This large lake near the head of the Yukon I named in honor of Dr. Lindeman, of the Bremen Geographical Society. The country thus far, including the lake, had already received a most thorough exploration at the hands of Dr. Aurel Krause and Dr. Arthur Krause, two German scientists, heretofore sent out by the above named society, but I was not aware of the fact at that time. Looking out upon Lake Lindeman a most beautiful Alpine-like sheet of water was presented to our view. The scene was made more picturesque by the mountain creek, of which I have spoken, and over which a green willow tree was supposed to do duty as a foot-log. My first attempt to pass over this tree caused it to sink down into the rushing waters and was much more interesting to the spectators than to me. Lake Lindeman is about ten miles long, and from one to one and a-half wide, and in appearance is not unlike a portion of one of the broad inland passages of south-eastern Alaska already described. Fish were absent from these glacier-fed streams and lakes, or at least they were not to be enticed by any of the standard allurements of the fishermen's wiles, but we managed to kill a few dusky grouse and green-winged teal ducks to vary the usual government ration; though all were tough beyond measure, it being so near their breeding season.

Over the lake, on quiet days, were seen many gulls, and the graceful little Arctic tern, which I recognized as an old companion on the Atlantic side. A ramble among the woods next day to search for raft timber revealed a number of bear, caribou and other game tracks, but nothing could be seen of their authors. A small flock of pretty harlequin ducks gave us a long but unsuccessful shot. The lakes of the interior, of which there were many, bordered by swampy tracts, supplied Roth, our cook, with a couple of green-winged teal, duck and drake, as the reward of a late evening stroll, for, as I have said, it was light enough at midnight to allow us to shoot, at any rate with a shot-gun.

While the lakes were in many places bordered with swampy tracts, the land away from them was quite passable for walking, the great obstacle being the large amount of fallen timber that covered the ground in all directions. The area of bog, ubiquitous beyond the Kotusk range, was now confined to the shores of the lakes and to streams emerging from or emptying into them, and while these were numerous enough to a person desiring to hold a straight course for a considerable distance, the walking was bearable compared with previous experience.

Two of the Tahk-heesh or "Stick" Indians, who had come with us as packers, had stored away in this vicinity under the willows of the lake's beach, a couple of the most dilapidated looking craft that ever were seen. To call them canoes, indeed, was a strain upon our consciences. The only theory to account for their keeping afloat at all was that of the Irishman in the story, "that for every hole where the water could come in there were a half a dozen where it could run out." These canoes are made of a species of poplar, and are generally called "cottonwood canoes;" and as the trees from which they are made are not very large, the material "runs out" so to speak, along the waist or middle of the canoe, where a greater quantity is required to reach around, and this deficiency is made up by substituting batten-like strips of thin wood tacked or sewed on as gunwales, and calking the crevices well with gum. At bow and stern some rude attempt is made to warp them into canoe lines, and in doing this many cracks are developed, all of which are smeared with spruce gum. The thin bottom is a perfect gridiron of slits, all closed with gum, and the proportion of gum increases with the canoe's age. These were the fragile craft that were brought to me with a tender to transport my effects (nearly three tons besides the personnel of the expedition) almost the whole length of the lake, fully seven or eight miles, and the owners had the assurance to offer to do it in two days. I had no idea how far it was to the northern end or outlet of Lake Lindeman, as I had spent too many years of my life among Indians to attempt to deduce even an approximate estimate from the assurances of the two "Sticks" that "it was just around the point of land" to which they pointed and which may have been four or five miles distant. I gave them, however, a couple of loads of material that could be lost without serious damage, weighing three hundred to four hundred pounds, and as I did not know the length of the lake I thought I would await their return before attempting further progress. Even if they could accomplish the bargain in double the time they proposed I was quite willing to let them proceed, as I understood the outlet of the lake was a narrow river full of cascades and rocks through which, according to Indian reports, no raft of more than a few logs could possibly float. I did not feel disposed to build a couple of such cumbersome craft to traverse so short a distance. A southern gale setting in shortly after their departure, with waves running on the lake a foot or two high, was too terrible a storm for the rickety little boats, and we did not see any thing of them or their owners until three days later, when the men came creeping back overland—the gale still raging—to explain matters which required no explanation.

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In the meantime, having surmised the failure of our Indian contractors, the best logs available, which were rather small ones of stunted spruce and contorted pine, had been floated down the little stream and had been tracked up and down along the shores of the lake, and a raft made of the somewhat formidable dimensions of fifteen by thirty feet, with an elevated deck amidships. The rope lashings used on the loads of the Indian packers were put to duty in binding the logs together, but the greatest reliance was placed in stout wooden pins which united them by auger holes bored through both, the logs being cut or "saddled out" where they joined, as is done at the corners of log cabins. A deck was made on the corduroy plan of light seasoned pine poles, and high enough to prevent ordinary sized waves from wetting the effects, while a pole was rigged by mortising it into one of the central logs at the bottom and supporting it by four guy ropes from the top, and from this was suspended a wall tent as a sail, the ridge pole being the yard arm, with tackling arranged to raise and lower it. A large bow and stern oar with which to do the steering completed the rude craft. On the evening of the 14th of June the raft was finished, when we found that, as a number of us had surmised, it was not of sufficient buoyancy to hold all our effects as well as the whole party of whites and natives.

The next day only three white men, Mr. Homan, Mr. McIntosh and Corporal Shircliff, were placed in charge. About half the stores were put on the deck, the raft swung by ropes into the swift current of the stream so as to float it well out into the lake, and as the rude sail was spread to the increasing wind, the primitive craft commenced a journey that was destined to measure over thirteen hundred miles before the rough ribs of knots and bark were laid to rest on the great river, nearly half a thousand miles of whose secrets were given up to geographical science through the medium of her staunch and trusty bones. As she slowly obeyed her motive power, the wind began blowing harder and harder, until the craft was pitching like a vessel laboring in an ocean storm; but despite this the middle of the afternoon saw her rough journey across the angry lake safely completed, and this without any damage to her load worth noticing. The three men had had an extremely hard time of it, and had been compelled to take down their wall tent sail, for when this was lashed down over the stores on the deck to protect them from the deluge of flying spray breaking up over the stern there was ample surface presented to the furious gale to drive them along at a good round pace, especially when near the bold rocky shores, where all their vigilance and muscle were needed to keep them from being dashed to pieces in the rolling breakers. They had started with a half dozen or so good stout poles, but in using them over the rocks on the bottom one would occasionally cramp between a couple of submerged stones and be wrested violently from their hands as the raft swept swiftly by before it could be extricated. The remainder of the personnel, white and native, scrambled over the rough precipitous mountain spurs on the eastern side of the lake, wading through bog and tangled underbrush, then up steep slippery granite rocks on to the ridge tops bristling with fallen burned timber, or occasionally steadying themselves on some slight log that crossed a deep caÑon, whose bed held a rushing stream where nothing less than a trout could live for a minute, the one common suffering every where being from the mosquitoes. The rest of the stores not taken on the raft found their way along slowly by means of the two dilapidated canoes, previously described, in the hands of our own Indians.

As we neared Camp 7, at the outlet of Lake Lindeman, on the overland trail we occasionally met with little openings that might be described by an imaginative person as prairies, and for long stretches, that is, two and three hundred yards, the walking would really be pleasant.

An inspection of the locality showed that the lake we had just passed was drained by a small river averaging from fifty to seventy-five feet in width and a little over a mile long. It was for nearly the whole length a repetition of shallow rapids, shoals, cascades, ugly-looking bowlders, bars and network of drift-timber. At about the middle of its course the worst cascade was split by a huge projecting bowlder, just at a sudden bend of the stream, and either channel was barely large enough to allow the raft to pass if it came end on, and remained so while going through, otherwise it would be sure to jam. Through this narrow chute of water the raft was "shot" the next day—June 16th—and although our predictions were verified at this cascade, a few minutes' energetic work sufficed to clear it, with the loss of a side-log or two, and all were glad to see it towed and anchored alongside the gravelly beach on the new lake, with so little damage received. Here we at once commenced enlarging its dimensions on a scale commensurate with the carrying of our entire load, both personnel and materiel. Around this unnavigable and short river the Indian packers and traders portage their goods when making their way into the interior, there being a good trail on the eastern side of the stream, which, barring a few sandy stretches, connects the two lakes. I called these rapids and the portage Payer Portage, after Lieutenant Payer, of the Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1872-74.

By the 17th of June, at midnight, it was light enough to read print, of the size of that before my readers, and so continued throughout the month, except on very cloudy nights. Many bands of pretty harlequin ducks were noticed in the Payer Rapids, which seemed to be their favorite resort, the birds rarely appearing in the lakes, and always near the point at which some swift stream entered the smoother water. Black and brown bears and caribou tracks were seen in the valley of a small stream that here came in from the west. This valley was a most picturesque one as viewed from the Payer Portage looking westward, and was quite typical of the little Alpine valleys of this locality. I named it after Mr. Homan, the topographer of the expedition. We were quite fortunate in finding a number of fallen logs, sound and seasoned, which were much larger than any in our raft, the only trouble being that they were not long enough. All of the large trees tapered rapidly, and at the height of twenty or twenty-five feet a tree was reduced to the size of the largest of its numerous limbs, so that it did not offer surface enough at the small end to use with safety as the side-log or bottom-log of a well-constructed craft. We soon had a goodly number of them sawed in proper lengths, or, at any rate, as long as we could get them, their numerous limbs hacked off, and then, with much labor, we made log-ways through the brush and network of trunks, by means of which we plunged them into the swift river when they were floated down to the raft's position. One of the delights of this raft-making was our having to stand a greater part of the day in ice-water just off the mountain tops, and in strange contrast with this annoyance, the mosquitoes would come buzzing around and making work almost impossible by their attacks upon our heads, while at the same time our feet would be freezing. When the larger logs were secured, they were built into the raft on a plan of fifteen by forty feet; but, taking into account the projections outside of the corner pins, the actual dimensions were sixteen by forty-two. These were never afterward changed.

Two elevated decks were now constructed, separated by a lower central space, where two cumbersome oars might be rigged, that made it possible to row the ponderous craft at the rate of nearly a mile an hour, and these side-oars were afterward used quite often to reach some camping place on the beach of a lake when the wind had failed us or set in ahead. The bow and stern steering-oars were still retained, and we thus had surplus oars for either service, in case of accident, for the two services were never employed at once under any circumstances. There was only one fault with the new construction, and that was that none of the logs extended the whole length of the raft, and the affair rather resembled a pair of rafts, slightly dove-tailed at the point of union, than a single raft of substantial build.

The new lake on which we found ourselves was named Lake Bennett, after Mr. James Gordon Bennett, a well-known patron of American geographical research. While we were here a couple of canoes of the same dilapidated kind as those we saw on Lake Lindeman came down Lake Bennett, holding twice as many Tahk-heesh Indians who begged for work, and whom we put to use in various ways. I noticed that one of them stammered considerably, the first Indian I ever met with an impediment in his speech.

Among my Chilkat packers I also noticed one that was deaf and dumb, and several who were afflicted with cataract in the eye, but none were affected with the latter disease to the extent I had observed among the Eskimo, with whom I believe it is caused by repeated attacks of snow-blindness.

On the summits of high mountains to the right, or eastward of Lake Bennett, were the familiar blue-ice glaciers, but in charming relief to these were the red rocks and ridges that protruded amid them. Specimens of rocks very similar in color were found on the lake beach and in the terminal moraines of the little glaciers that came down the gulches, and these having shown iron as their coloring matter, I gave to this bold range the name of the Iron-capped Mountains.

On the morning of the 19th of June the constructors reported that their work was done, and the raft was immediately hauled in closer to shore, the load put on and carefully adjusted with reference to an equitable weight, the bow and stern lines cast loose, and after rowing through a winding channel to get past the shallow mudflats deposited by the two streams which emptied themselves near here, the old wall tent was again spread from its ridge-pole, lashed to the top of the rude mast, and our journey was resumed.

The scenery along this part of Lake Bennett is very much like the inland passages of Alaska, except that there is much less timber on the hills.

I had started with four Chilkat Indians, who were to go over the whole length of the Yukon with me. One of them was always complaining of severe illness, with such a wonderful adaptation to the amount of labor on hand that I discharged him at Lake Bennett as the only method of breaking up the coincidence. The best workman among them discharged himself by disappearing with a hatchet and an ax, and I was left with but two, neither of whom, properly speaking, could be called a Chilkat Indian; in fact one was a half-breed Tlinkit interpreter, "Billy" Dickinson by name, whose mother had been a Tsimpsean Indian woman and whose father kept the store of the North-west Trading Company in Chilkat Inlet. "Billy," as we always called him, was a rather good-looking young fellow of about twenty-five years, who understood the Tlinkit language thoroughly, but had the fault of nearly all interpreters of mixed blood, that when called on for duty he considered himself as one of the high contracting parties to the bargain to be made; a sort of agent instead of an interpreter, and being a wonderfully poor agent he became still worse as an interpreter. He was as strong as two or three ordinary men of his build and in any sort of an emergency with a sprinkle of dangerous excitement about it he put all his strength to use and proved invaluable, but in the hum-drum, monotonous work of the trip, such as the steering of the raft or other continuous labor, his Indian nature came to the front, and he did every thing in the world on the outskirts of the work required, but would not be brought down to the main issue until compelled to do so by the application of strong language. Our other native companion was named Indianne, a Chilkat Tahk-heesh Indian, whose familiarity with the latter language, through his mother, a Tahk-heesh squaw, made him invaluable to us as an interpreter while in the country of this tribe, which stretches to the site of old Fort Selkirk at the mouth of the Pelly River. Physically, Indianne was not all that might be required in an Indian, for they are generally supposed to do twice as much out-of-door work as a white man, but he was well past fifty years and such activity was hardly to be expected of him. Besides being a Tahk-heesh, or Stick interpreter, he was fairly familiar with the ground as a guide, having traveled over parts of it much oftener than most Indians, owing to the demand for his services as an interpreter among the Sticks. Through the medium of our two interpreters, and the knowledge found in each tribe of the language of their neighbors, we managed to get along on the river until English and Russian were again encountered, although we occasionally had to use four or five interpreters at once.

There was a fair wind in our favor as we started, but it was accompanied with a disagreeable rain which made things very unpleasant, as we had no sign of a cover on our open boat, nor could we raise one in a strong wind. Under this wind we made about a mile and a half an hour, and as it kept slowly increasing we dashed along at the noble rate of two or two and a half miles an hour. This increasing wind, however, also had its disadvantages, for on long, unprotected stretches of the lake the water was swelling into waves that gave us no small apprehension for our vessel. Not that we feared she might strike a rock, or spring a leak, but that in her peculiar explorations she might spread herself over the lake, and her crew and cargo over its bottom. By three in the afternoon the waves were dashing high over the stern, and the raft having no logs running its entire length, was working in the center like an accordion, and with as much distraction to us. Still it was important to take advantage of every possible breath of wind in the right direction while on the lakes; and we held the raft rigidly to the north for about two hours longer, at which time a perfect hurricane was howling, the high waves sweeping the rowing space so that no one could stand on his feet in that part, much less sit down to the oars, and as a few of the faithful pins commenced snapping, we headed the vessel for the eastern shore at as sharp an angle as it was possible to make running before the wind, and which I do not think was over two points of the compass, equal to an angle of about twenty degrees.

This course brought us in time to a rough, rocky beach strewn with big bowlders along the water's edge, over which the waves were dashing in a boiling sheet of water that looked threatening enough; but a line was gotten ashore through the surf with the aid of a canoe, and while a number of the crew kept the raft off the rocks with poles, the remainder of the party tracked it back about a half a mile along the slippery stones of the beach, to a crescent-shaped cove sheltered from the waves and wind, where it was anchored near the beach. We at once began looking around for a sufficient number of long logs to run the whole length of the raft, a search in which we were conspicuously successful, for the timber skirting the little cove was the largest and best adapted for raft repairing of any we saw for many hundred miles along the lakes. Four quite large trees were found, and all the next day, the 20th, was occupied in cutting them down, clearing a way for them through the timber to the shore of the lake, and prying, pulling, and pushing them there, and then incorporating them into the raft. Two were used for the side logs and two for the center, and when we had finished our task it was evident that a much needed improvement had been made. It was just made in time, too, for many of our tools were rapidly going to pieces; the last auger had slipped the nut that held it in the handle, so that it could not be withdrawn from the logs to clear it of the shavings, but a small hand-vise was firmly screwed on as a substitute, and this too lost its hold and fell overboard on the outer edge of the raft in eight or ten feet of water, and ice-water at that. A magnet of fair size was lashed on the end of a long pole, and we fished for the invisible implement, but without avail. "Billy" Dickinson, our half-breed Chilkat interpreter, of his own free will and accord, then stripped himself and dived down into the ice-cold water and discovered that near the spot where it had sunk was a precipitous bank of an unknown depth, down which it had probably rolled, otherwise the magnet would have secured it. Other means were employed and we got along without it.

The day we spent in repairing the raft a good, strong, steady wind from the south kept us all day in a state of perfect irritation at the loss of so much good motive power, but we consoled ourselves by observing that it did us one service at least—no mean one, however—in keeping the mosquitoes quiet during our labors.

Across Lake Bennett to the north-westward was a very prominent cape, brought out in bold relief by the valley of a picturesque stream, which emptied itself just beyond. I called it Prejevalsky Point after the well-known Russian explorer, while the stream was called Wheaton River after Brevet Major-General Frank Wheaton, U. S. Army, at the time commanding the Military Department (of the Columbia) in which Alaska is comprised, and to whose efforts and generosity the ample outfit of the expedition was due.

On the 21st we again started early, with a good breeze behind us that on the long stretches gave us quite heavy seas, which tested the raft very thoroughly, and with a result much to our satisfaction. It no longer conformed to the surface of the long swelling waves, but remained rigidly intact, the helmsman at the steering oar getting considerably splashed as a consequence. The red rocks and ridges of the ice-covered mountain tops that I have mentioned finally culminated in one bold, beetling pinnacle, well isolated from the rest, and quite noticeable for many miles along the lake from either direction. This I named Richards' Rock, after Vice-Admiral Richards, of the Royal Navy. The country was becoming a little more open as we neared the northern end of Lake Bennett, and, indeed, more picturesque in its relief to the monotonous grandeur of the mountain scenery. Lake Bennett is thirty miles long. At its north-western extremity a couple of streams disembogue, forming a wide, flat and conspicuous valley that, as we approached it, we all anticipated would prove our outlet. Several well marked conical buttes spring from this valley, and these with the distant mountains give it a very picturesque appearance, its largest river being sixty to seventy-five yards wide, but quite shallow. It received the name of Watson Valley, for Professor Sereno Watson, of Harvard University.

About five o'clock the northern end or outlet of the lake was reached. As the sail was lowered, and we entered a river from one hundred to two hundred yards wide, and started forward at a speed of three or four miles an hour—a pace which seemed ten times as fast as our progress upon the lake, since, from our proximity to the shore, our relative motion was more clearly indicated, our spirits ascended, and the prospects of our future journey when we should be rid of the lakes were joyfully discussed, and the subject was not exhausted when we grounded and ran upon a mud flat that took us two hours of hard work to get clear of. This short stretch of the draining river of Lake Bennett, nearly two miles long, is called by the natives of the country "the place where the caribou cross," and appears on the map as Caribou Crossing.

At certain seasons of the year, so the Tahk-heesh Indians say, these caribou—the woodland reindeer—pass over this part of the river in large numbers in their migrations to the different feeding grounds, supplied and withdrawn in turn by the changing seasons, and ford its wide shallow current, passing backward and forward through Watson Valley. Unfortunately for our party neither of these crossings occurred at this time of the year, although a dejected camp of two Tahk-heesh families not far away from ours (No. 10) had a very ancient reindeer ham hanging in front of their brush tent, which, however, we did not care to buy. The numerous tracks of the animals, some apparently as large as oxen, confirmed the Indian stories, and as I looked at our skeleton game score and our provisions of Government bacon, I wished sincerely that June was one of the months of the reindeers' migration, and the 21st or 22d about the period of its culmination.

The very few Indians living in this part of the country—the "Sticks"—subsist mostly on these animals and on mountain goats, with now and then a wandering moose, and more frequently a black bear. One would expect to find such followers of the chase the very hardiest of all Indians, in compliance with the rule that prevails in most countries, by which the hunter excels the fisherman, but this does not seem to be the case along this great river. Here, indeed, it appears that the further down the stream the Indian lives, and the more he subsists on fish, the hardier, the more robust, the more self-asserting and impudent he becomes.

After prying our raft off the soft mud flat we again spread our sail for the beach of the little lake and went into camp, after having been on the water (or in it) for over thirteen hours.

The country was now decidedly more open, and it was evident that we were getting out of the mountains. Many level spots appeared, the hills were less steep and the snow was melting from their tops. Pretty wild rose-blossoms were found along the banks of the beach, with many wild onions with which we stuffed the wrought-iron grouse that we killed, and altogether there was a general change of verdure for the better. There were even a number of rheumatic grasshoppers which feebly jumped along in the cold Alpine air, as if to tempt us to go fishing, in remembrance of the methods of our boyhood's days, and in fact every thing that we needed for that recreation was to be had except the fish. Although this lake (Lake Nares, after Sir George Nares) was but three or four miles long, its eastern trend delayed us three days before we got a favorable wind, the banks not being good for tracking the raft. Our old friend, the steady summer south wind, still continued, but was really a hindrance to our progress on an eastern course. Although small, Lake Nares was one of the prettiest in the lacustrine chain, owing to the greater openness of country on its banks. Grand terraces stretching in beautiful symmetry along each side of the lake plainly showed its ancient levels, these terraces reaching nearly to the tops of the hills, and looking as if some huge giant had used them as stairways over the mountains. Similar but less conspicuous terraces had been noticed on the northern shores of Lake Bennett.

Although we could catch no fish while fishing with bait or flies, yet a number of trout lines put out over night in Lake Nares rewarded us with a large salmon trout, the first fish we had caught on the trip. I have spoken of the delay on this little lake on account of its eastward trend, and the next lake kept up the unfavorable course, and we did not get off this short eastern stretch of ten or fifteen miles for five or six days, so baffling was the wind. Of course, these protracted delays gave us many chances for rambles around the country, some of which we improved.

Everywhere we came in contact with the grouse of these regions, all of them with broods of varying numbers, and while the little chicks went scurrying through the grass and brush in search of a hiding place, the old ones walked along in front of the intruder, often but a few feet away, seemingly less devoid of fear than the common barn fowls, although probably they had never heard a shot fired.

The Doctor and I sat down to rest on a large rock with a perturbed mother grouse on another not over three yards away, and we could inspect her plumage and study her actions as well as if she had been in a cage. The temptation to kill them was very great after having been so long without fresh meat, a subsistence the appetite loudly demands in the rough out-of-door life of an explorer. A mess of them ruthlessly destroyed by our Indian hunters, who had no fears of the game law, no sportsman's qualms of conscience, nor in fact compassion of any sort, lowered our desire to zero, for they were tougher than leather, and as tasteless as shavings; and after that first mess we were perfectly willing to allow them all the rights guaranteed by the game laws of lower latitudes.

CARVED PINS FOR FASTENING MARMOT SNARES.