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An early ascent of the Yukon River

Civil War veteran Charles Raymond was 27 when he accepted an assignment to visit the new U.S. territory of Alaska, a place so far away from his home in New York City he couldn’t imagine it.

Two years after Secretary of State William Seward had brokered the purchase of Alaska from Russia, U.S. leaders suspected the British trading post at Fort Yukon might be located on American soil. But they weren’t sure.

An 1825 treaty between Russia and Great Britain — then the controlling power of Canada — described Interior Alaska’s eastern boundary as a straight line along the 141st meridian. Surveyors would not get to marking that with waist-high obelisks until the early 1900s.

But U.S. military leaders thought that a point measurement of Fort Yukon’s longitude was possible, if difficult. That required someone to travel deep into the heart of the ������appterritory with equipment that would let him determine from the stars where his boots were planted.

Raymond’s superiors were impressed enough with him — an engineer who had finished first in his class at West Point — that they asked him to ascend the Yukon River from its mouth at the Bering Sea, a journey of more than 1,000 miles.  

With an assistant, Raymond left San Francisco in a steamship bound for ������appon April 6, 1869. Due to choppy seas that delayed his arrival in St. Michael, Alaska, Raymond did not begin his odyssey up the Yukon River until three months later.

On July 4, 1869, a wooden ship chugged into the mouth of the Yukon River with “flags flying and guns firing,” Raymond wrote in an account of his mission.

The steamship Yukon, owned by the ������appCommercial Co., was — along with many others — soon to become a common sight on Alaska’s largest river. But a paddlewheeler powered by wood-fired boiler had never before churned as far up as Fort Yukon.

The Yukon’s crew would stop a few times each day at logjams in the river. There, they would saw off stems by hand and stuff them in the ship’s hungry boiler, which produced steam to turn the paddlewheel.

After dozens of such stops, the ship arrived at Fort Yukon on July 31, 1869.

Raymond anticipated tension at the trading post. He instead found the hospitality he noted everywhere he visited in Alaska:

“Notwithstanding the somewhat unpleasant character of our errand, we were cordially welcomed by Mr. John Wilson, the agent of the Hudson Bay Company at the station,” Raymond wrote. “(We) were speedily established in one of the comfortable log buildings which compose the fort.”

He found his surveying job harder than he expected: “The nights were so light as to greatly embarrass astronomical observations.” 

Impatiently watching the Yukon River’s water level drop as feeder creeks started to freeze, the captain of the Yukon announced he was heading back for St. Michael, with or without Raymond.

Because he needed more measurements to be confident, one afternoon Raymond stood on shore and watched the steamship pull away from Fort Yukon. The captain had left him and his assistant behind.

Raymond soon thereafter — with the help of a solar eclipse — determined that Fort Yukon was indeed west of the 141st meridian and part of the United States.

Raymond informed John Wilson with some regret that he needed to take possession of the British trading post. He then hoisted the American flag on a spruce pole. As Raymond watched it flap in the breeze, he pondered his exit from Alaska.

On Aug. 28, 1869, Raymond shoved off from Fort Yukon for home with four others in a wooden skiff sealed with spruce pitch.

Their rations for the long trip downstream included 25 pounds of “moose pemmican” from John Wilson, the ousted Hudson Bay manager.

In a journey “too monotonous to require much description” Raymond and his party paddled the hundreds of miles of gentle river to the village of Anvik in two weeks.

There, his plan changed. Raymond’s boat had disintegrated beyond repair. The Natives in Anvik deemed it too late in the season to help the men descend the Yukon to its mouth, more than 300 river miles away.

Not wanting to overwinter in Alaska, Raymond heard from a village leader that the locals sometimes travelled upstream on the Anvik River to a portage that would lead them to the ocean at Norton Sound. It was a much shorter journey than boating to the mouth of the Yukon but promised more suffering.

“This being apparently the only avenue of escape, I did not hesitate long,” Raymond wrote.

Their overland trip to the coast by birchbark canoe and foot began with the “unpleasant discovery” that they had left behind a canvas bag that contained most of their food. Raymond and his companions continued, enduring a hungry few days, until they spotted campfire smoke on the far side of the pass.

There, a coastal Native and his wife were at their hunting camp. They shared caribou meat with the men, who “feasted to our hearts’ content.”

The men weren’t out of the woods yet, as 20 miles of tussocks and deep moss separated them from tidewater. They staggered “almost dead with fatigue” into present-day Golsovia on the Norton Sound coast. 

There, they shared a Native’s meal of one hare cooked in sea water, “which we fancied delicious because we had not tasted salt for more than a week.”

An American Commercial Co. captain soon picked up Raymond’s party by steamer. A month later, Raymond arrived back in San Francisco. It was Nov. 6, 1869, exactly six months after he had taken off.

Though he never returned to Alaska, Raymond’s half-year mission resulted in not only in the establishment of America’s newest trading post at Fort Yukon but also the first detailed paper map of the Yukon River, drawn from his observations.

Since the late 1970s, the ������app' Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.