Pruitt was near apoplectic. He is certain all the photographs are ruined.
I worry, too, for my letter to Sophie. The Old Man is fortunate that we will not see him again, as I do not think I could temper my fury.
I thanked the Indian who came to us with the news. In gratitude, I said he should help himself to some of the abandoned food, supplies we cached near his village.
?—?It was good of him to come back & tell us what happened, I said. —?Skilly is his name, am I right?
?—?That’s no name, Samuelson said. —?It only means ‘little brother.’ Would guess he’s kin of a chief.
No one in our group seems to know the skilly’s real name. It makes me sorry.
As for our papers, there is nothing more to be done. The Indians say the river will soon break. Throughout the morning we heard the grinding of ice on the move. It is here that Lieut. Haigh abandoned his attempt as the water through the canyon became too deep & fast moving to navigate.
If the ice washes out before we enter, we too will fail. If it does so while we are in the canyon, I cannot say we will survive.
Samuelson caught several rabbits in his snares during the night. He & the Indian woman, who apparently continues on with us, are cleaning them so we will have meat for this next day or two.
We leave as soon as they are done.
But with the box containing the sun he was more careful.?.?.?.?That was finally given to him, with the strict injunction to not open it. But, turning himself into a raven, he flew away with it, and, on opening the box, light shone on the earth as it does now. But the people, astonished by the unwonted glare, ran off into the mountains, woods, and even into the water, becoming animals or fish.
?—?From Alaska and Its Resources, William Healey Dall, 1870
Dear Mr. Forrester,
I’m working to organize and read everything in the order of how events would have unfolded. But I keep finding unexpected documents, and I’m so enjoying them. There is this rare sense of immediacy I sometimes encounter with artifacts. I’ll be holding one of your great-uncle’s small leather diaries in my hands, thinking what a miracle it is that they are still around today, and then I look outside and see the very river the Colonel is describing. I know it probably sounds overdramatic, but it gives me goose bumps. Each time I turn these brittle pages, and imagine the Colonel camped right outside my window, writing by campfire, meeting the first people of this land, it feels like time has collapsed and the past is happening now. This is what made me fall in love with history.
And as I’m going through the boxes, I have so many questions. I’m sure some of them will be answered as I go. Right now, for example, I’m wondering how on earth you could end up with your great-aunt’s hair comb as one of the artifacts if it plucked up by a raven and lost in Vancouver in 1885.
I thought of her letters when I was at the post office here in Alpine yesterday. A raven had landed in the back of my partner’s pickup truck, and it was rummaging through our grocery bags. It was trying to peck its way into a bag of tortilla chips when we noticed it. We both went running and yelling at it, trying to scare it away from our groceries. It flew off, but only as far as a light pole.
There are some great stories about the Raven character in Alaska. In one of my favorites, Raven coaxes his friend Whale into beaching himself in the mud. When Whale is stranded, Raven eats him, the entire whale. The people in the nearby village are angry at Raven because he was so greedy. The hunters begin shooting arrows at him and chasing after him. But Raven is too fat with blubber and can barely flap off the ground. Since he can’t fly away, Raven starts turning every arrow into a spruce tree. Even as the arrows fly, the trees grow and grow, and so Raven is able to hide away until the end of time.
On a more practical note, I think it’s important that we get these materials into digital form. The journals and letters have been subjected to a lot through the years. I worry about damaging them as I read through them now, but I’m trying to handle them as carefully as I can. Because I’m already doing the work of translating the Colonel’s shorthand as I read it, I’ve started to convert the diaries into a transcript.
I noticed that many of the clippings from newspapers, books, and greeting cards look as if they were once pasted to other backing paper. Do you know where they came from?