Iditarod City furnished a new and large base of supplies. Amidst the heterogeneous mass of humanity that swarmed into the place, though by no means the largest element in it, were experienced prospectors from every other district in Alaska. Under the iniquitous law that then prevailed and has only recently been modified, by which there was no limit at all to the number of claims in a district which one man could stake for himself and others, every creek adjacent to Flat Creek, every creek for many miles in every direction, had long since been tied up by the men with lead-pencils and hatchets. So the newly arrived prospectors must spread out yet wider, and they were soon scattered over all the rugged hundred miles between Iditarod City and the Kuskokwim River. Here and there they found prospects; and here and there what promised to be "pay." They started a new town, Georgetown, on the Kuskokwim itself; another town sprang up on the Takotna, a tributary of the Kuskokwim; and the great Commercial Company of Alaska, ever alert for new developments, put a steamboat on the Kuskokwim and built trading-posts at both these points. Thus the Kuskokwim country, which for long had been one of the least-known portions of Alaska, was opened up almost at a stroke. [Sidenote: CAMP AT 50° BELOW] It was my purpose to visit Iditarod City during the winter of 1910-11, although, by reason of the distance to be travelled, a journey thither would involve the omission of the customary winter visit to upper Yukon points. When the northern trip to the Koyukuk was returned from at Tanana, a sad journey had to be made to Nenana to bury the body of Miss Farthing, and Doctor Loomis, missionary physician at Tanana, who accompanied me on this errand, had almost as rough a breaking-in to the Alaska trail as we came back to Tanana again as Doctor Burke had in our journey over the "first ice" of the Koyukuk two years before. Two feet of new snow lay on the trail, and the thermometer went down to 60° below zero. We were camped once on the mail trail, unable to reach a road-house, at 50° below zero. [Illustration: THE ROUGH BREAKING IN OF DOCTOR LOOMIS, CAMPED ON THE MAIL TRAIL AT 50° BELOW ZERO, UNABLE TO REACH A ROAD-HOUSE FOR THE DEEP SNOW.] [Illustration: ESQUIMAUX OF THE UPPER KUSKOKWIM.] [Sidenote: THE ROUTE TO THE IDITAROD] From Tanana the beaten track to the Iditarod lay one hundred and sixty miles down the Yukon to Lewis's Landing, and then across country by the Lewis Cut-Off one hundred miles to Dishkaket on the Innoko, and thence across country another hundred miles to Iditarod City. But I designed to penetrate to the Iditarod by another route. I had long desired to visit Lake Minchúmina and its little band of Indians, and to pass through the upper Kuskokwim country. So I had engaged a Minchúmina Indian as a guide, and laid my course up the Tanana River to the Coschaket, and then due south across country to Lake Minchúmina and the upper Kuskokwim.