THE OUTFIT, HUMAN AND MATERIAL
Who we of this expedition were, our measure of fitness for this job—that the Diary should tell. Here is no place to be personal, except on the surface, which is necessary.
The Professor, our leader, was a man of polar experience, hardly versed in the craft of trail or woods, or packing horses. He was our topographer and meteorologist; but the top of McKinley, not science, was our prime object, he told me; and that once we were at the foot, he was certain that the summit would be ours, at the rate of 5,000 feet a day. I believe in looking hardest at the uncertainties of a struggle, not letting the glamour of its sure victories dazzle you. The Professor was more than forty years old; married; of German descent; fair-haired, large-featured.
He chose me as geologist, and to be second in command. I have that fervor for geology, backed by small book knowledge, which blesses all habitual wanderers in the chaotic North. I had been an adventurer on the Edmonton trail to the Klondike in 1898, where a fifth of us died, and two years later had explored the Wrangel volcano, two hundred miles east of McKinley. I was unmarried, twenty-six, Yankee.
Of the four other members of our party, the Professor picked two, and two were casually included on the way to Cook Inlet.
The first I call Simon. He was a Jew. The Professor asked me if I objected on that score to his joining us. I said that I did not. I have the racial, not the religious, repugnance to Jews. I had never relished their race-selfishness, and scouted their tenacity under physical and mental stress. The Diary shows how wrong I was here in one regard, at least. But in my ardor to get North, I persuaded myself that such natural instincts were prejudices, and unworthy. Simon’s only adventuring had been with the summer session of a North Polar fiasco, on which he made a collection of flowers. So he was to be our botanist. He was small, dark, rotund, and twenty-one.
Next, was Fred King, of Montana. He had packed the Government horses on Brooks’ Geological Survey trip to McKinley. He joined the Professor in eastern Washington, where our leader had picked and bought from Indians fifteen pack-horses, some broken, some unbroken. I first saw him in Seattle. He was a small man, with a fragile forehead and clear eyes; unmarried; in the midthirties. He had spent his life packing and trapping in the Bitter Root Mountains. “Would you know about horses?” he asked me when we met. I asked his opinion of our beasts. “Does the Professor know a lot about horses?” he asked again. I said that I did not know. He went on: “I think they’ll make the trip, but they’re not just the animals I’d have picked.”
Though discredited for Alaska, I thought it best to take an alpine guide. We had neither time nor money to send to Europe for one, but we knew that Swiss guides, although with second-class certificates, had been imported into Canada by a railroad. I went to Banff and found that they were not for rent; failed to get one. And the horse-rustlers there said: “You don’t want no Swiss guides. They’re handy high up on rocks and ice, but lose themselves in the woods. Six weeks across Alasky swamps? They’d die or quit you the first day.”
In Seattle we outfitted. I hate it—lists of grub, clothing, saddlery, pots; musing on how neatly this new poncho buckle will free your arm, that cheesecloth lining make your tent mosquito-proof. We clicked and condemned each neat, new, folding device that will not last a minute on the tundra. We bought, briefly, for grub: Eighty-six pounds per month per man, the government Alaskan ration; mostly flour, beans, bacon, and sugar, with tea, which the climate makes you crave, and little coffee—food least in bulk, greatest in nourishment; sixteen hundred pounds in all, for six men for three months, the least time that we could be on the trail. This is the pioneer-prospectors’ fare, taught by experience. We let alone all tinned food, except to pamper ourselves with a few cans of milk and butter; tins give least sustenance in proportion to weight and bulk, pack abominably through soft ground and rough, and we had to travel fast and light. We had no use for patent or condensed grub, except some erbswurst pea-soup—an experiment, though it is German army emergency ration. We counted on killing sheep, moose, and caribou on the north side of the Alaskan range, where King said that they were thick. We took arctic pemmican, two cheeses, and a box of biscuits to eat on the mountain; primus stove, two spirit lamps, wood alcohol and kerosene to cook with above snow line; no stimulant at all—I have never seen and cannot imagine a case in the North where it would be of use—some drugs, I forget which, as we never used them.
Clothing: Boot-rubbers and heavy asbestos-tanned boots for the trail, light boots for the mountain; wool underwear, overalls, jumpers, German socks, rubber sheeting. For the mountain: Four real eiderdown bag-quilts, and much sure-enough arctic dress, hair ropes, ice-axes. For horses: twelve saw-buck saddles, three Abercrombies, hobbles, cinch-rope, sling rope, oiled pack-covers, a cowbell, and a double blanket and a half for each brute—we slept in these on the trail, taking but one real sleeping-bag. A canvas tent for four; for the mountain, a conical Shantung silk thing, designed by the Professor. Guns: A Savage .3033, the Professor’s Greenland .44 Winchester relic, and Simon’s arsenal—a Winchester .22 and Colt automatic .38. Instruments: Aneroids, thermometers, Abeny level, but, I think, no sextant or artificial horizon; no mercurial barometer, anyhow, though the Professor filled two huge boxes to torture their pack beast in the name of science.
My scientific outfit went no further than a geological hammer. Other hardware: Heavy steel and granite cook pots, no aluminum—which burns like tallow when grease-soaked; nails, wire, and two axes; my Weno Hawkeye with Goerz double ana-stigmatic lens, the Professor’s reflex camera, a No. 3 Kodak, films in tin cases bound with electric tape, Zeiss field glasses. No chairs or tables; no luxuries at all, not because we posed at roughing it, but because fifteen horses in a new, soft country is quite too big a pack train, anyhow. We bought with an eye to fast, hard, light travel, and that alone. Nothing “patent,” nothing “folding,” nothing “automatic” but the Colt—and a kind of fire-grid, with legs, to cook over, the Professor’s obsession. Something over a ton in all; that seems enough to remember.
Seattle furnished our fifth man, Miller. An utter stranger, he had sought us out and asked us to take him. The Professor twice refused, not admiring his physique; but the night our horses and outfit were loaded on the S. S. Santa Ana, for Cook Inlet (June 10, 1903), we still had not enough men. Miller appeared on the dock to see us off—and came with us. He was tall and slim and quiet; a low-voiced youth of twenty-four, who did office work in the Seattle city hall, and was clever with cameras. He was our photographer.
We still needed another man. But at Juneau, Sitka, Yakutat, where we touched, following up the coast, all fit men were either hot on the trail of certain riches, or their dreams of gold had turned to ashes in the mouth, and they were bound home. Glaciers shot bristling into the sea, like rays from cold suns; icebergs rotted delicately in the spectra of midnight. Seaward over the archipelagoes moved never boat, never man, never shadow—only sometimes an eagle with whitened head and tail specking the late-lying snowfield upon one of ten thousand alps.
The eighth day out we anchored off Kayak Island to land and ship passengers. A black-haired, square-featured Apollo came aboard. He knew me. We had camped together a single night three years before on Copper River. I did not remember. Soon King told him how on a certain creek which the Government party had crossed a week out from Tyonek, Brooks had prospected cents to the pan, which meant wealth illimitable, if true. When we asked him to come with us, he said, “I’ll make the trip with you to shake a pan in that crick—and to go with you.” And the next morning, after we had left the town of Valdez in its ice-hung fjord, he looked at me and said, “Shanghaied!”
This was Jack, Scotch-Irish, and twenty-five. He had begun life as a breaker-boy in Pennsylvania collieries. His partner had died in his arms in the terrible winter of ‘98, starving and lost on Copper River. Jack was that immutable being, a prospector.
In two days we had entered Cook Inlet. Still we siphoned water for the thirsty horses, balancing buckets down ladders, as the mare we had named Bosco kicked herself crazy when you went near. At last we sighted the steam of the Redoubt volcano pouring over the snowy Chigmit range, and hove to one midnight, swinging the lead off Tyonek, on the west shore of the inlet, near its head.