A day and a half brought us to the Salchaket, one of a chain of missions along the Tanana River, established by the energy and zeal of the Reverend Charles Eugene Betticher, Jr., during his incumbency at Fairbanks, that have already brought a great change for the better in native conditions. Five years had elapsed since last I visited this tribe, a reconnoitring visit on one of the first steamboats that ever went up the Tanana River above Fairbanks, and it was a delight to see the new, clean village with the little gardens round the cabins, and to note the appreciative attitude which the Indians showed. So highly do they value the missionary nurse in charge that however far afield their hunting may lead them, one of their number is sent back every week to see that the mission does not lack wood and water and meat; a simple, docile, kindly people that one's heart warms to. This mission was our last outpost to the south. My farther journey had for its prime object the visiting of the natives of the upper Tanana as far as the Tanana Crossing, some two hundred and fifty miles beyond the Salchaket, the inquiring into their condition and into the desirability of establishing a post amongst them. [Sidenote: THE UPPER TANANA] The upper Tanana is probably one of the most difficult streams in the world to navigate that can by any stretch of the term be called navigable. The great Alaskan range begins to approach the Tanana River so soon as one gets above Fairbanks. Its prominent peaks, ten thousand to twelve thousand feet high, are continually in view from one angle to another as one pursues the river trail, and come constantly nearer and nearer. All the streams that are confluent with the Tanana on its left bank are glacial streams draining the high ice of these mountains. They come down laden thick with silt, at times foaming torrents, at times merely trickling watercourses that seam with numerous small runnels the wide deltas at their mouths. The tributaries of the right bank flow for the most part through heavily wooded country, and come out cleanly into the river. So the glacial waters form shoals and bars, and the woodland waters during freshets pile them high with driftwood. Such is the chief characteristic of the upper Tanana; a multiplicity of swift, narrow channels amidst bars laden with drift. It is subject to sudden rises of great violence; the attempt to stem a freshet on the upper Tanana is a hair-raising experience as the log of the _Pelican_ would show, but does not come within this narrative. Owing to the origin of much of its water, the Tanana is often in flood in dry, hot seasons, when other rivers run meagrely, as well as in times of rain. It cannot be stemmed in flood; its shoals deny passage in drouth; there must be just the right stage of water to permit its navigation, and that stage, "without o'erflowing, full," is not often found of duration to serve the voyage after the month of June.