Fort Yukon, though it holds no attraction for the ordinary visitor or the summer tourist on the river, is a place of much interest to those who know the history of Alaska. While it is purely a native village, with no white population save the traders and the usual sprinkling of men that hang around native villages, it is yet the oldest white man's post on the Yukon River, save the post established by the Russians at Nulato, five or six hundred miles lower down. The Hudson Bay Company established itself here in 1846, and that date serves as the year one in making calculations and determining ages to this day. It is a fixed point in time that every native knows of. Any old man can tell you whether he was born before or after that date, and, if before, can pick out some boy that is about the age he was when the event occurred. The massacre at Nulato in 1851 serves in a similar way for the lower river. After the Purchase, and the determination of the longitude of Fort Yukon by Mr. Raymond in 1869--who made the first steamboat journey up the Yukon on that errand--the Hudson Bay Company moved three times before they succeeded in getting east of the 141st meridian, and at the point reached on the third move, the New Rampart House on the Porcupine River, only a few hundred yards beyond the boundary-line, they remained until the gold excitement on the Yukon and the journeying of the natives to new posts on that river rendered trading unprofitable; then they withdrew to the Mackenzie. The oldest white men's graves in Alaska, again with the exception of Nulato, are those in the little Hudson Bay cemetery near Fort Yukon. [Sidenote: ARCHDEACON MACDONALD ] Fort Yukon is also the site of the oldest missionary station on the river, unless there were earlier visits of Russian priests to the lower river, of which there seems no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman of the Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald was a remarkable man. Married to a native wife, he translated the whole Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his translations are in general use on the upper river to this day. He reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar, taught the Indians to read and write their own tongue, and dignified it by the gift of the great literature of the sacred books. The language is, of course, a dying one--English is slowly superseding it--but it seems safe to say that for a generation or two yet to come it will be the basis of the common speech of the people and the language of worship. It is chiefly in matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking its place, though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit of the civilised race that blackguard English is the first English that is learned.