The history of the migrations of the Indians from the Athabascan or Mackenzie region is impossible to trace now. It is highly probable that the movement was by way of the Porcupine River. And it would seem that there must have been two distinct migrations: one that passed down the Yukon to the Tanana district and spread thence up the Tanana River and up the Koyukuk; and long after, as one supposes, a migration that peopled the upper Yukon. A portion of this last migration must have gone across country to the Ketchumstock and the upper Tanana, for the inhabitants of the upper Tanana do not speak the Tanana tongue, which is the tongue of the Middle Yukon but a variant of the tongue of the upper Yukon. [Illustration: A DOCILE FOLK, EAGER FOR INSTRUCTION.] [Illustration: THE MISSION TYPE.] [Illustration: WILD AND SHY.] How long ago these migrations took place there is not the slightest knowledge to base even a surmise upon. The natives themselves have no records nor even traditions, and the first point of contact between white men and the natives of the interior is within three quarters of a century ago. It may have been two or three families only which penetrated to this region or to that and settled there, and what pressure started them on their wanderings no one will ever know. Perhaps some venturesome hunter pursuing his game across the highlands that separate the Mackenzie from the Yukon was disabled and compelled to remain until the summer, and then discovered the salmon that made their way up the tributaries of the Porcupine. The Mackenzie has no salmon. Or a local tribal quarrel may have sent fugitives over the divide. When first the white man came to the upper Yukon, in 1846 and 1847, no one knew that it was the same river at the mouth of which the Russians had built Redoubt Saint Michael ten or twelve years before. The natives of the upper river knew nothing about the lower river. It is an easy matter to float down the Yukon for a thousand miles in a birch-bark canoe, but an exceedingly difficult matter to come up again. It was not until the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous fur-trading expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana River the agents of the Russian Fur Company, come up from Nulato on the same quest, that the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered; and that seems to have been well past the middle of the century. In the map of North America that the writer first used at school, the Yukon flowed north into the Arctic Ocean, parallel with the Mackenzie. [Sidenote: AN INOFFENSIVE PEOPLE]