The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, September 13, 1898, Page 2

2 THE 1898, FRANCISCO CALL, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, e e eeee——————————————————————————————————————— loaned them to the Government, nor l we reached Cape Lisburne, twenty-five can anybody get any benefit from them miles north of Point Hope, and no ice this winter. Besides Mr. Lopp—and to bother us until we anchored behind no one knows better than he?—says | Blossom Shoals at Icy Cape. the Pitmagea country is not a g00d | On the 14th of July we got to Cape piace for the herd. It would be better | Blossom in Kotzebue Sound. There we to leave the deer in charge of native found the Guardian, Northern Light, herders where they are now. The Leslie D. and several little schooners, splendid success of the native herders apparently hardly large .enough to in driving the deer to Point Barrow navigate San Francisco Bay. Yet these little fellows had the cheek to start from California and Washington ports to come away up here. And they got contrasts so favorably with the failure of the expedition to the Yukon in charge of Laplanders that it appears to be a pity that s should be suD- | nere, too, which makes their presump- planted by foreigne tion still worse. The Kenney, which had sailed bY These vesse! had been here since the Cape BIc m without landing her Fourth of July and many men had cargo there, had dra~~ed ashore the gone un the river. But the main body night before we arrived. She had filled of miners was waiting for the river with water. The master had a2ban- gteamers, four in number, that were to doned her and had sold he be towed up by sailing vessels. Every- cargo for $250. ‘There is s body was jubilant and hopeful. There been more than that value of whale- |y 4 pheen no gold in evidence. The na- bone alone in the cargo. He did nct | yjyes had no nug~cts, no gold dust. The ask for assistance to haul the vessel |1y naries had not seen any, but the off the beach, nor did the man Who | ihare were confident of success just bought her. We took the crew and | s gam.. The Lord is said to pay par- the officers off ‘%o be through the | ¢jopjar attention to people like these, : ‘arted for Kotzebue Soun ving here this morning. Lieut nt Bertholf, who had spent several days with us during the winter, went ashore to tell the Rev. Robert Samms that no supplies could reach him this year, as theX#ad been soid for the benefit of the insurance com- pany when the vessel was wrecked Point Hope. He was offered a pas on the Bear to Seattle for himse who will start out on such an expedi- tion with shadow of a rumor. Before leaving Seattle one man, a doctor of medicine, there. ble to sift down was false; that the icers of the Bear had not located wife and the Government schoc ms there and Captain Tuttle had teacher. not grub-staked a native to hunt for Mr. Samms said he could not see Why gold. I told him that the rumors of the goods had been sold for the benefit golg emanated from the whalers. I of the insurance company when they suppose he was not acquainted with | had not been insured. He d ned t¢ apy whalers, because he came up here leave the sound on the supposition t in epite of that statement of mine. ord would provide and the c that he can get plenty of T from the miners, who have up the search for gold and ar Going into Cap. Blossom we passed the Leslie D. and Willard Ainsworth. e left that night and found the Cath- erine Sudden and Jane Falkinberg,each going be He is going to Point Hoy with a little sternwheel steamer in tow, to see if he can recover the goods there. apchored under Cape Kruzensterne. He is ;uine of success, but he will They had been carried by the current have a pretty hard crowd to bargait (o the northward, past the entrance to with. the sound. A station has been established here At Cape Blossom we found Mr. Til- by one or more of the transportation companies to keep the miners There will probably be the usual cry his winter that miners are starving here is a chance that Kotzebue Sound will be the seat of suffering. When the Bear is sent to their relief in No- sember, I for one do not intend to (R (ASTS 4) Continued from First Page. ton, who brought the first news down from Point Barrow last winter. He is hief mate of the Northern Light. ad on board the Bear Tickey and his wife, the Point Hope natives who guided him to St. Michael. Tilton came over to see hir natives and ther went supplied him again. We picked up these natives from the Bonanza at Port Clarence. They had come from San Francisco on her. They declared that they would not dare tell | because the Point Hope natives can stand only a reasonable amount of ro- mancing. What struck them more for- | eibly than anything else was *‘shooting { the chutes.” They were strutting around on the ship in San Francisco clothes until we neared Point Hope, when they began to ‘“‘shuck” them and come out in their skin clothing. We | reached Point Hope on the evening of the 15th and the two natives went ashore. It transpired later that some- body at Point Clarence had given them t. But before it had lifted her on to its urface theheavy cakes crashed through ser pl and she was a wreck Phe everything of value and is on board the Bar. The | crew 1 c of the schooner promptly ship- |5 pottle of whisky with instructions e mate of the Fearless, and will | not to drink it while on the Bear, but t0 ling this season on her. The |} ihe moment they touched the beach prospect confronts the Bear it Mr. and Mrs. Tickey got gloriously ice outside of us does not clear Up. | grunk to the envy of their admiring On July 9 the Bear reached Port neighbors. It was clear of ice and the | Here Lieutenant E. P. Bertholf came | & fleet was congregated there, |on board. He was in excellent health | 15 for a coal vessel. There were |and declared that he had passed a | Jso the Alaska, Jane Falkinberg, Mer- | pleasant winter. The only thing that | naid, Leslie D and Willard Ainsworth, | troubled him serfously in his long | illed with people bound for Kotzebue |gled trip was the poor fare that he had | jound and walting there because their | in many places. The extreme cold was nasters believed that the sound was | not so disagreeable, because it was al- | illed with ice, and did not have enter- | ways calm when the thermometeri| rise enough to go up there and see for | went away down. But the blizzards, | mselves. Cogan on the Alaska had | with their moderately low tempera- | : good excuse for delaying, because he | tyre, were decidedly uncomfortable. | 1ad just run up to Port Clarence for | Bertholf has made more progress in vater and could not get into Kotzebue |jearning the language than anybody I ce. fjound until the sternwheel steamer |nave ever scen who has spent such a john Riley was completed. On the 10th | gnort time in the ‘country. He was se started for St. Lawrence Island |just beginning to get at the true ¢here the steamer was building. language of the natives. He says they We cleaned our bofler preparatory |talk to the white man in a language or the northern trip, filled up with vater and left Port Clarence at 11:30 ). m. on the 12th. At Port Clarence As. istant Engineer Wood found a mineral ipring whose waters are very like the iohannes water. That spring would be worth a fortune in a more accessible Mace, Several of us went in swimming in L stream near where we watered ship. Che water was fairly warm in spite of he fact that you could find solid ice at some of the moods and tenses when we arrived. Mr. Lopp at Cape Prince of Wales speaks the language of the natives. Scarcely any other white man in the country does that. Charley Peterson, an old employe of the Alaska Commercial Company on the Yukon River, talks like a native, but he is no grammarian and cannot explain the language to the other whites. »y digging four feet beneath the sur-| Father Barnum Is the man '‘ace of the ground anywhere around | who will finally codify the here. language. He has worked like | The next morning after leaving Port Tlarence we stopped at Cape Prince of Nales for an hour or so and then went nto the Arctic Ocean. It was a beau- iful day, almost calm and the heat vas really uncomfortable. It seemed s much like cruising in the Caribbean | According to Father Barnum, the jea as in the Arctic Ocean. There was | language is exceptionally rich, like the L strong current setting to the north- | Greek. Its action expresses itself in var.. but following the coast line. This | terminations. There are no detached wurrent had cleared out all the ice from | adjectives or adverbs. The whole thing hat part of the ocean. In Kotzebue | appears to go into the verb. To every sound I saw one little cluster of ice | verb there are 3537 forms, while the alkes left behind in the general exodus. | Greek verbs run up to about 1400 only. We saw no ice worth mentioning until | Father Barnum says the language is the men who decipher hieroglyphi¢ in- scriptions. He has in his manuscript enough of the language to give it to the civilized world and hopes to com- plete his work and publish it before | many years. nothing to go on but the wrote asking me about the truth of the stories regarding ue Sound and the probability of I answered that every story I had heard so far and had been We | almost wild in their delight at seeing | | the folks at home all they had seen, | | | LIEUTENANT D. H. JARVIS VALIANT LEADER OF THE OVERLAND RELIEF EXPEDITION TO THE IMPRISONED WHALERS. like our pigeon English. He mastered | that all right and was beginning to get | O00@9@0@@@@@0@@@@QQQ@OO0@@@@‘i‘@@@Q@@@QQ@OO?@@@OQ TWELVE HUNDRED GOLD SEEKERS ARE STRANDED | and she | first to AT KOTZEBUE SOUND BY LIEUTENANT JOHN G. BERRY, UNITED STATES REVENUE CUTTER SERVICE. ABOARD THE ARCTIC RELIEF STEAMSHIP BEAR, off Cape Blossom, Kotzebue Sound, Aug. 21, via Victoria, Sept. 12.—No, we are not in Kotzebue“Sound hurting fof gold, ‘but we are finding just as much as are those people who came here for it—and that is none. For a month and a half gold seekers have been arriving here in all sorts of vessels. They brought more provisions, as a rule, than the majority of Yu- kon miners take. Some, to be sure, are even short of food considering the length of time they must neces- sarily be out of communication with the rest of the world, but I should judge these are so few that there will be no danger of starvation this winter at this place. It Is estimated that at least 1200 men have landed here. ‘- Most of them have gone up the Kowak River. A few have gone up the Salawwik, and about 400 have returned to Cape Blossom and are here now, wait- ing for a chance to return to civilization. Men have been 350 miles up the Kowak River. They report that the river is all mud. What sand they found gave only the slightest trace or color of gold. Of the 1200 seekers not one has struck enough gold to pay. for his daily flapjacks and salt pork. The gold fever appears to have passed the epidemic stage in Kotzebue Sound. The patients are conva- lescing rapidly, but are now in a state of extreme depression. Probably as many as 900 of them will return this year to the States and will be ready next year to start on a balloon trip to Saturn if some astronomer will kindly let them know that there are precious metals there. This Kotzebue Sound boom has been al- most as crazy as that would be. The Kotzebue Sound boom has stuck in the mud of the Kowak River. is a very swiftly flowing stream—dangerously swift for the small boats that they are towing up there. Hotham Inlet, which must be crossed before they can even enter the mouths of the river, is shallow, and so rough that the prospectors, in some cases, do not dare to go out on its waters in steam launches. Some of them, who had planned to take their goods up the river with the launches, have had to change their minds, and they are forced to pay the little river boats $40 a ton to get the supplies 250 miles up the river. Seven men, so far, have lost their lives in trying to tow their dories and other small boats up the river, I have been unable to get the names of all, but I hear that Miller and Scott of Boston, and Moore of Dubuque, are among those lost. Twenty-eight men have lost all their supplies by the capsizing of boats in the rapid currents of the river, and there is not an ounce of gold to offset this weight of calamity. ] Four stern-wheel river steamers are running and each has made several trips up and down the river. At first they ran up full and came down empty. Now they are loaded on the trip down. The vessels here, having brought the people up for about $100 a head, will now get from $40 to $60 apiece for taking three-quarters of the number back, and the poor feliows will have lost nearly a year's work at home. In most cases they had spent their last dollar to outfit them for spending the winter in an Arctic climate. They will have to sell their remaining stock of provisions to more fortunate companions in order to pay their fares down, and they will land without a cent in the States. Those who remain will be able to get the stores of the others at little cost, and the chances are that there will be little suffering, if any. Yet very few of them are supplied with proper clothing for the climate. A man named Gordon, from Provincetown, Mass. said that Pickett, who claims to have discovered the Treadwell at Juneau, Alaska, reports that there is no chance for gold on any of the rivers emptying into Kotzebue Sound. Probably the only chance that the prospectors have of success is to cross over to the headwaterS of some of the tributaries of the Yukon River. We know there is gold there. There may be a chance even now on the Kowak, but it would seem certain that some of the 1200 men who have been searching every nook of the river for a month must have found gold if there was any there. The twenty-eight men who lost their provisions are destitute on the' beach here. Many of them ap- plied to Lieutenant Bertholf, who went ashore, as#ing to be taken down on the Bear; but our orders are to take down none but ship-wrecked seamen, and he had to leave them on the beach. It 009@@e@@@eeo@eoe@o@oo@o@oo@ooeoe@@ooo@@@e@ooooo 0000060000000 090008 900060000600 000000000600000000000000¢ SaME OF THE MEN WHO REPRESENT THE CALL ON THE BEAR. e SR " IEUTENANT JOHN G. BERRY, Carrespondent. DR. E. H. WOODRUFF, Surgeon furnished by The Call. “as regular as a chess board.” There are only twenty-one forms in the de- clension of the nouns, so that any one who wishes to become proficient has only to learn the roots and the 38537 verbal forms, then accustom his ear to the sound of them all. Then he can talk with the children. They speak the language prettily and correctly. The older people use contracted forms, which makes it almost another lan- guage to learn. The Eskimos speak their own language correctly, all of them, from one end of the Arctic Ocean to the other. Each district has pe- culiarities in its language on the Yu- kon River. Converse with the natives of Point Hope or Cape Smyth, and they do not understand one at first, be- cause they find it difficult to compre- hend hew a white man can speak any other but the gibberish of the coast. Presently one of them suggests that the man is really talking the language properly. Then their faces light up and they start in to talk correctly and fluently. Theodore Borquin, a Frenchman who studied the language in Labrador, has published an Eskimo grammar. Father Barnum says the book is good, has plenty of matter, but no system. Bour- quin started with the idea that the language was connected in some man- ner with the Hebrew tongue, and that proposition leads him into many devi- ous ways. At Point Hope we saw the midnight sun for the first time. It had been daylight all the time since arriving at St. Lawrence Island on June 19, but we had not seen the sun itself at mid- night. We left Polnt Hope at 4:20 p. m. on July 17. At 11 p. m., off Cape Lisburne, we sighted ice for the first time since June in the Bering Sea. On ~H. N. WOOD, Photographer. relieved by chopping away the corner of the icy spur. It was not serious of itself, bu: was an indication of what might halpen if the ice really got down to busines, s * While Wi were cutting ice we were also getting a large stock of provisions on deck, ready for abandoning ship. On the 5th 21d 6th we gave twelve tons of coal to the Newport. On the 6thand 7th we tried to blast a passage thwugh the grounded ice in order to haul ‘he ship through into the July 18 we steamed through light scat- tering ice, pretty well softened by the fairly warm weather (40 to 50 degrees) in which it floated. At 1:30 p. m. we got into clear water, which extended clear along the coast as far as Iey Cape. On the morning of July 19 we picked up a native boat containing Captain A. C. Sherman of the wrecked steamer Orca, J. Drynen of the Pa-| cific Steam Whaling Company, J. Clark, second mate of the Jessie H. Freeman, | Fred Hobson of Cape Smyth, Oscar { Thompson, Anton Roderick, Pe- |clear water bétween the shore and the ter Nelson and Ivan EIlt, “starving |ice, but a few hours’ trial on the 7th whalers,” and two natives. They had | showed that the work would take more powder than we had on all the vessels and the attemp! was abandoned. The ice was fully thity feet thick in many places. This shore ice is a mass fully ten miles long, g-ounded in five fath- oms or more of water. Its average thickness cannot be less than twenty feet, and in places it may reach sixty feet from top ts bottom. It 'is | about 400 yards across and lies about half a mile from ths beach with clear water outside. We lis between this im- movable mass and the irresistible force of the ice pack whenever it chooses to exert itself. Between us and the pack is drift pretty thickly packed, which may or may not serve as a bumper to keep the direct pressure of the pack from us. Yesterday and the day be- fore we gave the Fearless twenty-three tons of coal. Larse cracks are open- ing in the ground ice, and every day or come down to get the mail from the ships, but the mail was on the Thrasher has not got here yet, although Snow confidently predicted would be at least one of the arrive at Cape Smyth. The whalers now on board say Snow will, in all probability, be the very last to arrive. Sherman reported all well at Point Barrow. Finding the ice packed on Blossom | Shoals off Icy Cape we anchored to the southward of the cape on the afternoon | of the 19th. This is one of the last places south of Point Barrow for the ice to leave in the summer. Extending | off shore from Icy Cape fc about eight | miles is this patch of shoals, worked up into ridges with less than three fath- | oms of water on them, while there may | be seven or nine fathoms between the | ridges. But since the ice probably | Captain that he changes the position of these ridges | two the off-shore ice moves to the from year to yvear it is almost always | northward for a few hours, but the necessary to go out around the whole | Pressure about us has not been re- laxed. We had only light winds from all quarters. The northwest wind, on which we rely to clear the ice away, will not blow long enough nor strong enough to make anyappreciable change in our condition. To seaward there is nothing but ice as far as the eye can reach. Not a drop of water is visible in that direction. It would be a great joke on us if the Jeanette had to take us all down to San Francisco shoal. Safling vessels have gone! through because they got caught in the shoals and eould not beat out of dan- | ger. The heavy ice grounds here and | other ice gets jammed in between it, | a sea of ice extending sometimes from one shore to the sea horizon. Once past the shoals at this season of the.year the probability is that fairly clear wa- ter will be found as far as the Sea Horse Islands. Nature makes that an- | other stopping place along the north- | ward road. The islands and shoal around them stop the ice just as Bios-| ESKIMO S som Shoals do, and it fills up Pearl | Bay to the northward of the Sea Horse | but generally leaves some kind of a | harbor in behind the islands. It was | : this harborage that sheltered the Bei. | LO@ned Their Deer Freely vedere last winter and it was toward | for the Relief of the that place that the Freeman and Orea | DDA Ty HOULD BE WELL REPAID were heading when the ice nipped | Whalers. them. ! Y On the 20th we tried to get around i outside Blossom Shoals, but ot too far | NOW the Government Seems in to the westward and probably | No Hurry to Reward Them pretty close to the ice pack, although i i we could not distinguish the pack from | e dhett Brivabion. the vessel. It ible that we 3 T 3, | BY tenant John G. Berry, U. S. R. C. 8. might have found a passave in close to | > it TN O Ber the shore. But out there the ice be-!| ABOARD AR 'TICRELIEF STEAM- came more and more thickly packed | A until we turned back and anchored off | Point Lay, about fifteen miles to the SHIP BEAR, Aug. reached Cape Prince of Wales at night southward of Ic— Cape. on August 22 and W. T. Lopp came On the 22d we moved up to Iey Cape|on board. As we are in a hurry to again. On the 23d Lieutenant Hamlett, | get away Mr. Lopp and Lieutenant Jar- A. Svendson, one of the Bear’s crew, | vis worked all night arranging to set- with J. A. Clark, Oscar Thompson and | tle up the accounts of the overland ev- the two natives who came down with | pedition with the natives. Many of Sherman, left in the native boat to|Jarvis’ “I O U's” have not been pre- take on a case of evaporated potatoes | sented for redemption, but he left the and one case of evaporated onions to ‘ trade goods with Mr. Lopp, who will Lieutenant Jarvis and incidentally to|take up the accounts as the natives give a few bags of iour to the Belve- | come in on behalf of the natives. dere at Sea Horse Islands. Finally, on| Mr. Lopp objected to the scheme of the 26th, we went out around the shoals. | Rev. Sheldon Jackson for providing for ‘We did not go far enough to the west- | his Laplanders for the winter. He de- ward this time, as we got.into three | clared that the deer were loaned, not fathoms of water (we must have|given to the Government, by the per- scraped the bottom at that depth); and | sons who owned them. The peopl in there, but she appeared to be all right, and there was considerable ice between us, so we went on and emerged into clear water as far as the eye could reach. This was about 11 p. m. The next morning at 8 we made fast to the outside of the shore ice off Cape Smyth and had reached the northern limit of our cruise. Lieutenant Jarvis came on board as soon as we reached here. Both he and Dr. Call were in excellent conditien. There was scarcely any sickness on the beach, the food was holding out well with the exception of butter, which had been exhausted over a week before. The herd of reindeer was as large as when it reached here. The births had equaled the killings. Mr. Brewer sent over to the ship hundreds of ducks that he could spare, and the whole ship’s company, “star- ving whalers” and all, have lived on wild duck ever since. What the people needed here last winter was somebody who had the authority to take charge of them and their affairs and who at the same time would exercise that authority. Neither of the masters of the wrecked vessels would take charge even of his own crew. Neither Brewer nor Mellhenny, though either one was competent to handle the situation, had the authority to govern the men. The two captains claimed that they were wrecked and that thelr authority ceased when they left their vessels. Brewer and Me- Ilhenny did take charge, but they had no way of enforcing their orders. The men obeyed them or not as they chose. had ‘to go oWt still farther, Yet that!wanted the use of them for the wintes made very little difference, as even the | The Government, through Jackson, had shoals were practically clear of ice by this time. At 3 a. m. on the 28th we anchored “ b 99 off the deserted village of Attanka, & south of Sea Horse, having tried to get to the northward inside of the shore [ ] ice. That night we steamed all around the outside of the ridge of shore ice and went merrilynorthward. We passed A sufferer from Nasal the Sea Horse and saw the Belvedes S . . S n Pee. Catarrh will find in- stant relief from the use of the new “0z0” tatarth treatment, For this reason 2 trial treatment is offered to yow, (all to the Institute and get a frial or write for a free trial. “0z" cures catarrh of the head, catarrh of the stomach, etc. It is a certain catarrh treatment. Trial free. AUDSON MEDICAL INSTITUTE, Ellis, Stockton and Market Sts When Jarvis arrived he supplied the Nam missing link in the chain of govern- IS the 3 : 0’ ment. He straightened things out, the dlSOOV@l’Y made the men work, and he made them for weak play baseball. If any of them did not men, want to play he was promptly hustled off to drag deer meat and ducks to camp. A few miles of this work soon made him willing to “play ball.” Jarvis was strict with them, but they all'ap- pear to have liked it. That was just what they wanted. On the 29th the steam whaler Jean- nette came along and tied up to the ice not far from us. She had been de- layed for a long ‘‘me at Port Clar- ence waiting for the coal schooner. On August 2 the ice closed in around us and the Jeanette. We had both mean- while changed our positions and were in a fairly well sheltered place. It did | not take more than twelve hours for the ice to come in. We had the whalers on board, but we were waliting for our friend the Thrasher, that was to have reached here before us. On the 3d the Jeanette, Newport and Fearless got through the ridge to the north- ward and steamed down to Cape Smyth inside the shore ice, where they now lie In safety, ready to take us down home, if the Bear is crushed. That after- noon there was a slight movement of ice that parted five lines, all that we had out forward, and set the vessel so hard against a spur of shore ice that the side of the ship was pressed in about an inch and a half, lifting the floor plates of the engine-room about four inches. The pressure was soon Fudyan cures pains in the back, catches in the back, weak back, pains in the shoulder, etc. Hudyan has cured in every case where it has been thoroughly nsed. - Hudyan stops the waste, the losses, in a single day, Circulars and testimonials free, HUDSON MEDICAL INSTITUTE, Ellis. Stockton and Market Sts. ‘;Lt"s (zhluux mlx.lln fsa ly into the nostrils. Itls quickly absor! cents at Drugglets or by mail ; sampies 10c. iym Y ELY BROTHERS, 56 Warren §t., New York Cltyy tive cure,