dition of affairs, threatened to hang every carpenter and mechanic Weare had brought up if they failed to immediately commence work. The men went to work, and with them went a gang of men from the Bear. The little steamer was put together in a few days, and the Bear only went to sea after seeing the P. B. Weare steaming into the mouth of the Yukon.

The Weare was enabled that summer to land her stores along the Yukon, and was the only vessel available for the early crowds of miners going to Klondike.

The mouth of the Yukon is a great delta, surrounded by marsh of timber-a soaking prairie in summer, a plain of snow and ice in winter. The shifting bars and shallows face out from this delta far into Bering Sea, and no channel has yet been discovered whereby an ocean steamer could enter any of the mouths. Fortunately the northernmost mouth, nearest St. Michael and 65 miles from it, is navigable for the light river steamers, and this one, called Aphoon, and marked by its unusual growth of willows and bushes is well known to the local Russian and Indian pilots. It is narrow and intricate, and the general course up stream is southsoutheast. Streams and passages enter it, and it has troublesome tidal currents. The whole space be

tween the mouth is a net-work, indeed, of narrow channels, through the marshes.

Kutluck, at the outlet of the Aphoon, on Pastol Bay, is an Indian village,long celebrated for its manufacture of skin boats (bidars), and there the oldtime voyagers were accustomed to get the only night's sleep ashore that navigation permits between St. Michael and Andraefski. On the south bank of the main stream, at the head of the delta, is the Roman Catholic mission of Kuslivuk; and a few miles higher, just above the mouth of the Andraefski River, is the abandoned Russian trading post, Andraefski, above which the river winds past Icogmute, where there is a Greek Catholic mission. The banks of the river are much wooded, and the current even as far down as Koserefski averages over three knots an hour. Above Koserefski (the Catholic Mission station), the course is along stretches of uninviting country, among marsh islands and "sloughs," the current growing more and more swift on the long reach from Auvik, where the Episcopal mission is situated, to Nulato.

The river here has a nearly north and south course, parallel with the coast of Norton Sound and within fifty miles or so of it. Two portages across here form cut-offs in constant use in winter by the traders, Indians and missionaries. The first of these

portages starts from the mainland opposite the Island of St. Michael, and passes over the range of hills that defines the shore to the headwaters of the Anvik River. This journey may be made in winter by sledges and thence down the Auvik to the Yukon, but it is a hard road. Mr. Nelson, the naturalist, and a fur trader, spent two months from November 16, 1880, to January 19, 1891, in reaching the Yukon by this path.

The other portage is that between Unalaklik, a Swedish mission station at the mouth of the Unalaklik River, some fifty miles north of St. Michael, and a stream that enters the Yukon half way between Auvik and Nulato. In going from St. Michael to Unalatlik there are few points at which a boat can land even in the smoothest weather; in rough weather only Major's Cove and Kegiktowenk before rounding Tolstoi Point to Topánika, where there is a trading post. Topánika is some ten miles from Unalaklik, with a high shelving beach, behind which rise high walls of sandstone in perpendicular bluffs from twenty to one hundred feet in height. This beach continues all the way to the Unalaklik River, the bluff gradually decreasing into a marshy plain at the river's mouth, which is obstructed by a bar over which at low tide there are only a few feet of water except in a narrow and tortuous channel, constantly