought him out, especially the merganser ducks that abounded on the lake, but also kingfishers and stiltlike birds with long legs and even longer beaks that could dart through the water with incredible accuracy to snap up a tasty meal of salmon. It seemed as if everything in the lake lived on fry, and half of Nerka's fellow survivors vanished into gullets before the end of the first year.

But the lake was also a nurturing mother which provided young fry a multitude of dark places in which to hide during daylight hours and a jungle of underwater grasses in which they could lose themselves if light, dancing off their shimmering skin, betrayed their presence to the larger fish. Nerka learned to move only in the darkest nights and to avoid those places where these fish liked to feed, and since in these two years he was not even three inches long, and most things that swam were larger and more powerful than he, it was only by exercising these precautions that he did survive.

He was now a fingerling,

a most appropriate name, since he was about the size of a woman's little finger, and as his appetite increased, the comforting lake provided him, in its safer waters, nutritious insect larvae and various kinds of plankton. As he grew older he fed upon the myriad tiny fishes which flashed through the lake, but his main delight was twisting upward, head out of water, to snare some unsuspecting insect. Meanwhile, in the town of Juneau, a scant seventeen miles distant over a glacier-strewn route, impossible to travel on foot, forty miles by an easy water route, creatures of a much different life history were working out their own tangled destinies.

WHEN TOM VENN CAME DOWN TO JUNEAU TO OPEN THE Ross & Raglan store in the spring of 1902, he found the thriving little town a joy after the bitter cold and raw lawlessness of Nome. The settlement which many had been proposing as the new capital of Alaska, replacing outmoded Sitka, which lay off to one side at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, was already an attractive place, even though it was cramped into a narrow strip between tall mountains to the northeast and a beautiful sea channel to the southwest.

Wherever Tom looked in Juneau he saw variation, for even nearby Douglas Island, which crowded in from the south, had its own distinctive mountains, while big ships from Seattle berthed a hand's breadth from the main streets. But the majesty of Juneau, which differentiated it from all other Alaskan towns, was the huge, glistening Mendenhall Glacier, which nosed its way to the water's edge west of town. It was 652

a magnificent, living body of ice that snapped and crackled as it ground its way toward the sea, yet so available that children could take their picnics along its edge in summer.

Another glacier, less famous and visible, approached Juneau from the opposite direction, as if it sought to enclose the little town in its embrace, but the encroaching ice did not determine the temperature of Juneau, which was warmed by the great currents sweeping in from Japan. It had a pleasant climate, marked by much rain and fog but punctuated by days of the most enchanting purity when the sun made all components of the varied scene sparkle like jewels.