The Impossible Rescue

by Martin W. Sandler

  No single piece of equipment in the entire frozen North was more important than the Alaskan sled. Here, several of the sleds are shown drying out in a snow-house encampment.

  With the mountains behind them and no storms yet in sight, the expedition soon began coming upon the string of villages that Kalenin had told them they would encounter. The men were counting on these settlements to provide space in huts for shelter. “These huts,” Bertholf later wrote, “are built in a circular fashion, and are about half underground, with the roof arched over [with] brush and what wood the natives could pick up in the rivers in the spring. The whole is then banked up with earth in the fall before the ground is frozen. The floor is made of tough slabs of wood, and in the centre of it is a small opening large enough to admit a man’s body. This leads into a passage large enough to crawl along, and finally emerges into a smaller hut, built like the other one, which in turn opens into the outer air. Over each one of the openings is hung a piece of deerskin or seal skin. In the roof of the large hut is an opening, over which is stretched a covering made of the dried intestines of the whale, walrus, or seal, and, being translucent, admits the light during the day. The Eskimos appreciate the fact that hot air rises, for the outlet through the floor, being covered, only admits a small amount of cold air, while the opening at the top, being tightly [sealed], does not allow any of the warm air to escape. They do not have any fires in the hut, as a rule, for wood is scarce, and the heat from the bodies of the dozen or so [inhabitants] of each hut is sufficient to make the temperature inside quite comfortable. The cooking . . . is carried on in the outer entrance.”

  All three Cutter Service officers were not only impressed with the unique nature of the huts but were even more taken with the generosity of those who inhabited them. “The hospitality of these people I have never seen equaled elsewhere,” Jarvis wrote. “It is never grudging. . . . The best they have, and the best place in the house are at your disposal. . . . Never . . . did we pass a house where the people did not extend a cordial welcome and urge us to go in; and hardly a hut did we go into, but that the best place was cleared out for us and our belongings. What this means to a tired, cold, and hungry traveler can-not be fully appreciated save by those who have experienced it. . . . All that we ever gave in return for this hospitality, and all that was expected was a cup of tea and a cracker to the inmates of the house after we had finished our meal.”

  By the end of their first week’s travel, all in the party had become accustomed to the warm greetings they were receiving in every native settlement. But when they reached the village of Ki-yi-lieug-a-mute, the women and children stared at them in fright. Then they dashed into their dwellings. Jarvis and Call were stunned. But Kalenin knew exactly what had caused their strange behavior.

  “[Kalenin] informed us,” Jarvis would write, “that, with the exception of one or two of the Jesuit missionaries, we were the first white travelers who had gone through this part of the country for many years; and, as it had been the practice of the traders in the old days to steal the women during their visits to a village, these women were taking the precaution of getting out of sight lest we should do the same thing.”

  With the aid of his guides, Jarvis was soon able to allay the women’s fears. But he had entered the village knowing that he had a different kind of problem with which he had to deal immediately. Some miles before they had reached Ki-yi-lieug-a-mute, both he and Kalenin had noticed that many of their dogs had slackened their pace. Some were periodically falling down, obviously too weary to travel much farther. It was a frightening revelation. They hadn’t even begun crossing the far more difficult landscape that lay ahead, and already he had to find replacements for the animals. Was this, he thought, going to be a problem all the way to Point Barrow?

  Jarvis had hoped to obtain fresh dogs in Ki-yi-lieug-a-mute. But the natives told him that the animals he needed were away from the village and would not be brought back for two days — a seemingly short period of time. But from the moment the expedition had left Seattle, Jarvis had been obsessed with the knowledge that he was in a desperate race against time. Determining that he had enough healthy dogs to make up two teams, he decided that he and Dr. Call, along with two native guides, should move on. Bertholf and Kalenin and Koltchoff were to wait in Ki-yi-lieug-a-mute for the new dogs and were then to bring them to St. Michael as quickly as they could. Although he felt he had made the right decision, Jarvis was all too aware that, with at least 1,300 miles to go, he had already been forced to split up his small rescue party.

  In whatever village Jarvis either stopped at or passed through, he attempted to recruit guides from among the settlement’s inhabitants. He was well aware that their knowledge of the region that lay ahead of him was essential to his continuing on without mishap or losing his way.

  Early on the morning of December 23, 1897, Jarvis and Call left the village. For the first time since they had begun their overland journey, the temperature had dropped to well below zero. To make matters worse, they battled headwinds that seemed determined to drive them back with every step. But on Christmas Eve they reached the trading post of the Alaska Commercial Company, where several traders and their families, a group of miners, and a number of people whose river steamboats had become frozen in the Yukon River were hunkered down for the winter.

  After all they had already been through, the two officers were delighted to find that they had come upon a festive scene. The winter inhabitants of the trading post were determined to celebrate Christmas. And although Jarvis had no presents to give them, he found that he could add to the simple festivities by playing his own version of Santa Claus. “Before the Bear left Seattle,” he would later write, “the postmaster had sent on board a large sack of mail . . . with the request that it be delivered at St. Michael in case the expedition reached that point; and though its weight, 70 pounds, was a great drawback, it was brought along. As some of the mail was for the people at [the trading post], and taking it through to St. Michael might prevent their getting it until the river opened for navigation in the spring, I assumed the responsibility of opening the mail sack and delivering to the proper persons the letters directed to them.”

  Inhabitants of St. Michael outside one of their dwellings. At the time that Jarvis and his party reached the settlement, there were only about three dozen permanent settlers living in the entire top half of Alaska.

  Jarvis would have loved to spend Christmas Day with his new friends at the trading post. But with St. Michael still at least five days away, he knew he had to move on. Even though the wind increased, he and Call found that they could make good time by traveling over the snow-free ice of the Yukon River. All along the way they delivered mail to families who, rather than move into the trading post, had decided to spend the winter aboard their iced-in steamboats.

  On December 30 they reached St. Michael. They had completed the first 375-mile leg of their journey. Under different circumstances it would have been an accomplishment that brought great satisfaction. But for Jarvis in particular, it was a time of ever-increasing anxiety. With Cape Rodney and Cape Prince of Wales now that much closer, the question of whether he would be able to persuade the men who owned and cared for the reindeer herds, Artisarlook and Lopp, to give up their reindeer was increasingly on his mind. Even if he could accomplish that miracle — and that was a giant “if”— he wondered if the deer could be driven all the way to Point Barrow, a distance far greater than any herd had been driven before, even in summer weather.

  St. Michael, the first major destination on the rescue expedition’s long route to Point Barrow, was a major trading center. The building in the center of this photograph housed the Alaska Commercial Company, which had trading posts in various places throughout the Arctic.

  The trek to St. Michael had been far more difficult than Alexis Kalenin had led Jarvis to expect, and Jarvis would have preferred to spend at least two or three days in the village resting for the even-more-arduous hundreds of miles tha
t were certain to lie ahead. But from the moment he had accepted command of the rescue mission, he knew that in order to reach the whalers in time, he would be in a constant battle against the clock. That meant never staying in one place longer than he absolutely had to. But it also meant making sure that each leg of the journey was as carefully planned as possible. Convinced that he could afford to spend no more than one day at St. Michael, Jarvis knew that he had to use his brief time there as wisely as possible. “It was necessary,” he would later write, “that careful and complete preparations be made before leaving St. Michael, for, as far as we knew, this was the last base of supplies we could depend upon for food or transportation as far north as [the approaches to Point Barrow].”

  The journey thus far had taught Jarvis and Call that they had to have better clothing for what was to come. Their current clothing was made out of wool and dogskin, and the sleeping bags were composed of goatskin, canvas, and rubber. None of these items was warm enough for the weather they were encountering.

  Lieutenant Colonel George Randall, the commander of the army post at St. Michael, helped Jarvis outfit the expedition with the same type of clothing that the indigenous people wore. The native people had long ago learned that nothing protected them better from the subzero temperatures, howling winds, and driving snow than boots, pants, shirts, and mittens made of deerskin. “On starting out,” Jarvis wrote, “I had determined to do as the people who lived in the country did — to dress, travel, and live as they did. . . . I found the only way to get along was to conform as nearly as possible to the customs of those who already had solved many of the problems of existence in their arctic climate. In this connection it has seemed to me that the value of deerskin clothing has not always been known or fully appreciated in arctic explorations. The Eskimos of arctic Alaska . . . use hardly anything else, and nothing is so warm and light as their dress . . . The men’s winter clothes consist of a single pair of close-fitting trousers, with the hair next [to] the skin [to keep out the] cold . . . a pair of socks, with the hair next [to their] feet; a pair of boots with the hair out, with heavy sealskin soles for hard wear or deerskin soles for light wear; two . . . shirts, one with the hair next [to] the body and the other with the hair out, and both with close-fitting hoods fringed with wolfskin to break the wind from the face and nose; and a pair of mittens. These are all made of the summer skins of the reindeer, and the whole outfit will not weigh more than 10 or 12 pounds. Over the skin shirt is worn a snow shirt, made of [light cotton], and sometimes a [second] pair of . . . trousers is worn over the skin trousers to keep the snow from driving into the hair, and, on coming indoors into a warm house, melting and wetting the deerskin. A belt is worn around the waist outside the shirt to keep the cold air out, or, rather, to keep the warm air in.”

  From their previous experiences in the Arctic, Jarvis and Call knew that there was much to be learned from those who had always lived there. “It is characteristic of the natives of the extreme north that they have an excellent knowledge of how to prepare for and withstand the rigors of the climate,” Jarvis would write. “They seem to have no fears of it, but at the same time are fully alive to its dangers.”

  Dressing adequately was just one of the many things Jarvis learned from the indigenous people.

  Well before dawn broke on New Year’s Day, 1898, Jarvis and Call, dressed in their new deerskin outfits, were ready to leave St. Michael for the short journey to Unalakleet, their final destination before heading for Cape Rodney and the first reindeer herd. Bertholf had not yet arrived with the fresh dog teams he had been left behind to obtain, but Jarvis decided he couldn’t wait for him. Leaving a note telling the lieutenant to join them at Unalakleet, Jarvis and Call were set to push on. But not before Jarvis, based on his previous experience, made one final preparation.

  “It is always well before starting in the morning to take as much tea and water as one can hold, to avoid as much as possible a thirst during the day,” Jarvis wrote. “It is impossible to get water during the day without stopping to build a fire and melt snow, unless one carries a flask inside the clothing, and this stopping uses up time. Snow is bad for the mouth and soon makes it sore, besides not being sufficient to quench the thirst except for the minute. The worst feature of eating snow is that if one gives way to the temptation there is no stopping for the rest of the day, for, while it serves to quench the thirst for the time being, it seems to really increase it in the long run, and shortly after taking some snow one is more thirsty than ever. I found that by drinking a quart of tea in the morning I seldom was thirsty until night, and had no great desire to drink unless a halt was made in the middle of the day to rest and make a fire for tea.”

  Jarvis and Call had hoped to reach Unalakleet in two days, but as had happened their first day out of Tununak, they discovered that winds had blown away the shore ice over which they had intended to travel and they were forced inland. “Our road was trying and difficult,” Jarvis would write. “The wind had cleaned the snow from the plains, and made progress one continual, hard, grinding pull. . . . The next day was no better, and, though we had hoped to be at Unalak[leet] in two days, it was soon evident that we must be satisfied with what progress we could make under the conditions. We shoved and pushed over bowlders and almost bare, grassy mounds, and up and down steep gullies and cliffs, and when darkness overtook us, 15 miles was all we had accomplished.”

  The next day started out much the same, pushing and pulling heavy sleds over the unyielding, desolate terrain when suddenly Jarvis looked up and saw a figure coming toward him. What person, other than a member of his lifesaving expedition, could be out there struggling through this wasteland at this time of year under these conditions? Perhaps he was experiencing that Arctic phenomenon called a mirage, which caused travelers in the far North to “see” things that weren’t really there.

  But as the figure approaching Jarvis came closer, it became clear that it was no mirage. It was a woman Jarvis recognized. Her name was Canuanar, and he had met her a year before. But she lived hundreds of miles to the north. What in the world was she doing here?

  As Jarvis listened in astonishment, Canuanar told him that she and her husband were accompanying a “white whaler-man” who had come “from the ship.” What ship could that be? The Arctic whaling grounds were even farther away than Canuanar’s village. Was it possible that the whaler was from one of the eight stricken ships? Was he about to discover the condition of the men he and the Overland Relief Expedition had been sent to save?

  He had little time to ponder these questions. For just as suddenly as Canuanar had appeared, another figure, this one with a sled and a team of dogs, came into view, a man just as surprised to see Jarvis as the officer was to see him. And he had an extraordinary story to tell. His name, he told Jarvis, was George Fred Tilton (no relation to Captain Benjamin Tilton of the Alexander), and he was the third mate aboard the whaleship Belvedere. His ship, he stated, was one of eight whaling vessels that three months ago had become entrapped in the ice off Point Barrow. Then Tilton went on to explain just what had happened to the whaling fleet.

  In this photograph, George Fred Tilton (center) is shown just before breaking camp and a short time before his chance encounter with Lieutenant Jarvis.

  The Belvedere and two others, the Orca and the Jesse H. Freeman, had been trapped just west of Point Barrow. Fortunately the Belvedere had been driven by wind and ice into a bay where, although totally icebound, it was sheltered from further damage. The Orca and the Jesse H. Freeman had not been so fortunate. The Orca had been caught between two immense ice floes that had crushed the vessel. Although not destroyed, the Freeman had also been struck by enormous blocks of ice and abandoned.

  By some miracle, Tilton reported, all of the officers and men of both vessels had escaped with their lives, and at first they had made their way over the ice to the Belvedere. When it become obvious that there were not enough supplies on the ship to provide for that number of men, the crews of the
Orca and the Freeman were forced to travel an even longer distance over the ice to a whaling station on the mainland at Point Barrow. Hardly pausing for breath, Tilton then went on to explain that three other whaleships, the Newport, the Jeannie, and the Fearless, were not seriously damaged but were locked in the ice at a spot east of Point Barrow. When he had last seen the Rosario, Tilton stated, that unlucky vessel was lying on its side in the ice. One final ship, the Wanderer, had not been seen or heard from since the disaster had taken place.

  Then, before Jarvis could even ask, Tilton explained how he came to be standing there. The disaster that had struck the whaling fleet, he said, had taken place at the beginning of September. By the middle of October, it had become all too obvious that, because of lack of food and supplies, both the whalers still on their ships and those at the whaling station would have a slim chance of surviving the winter. The captains of the vessels had taken an inventory of all the provisions they had and, according to Tilton, “found that our entire stock from all sources would allow two meals a day for the men of the eight ships until July 1st, but the meals would have to be mighty scant ones. This meant that half of the men would probably get weak and die, and even if most of them did hold out until July there was no guarantee of relief.”

  It was this “no guarantee of relief,” Tilton stated, that had led the captains to make a desperate decision. Their only chance, they decided, was to send a volunteer overland as far as possibly St. Michael, where, if the weather permitted, he might be able to board a succession of vessels that could eventually take him to San Francisco, Seattle, or some other American West Coast port, where the situation at Point Barrow could be made known. “It was then,” Tilton explained, “that I volunteered to go south to civilisation to get help. . . . [The captains] agreed to my proposition, and there were plenty who were willing to go with me, but I thought it all over and decided that if I failed one dead man was enough, so I refused all offers of travelling companions. . . . At 12 [noon] on October 23rd, I hitched up my dogs, . . . and after shaking hands all round, started on my trip, which I figure is the only one of its kind on record, that is, walking back from a whaling voyage.”