The falling short of complete success of this very gallant mountaineering attempt seems to have been due, first to the mistake of approaching the mountain by the most difficult route, so that it was more than five months after starting that the actual climbing began; or, if the survey made justified, and indeed decided, the route, then the summit was sacrificed to the survey. But the immediate cause of the failure was the mistake of relying upon canned pemmican for the main food supply. This provision, hauled with infinite labor from the coast, and carried on the backs of the party to the high levels of the mountain, proved uneatable and useless at the very time when it was depended upon for subsistence. There is no finer big-game country in the world than that around the interior slopes of the Alaskan range; there is no finer meat in the world than caribou and mountain-sheep. It is carrying coals to Newcastle to bring canned meat into this country--nature's own larder stocked with her choicest supplies. But if, attempting the mountain when they did, the Parker-Browne party had remained two or three days longer in the Grand Basin, which they would assuredly have done had their food been eatable, their bodies would be lying up there yet or would be crushed beneath the debris of the earthquake on the ridge. CHAPTER IX THE NAMES PLACED UPON THE MOUNTAIN BY THE AUTHOR There was no intent of putting names at all upon any portions of this mountain when the expedition was undertaken, save that the author had it in his mind to honor the memory of a very noble and very notable gentlewoman who gave ten years of her life to the Alaskan natives, set on foot one of the most successful educational agencies in the interior, and died suddenly and heroically at her post of duty a few years since, leaving a broad and indelible mark upon the character of a generation of Indians. Miss Farthing lies buried high up on the bluffs opposite the school at Nenana, in a spot she was wont to visit for the fine view of Denali it commands, and her brother, the present bishop of Montreal, and some of her colleagues of the Alaskan mission, have set a concrete cross there. When we entered the Alaskan range by Cache Creek there rose directly before us a striking pyramidal peak, some twelve or thirteen thousand feet high. Not knowing that any name had been bestowed upon it, the author discharged himself of the duty that he conceived lay upon him of associating Miss Farthing's name permanently with the mountain range she loved and the country in which she labored. But he has since learned that Professor Parker placed upon this mountain, a year before, the name of Alfred Brooks, of the Alaskan Geological Survey. Apart from the priority of naming, to which, of course, he would immediately yield, the author knows of no one whose name should so fitly be placed upon a peak of the Alaskan range, and he would himself resist any effort to change it.