channel through which the tides foam and churn, and then turn north
through the "Gulf of Georgia," twenty or thirty miles wide. Vancouver
Island stretches for three hundred miles along the west, fir-clad,
backboned by a chain of mountains rising up into the snows. On the east
a coast indented with multitudinous bays and deep channels, sharp
promontories and islands; the forest coming to the water's edge, the
mountains rising sharply six and seven thousand feet into the snows and
clouds, as lofty as the fjelde of Norway, but not so bare and naked, the
dense, deep green fir forests growing from water to snow line.
[Illustration: AWAITING CARGO-VANCOUVER, B. C.]
We were crossing Queen Charlotte Sound when we awoke this morning, and
all day long have been threading our way among islands, through narrow
channels, across seemingly shut-in lakes, ten and twelve miles wide, and
then no wider than the Kanawha River or even narrower. As we come north
the mountains grow higher and come closer to the water we sail upon,
and there is more snow on their summits.
You might imagine yourself with Henrik Hudson on his first voyage, when
the Hudson valley was covered with primeval forests.
Last evening we saw a number of humpbacked whales, and to-day more. This
morning saw my first sea lions and also fur and hair seals. To-morrow,
they say, we shall see yet more. Only gulls, a few terns and ducks
to-day. No larger birds as yet.
MONDAY, August 24, 1903.
The greyness of yesterday is vanished. The sky is cloudless, the
atmosphere translucent. The mountains are more lofty, the snow patches
grown into wide fields, and the air has taken on a certain added
keenness, telling of distant snow and ice. To-morrow we shall see more
snow and even glaciers. All day we have been going from one broad sound
or channel through narrow straits into others as broad. We crossed
Dixon's Channel at breakfast-time, through which the commerce of the
Orient will come to Port Simpson, the Canadians hope, when the Grand
Trunk Pacific shall have been built.
About noon we came around a wooded island and made our first port of
Ketchikan, where there are salmon canneries, and hard by quartz mines
yielding gold, and saloons and stores. Here we had our first view of
near-by totem poles, and our first sight of the shoals of salmon that
make alive these waters. From a foot-bridge crossing a little creek that
debouched near our steamer wharf, we looked down into the clear water
and saw it fairly swarming with salmon, fish from ten to fifteen pounds,
"small ones," they said. But the waters were choked with them. Dipping a
net down, you might haul up a wagon load as easily as one. Yet no one
was catching them. So plentiful are the fish that no one wants to eat
salmon except as a last resort--"food fit only for dogs," they say, and
the distant tenderfeet whom the canneries supply. And these swarming
fish below us shoved each other upon the shallow shore continually, when
there would be a great splashing to get back.
From Ketchikan we have come out into the great Clarence Strait, with
Belim and Ernest Sounds stretching away into the snow-covered mountains
toward the east. The strait is as wide as the Hudson at the Palisades,
the shores fir clad, the mountains six to seven thousand feet, up into
clouds and snow. The water to-day is like a mirror, and many porpoises
are playing about. I have just seen three big blue herons, and awhile
ago we passed a loon. Last night just at dusk, we saw several flocks of
snipe or plover, small, brown, swift in flight, close above the water.
[Illustration: TOTEM POLES AT KETCHIKAN.]
[Illustration: GLACIERS ON FREDERICK SOUND.]
We have just looked upon the most superb panorama we have yet beheld.
The last four hours the mountains both east and west of us have come
closer to the shores, and risen higher, the fir mantle enveloping
them has grown a darker green, larger timber than for the last few
hundred miles, and then we came round a bend in our great strait--about
six to ten miles wide--forty or fifty miles long--and there in front of
us, bounding the horizon on the north, stretched an immense mass of
jagged, serrated mountain chain, glittering like silver in the slanting
sun rays. Not mere snow patches, not mere fields of snow, but vast
"fjellen" of snow, snow hiding all but the most ragged rock peaks, and
even sometimes enveloping these. Valleys all snow-filled and from which
descend mighty glaciers. Below the miles of snow lay the deep green
forests of the lesser mountain summits and sloping flanks, and then the
dark blue waters of the giant fjord, dotted with many fir-clad islands.
We agree that we have seen nothing in our lives so sublimely beautiful.
Never yet nature on so stupendous a scale.
The quiet waters of the last two days are now alive with gulls and ducks
and grebes and divers, many loons. More bird life than we have yet seen.
Just as is told by the Harriman naturalist. Only at Wrangel does the
real bird life of the north begin. Curving around another wooded
promontory, we beheld the town of Wrangel, at Fort Wrangel, on Wrangel
Island, ten miles away, nestling at the mouth of a little valley, below
the firs and snow summits behind. We are now tied up to the pier at this
port, and shall lie here till 2 A. M., when flood tide will allow us to
continue the voyage, and at daylight pass through the narrowest and
most hazardous strait of the trip. We mean to be waked at four o'clock
so as to see the pass.
In the village, which claims to be the second town in Alaska, we have
walked about and seen some of the totem poles which stand before many of
the Indian cabins. Grotesque things, surely.
It is now near nine o'clock and yet the lingering twilight permits one
to read. At Dawson, they tell me, there is in June no night, and
baseball matches are played at 10 P. M.
August 25, 1903.
We did not leave Wrangel till 2 A. M., lying there waiting for the flood
of the tide. We were to pass through the very tortuous, narrow and
difficult straits and passages between Wrangel Bay and Frederick Sound,
through which the tides rush with terrific fury--the tides rise twenty
or thirty feet along these shores--and the ship would only venture at
flood tide and after dawn. In order to see these picturesque passages, I
climbed out between three and four o'clock this morning, wrapped in a
blanket shawl above my overcoat, and stood in the ice-chilled air while
we threaded slowly our dangerous way. Along sheer mountain-sides,
between low wooded islands (all fir), a channel carefully marked with
many buoys and white beacons, with many sharp turns, finally entering
the great Frederick Sound, where many whales were blowing, and we saw
our first real icebergs--masses of ice, blue and green, translucent,
with deep, clear coloring.
[Illustration: APPROACHING FORT WRANGEL.]
[Illustration: THE PIER--FORT WRANGEL.]
All day we have sailed up this great land-locked sheet of blue water,
the icebergs and floes increasing in number as we approached Taku Inlet,
from whose great live glaciers they are incessantly shed off.
4 P. M.--We have landed at the Treadwell Mines on Douglas Island, where
the largest stamp mill in the world crushes a low grade quartz night and
day the year around, and where is gathered a mining population of
several thousand. Then we crossed the fjord to the bustling port of
Juneau, the would-be capital of Alaska, the rival of Sitka. A curious
little town of wooden buildings, wooden streets, wooden sidewalks,
nestling under a mighty snow-capped mountain, and, like those other
towns, largely built on piles, on account of the tides.
Now we are off for Skagway, a twelve hours' run with our thirteen-knot
speed.
To-day we have fallen in with two more fellow-travelers. One a young
fellow named Baldwin, attached to the U. S. Fish Commission, who tells
me much about the fishing on these coasts, and the efforts now being
made to stay the indiscriminate slaughter. Another, a grave-faced,
sturdy man from Maine who is panning free gold near Circle City, and has
endured much of hardship and suffering. He hopes to win enough this
winter and coming summer from his claim to go back to California and
make a home for his old mother who waits for him there.
SKAGWAY, ALASKA, Wednesday, August 25.
Here we are, safe and sound after a voyage due north four days and four
nights, more than 1,500 miles--I do not know just how far. We came out
from Juneau last night in a nasty rain, mist (snow-rain almost) and wind
driving against the rushing tides. Coming around Douglas Island in the
teeth of the gale, we passed over the very spot where a year or two ago
the ill-fated S. S. "Islander" struck a sunken iceberg, and went down
into the profound depths with all on board. As I heard the moan of the
winds, the rain splash on our cabin window, and hearkened to the roar of
the whirling tides against whose currents we were entering the great
Lynn Canal--fjord we should say--ninety miles or more long--ten to
fifteen miles wide--I could not help thinking of the innumerable frail
and lesser boats that dared these dangerous waters in the first mad rush
to the Klondike but a few short years ago. In the darkness we have
passed many fine glaciers, and along the bases of immense snow and ice
crested mountains, which we are sorry not to have seen, but so much is
now before us that our minds are already bent toward the great Yukon.
We are tied to an immense pier, and mechanical lifters seem to be
dragging out the very entrails of the ship. Across the line of the
warehouses I see the trucks of the railway, the hackmen are crying out
their hotels. "This way, free 'bus to the Fifth Avenue Hotel."
[Illustration: THE PIER, SKAGWAY.]
[Illustration: LYNN CANAL FROM THE SUMMIT OF WHITE PASS.]
[Illustration: LOOKING DOWN WHITE PASS.]
[Illustration: THE SUMMIT--WHITE PASS.]
FIFTH LETTER.
SKAGWAY, CARIBOU CROSSING[A] AND ATLIN.
ATLIN, BRITISH COLUMBIA, August 29, 1903.
Here we are at the mining camp of Atlin, on Atlin Lake. We left Skagway
the same morning we arrived. Our boat, the "City of Seattle," came in
early Wednesday morning, and long before we got up we heard them
discharging cargo, all hands at work. The day was cloudy, cold, and icy
winds swept down from the glaciers. It seemed November. The little town
is built on a low sand tongue of detritus carried down from the glaciers
by the snow rivers, the river Skagway here pouring out a flood of muddy
white water like the Swiss streams.
[A] Caribou Crossing now called Carcross.
The railway is a narrow, three-foot gauge, and the cars are low but
roomy. Our train consisted of nine freight cars, a baggage, two
passenger cars and three locomotives, one in front and two in the
middle. The famous ride was all that has been said of it. First, a
gradual ascent up the deep valley of the Skagway, then steep climbing
and many doubles and winds up through the cañon to the summit, twenty
miles away, and 3,200 feet above the sea. In many places the road-bed is
blasted out of the granite rock, sheer precipices above and below, a
most costly piece of work, and ever down below winds the difficult,
dangerous trail, over which fifty to one hundred thousand men and women
footed it in the winters of 1897-1898, in the strange, mad world-rush to
the fabulous gold fields of the interior. How they got up and through at
all is the wonder; yet men tell me that men, pack-laden, footsore,
determined, were so closely massed along the trail that it was one
continuous line from Skagway to summit and beyond, for months at a time.
The various views from our car were magnificent and even appalling;
sometimes we seemed to hang in mid-air as we crawled upward. As we
approached the summit we came among snow fields and near many glaciers,
and then passed through long snow-sheds over which the avalanches often
slip and thunder into the abysses below.
Near the divide is the international boundary line, and the customs
station for Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada, and where the
red-coated Canadian mounted police come first in evidence. Here our bags
were examined by the customs. Then we began a gradual descent into wide,
open, flat valleys, over bare granite rock masses and through a stunted
fir wilderness into the basin of the Yukon, 2,600 miles from the Behring
Sea at St. Michaels. Flocks of ptarmigan flew up as the train rolled
down, and a few eagles soared high above the snow summits.
Our first stop was at a railway eating-house near the head of Lake
Bennett, a sheet of light green water, two to ten miles wide and over
thirty miles long, all shut in by gigantic granite mountains whose
summits were covered with glittering snow. The railway skirts the
water for the entire distance until it crosses at a bridge over a swift
current where Lake Bennett flows into Lake Marsh, and where is the
station of Caribou.
[Illustration: RAILWAY TRAIN--SKAGWAY.]
[Illustration: THE INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY.]
[Illustration: CARIBOU CROSSING.]
[Illustration: EARLY SEPTEMBER SNOW, CARIBOU CROSSING.]
Here we were put off, and here we would, two days later, take the
bi-weekly steamer for Atlin, on Atlin Lake, where we now are, and here
the railway leaves the lakes and takes a short cut across a low divide
to White Horse Rapids, where begins the steamboat navigation on the
Yukon River.
Caribou is a collection of cabins and tents, and is the first settlement
where, they say, will some day be a city.
It was on Lake Bennett that the weary pilgrims used to camp to build
their boats and rafts and begin their long water journey of five hundred
miles to Dawson and the golden Klondike.
Our hotel we found surprisingly neat and clean; owned and kept by a
famous Indian, "Dawson Charlie," who was one of the discoverers of the
gold of Bonanza Creek in the Klondike, and who had the sense to himself
stake out several claims, the gold from which has made him now a magnate
worth several hundred thousand dollars, and who lives and entertains
like a white man. He housed us in a neat, comfortable room, iron
bedstead, wire mattress, carpeted floor. He fed us at fifty cents a meal
as well, as abundantly as in West Virginia, and only his Indian
daughter, who waited on us, dressed neatly and fashionably, with big
diamonds in her ears, made us realize that we were not in our own land.
Here we have spent two delightful days. The air is as wonderfully clear
as on the table-lands of Mexico, full of ozone, but cold in the shadow
even in midday, though the sun is warm.
On the ship we met a delightful naturalist, Mr. Baldwin, of New Haven,
artist of the U. S. Fish Commission, and who came with us to try and
catch some grayling, in order to make drawings for the Commission, and
for two days we have been out in the woods, he with my rod, H---- with
your butterfly net, and I with my gun. He caught his grayling, several
of them. I shot several mallard ducks, but H---- caught no butterflies,
nor saw one. It was too late in the season for that.
On the way up we fell in with a very intelligent Swede, whose partner in
the Klondike is a Dane, and who, when he learned H----'s nationality,
and she had talked Danish with him, was all courtesy and friendliness.
He had come in with the "mushers" (corruption of the French _marche_),
as the early foot-farers are called, and had succeeded. When we get to
Dawson he will welcome us.
[Illustration: A VISTA ON LAKE MARSH.]
[Illustration: WOODLAND ALONG LAKE MARSH.]
[Illustration: ON THE TRAIL AT CARIBOU.]
[Illustration: VIEW NEAR CARIBOU CROSSING.]
At Caribou we also made acquaintance with the Canadian customs officer,
Mr. John Turnure, a fine type of Canadian official, big, bluff, yet
courteous, who at first was going to tax all my cartridges and kodak
films, notwithstanding I had passed the customs at Winnipeg and had come
from Vancouver direct, but who, upon explanation, relented, and
afterward called on us and invited H----, Mr. B---- and myself to
call on his wife and family at his log cabin mansion near the station,
which we did, and were served cake and coffee from dainty china, and sat
on a divan covered with priceless furs, near a good piano. His daughters
were now at home from school on vacation, and his wife, a cultured
woman, was next day going with them on a shopping visit to Dawson, the
New York or Cincinnati of this far north.
The Yukon territory is governed from Ottawa by appointees, and policed
by the "Northwest Mounted Police," a fine body of men--including many
young Englishmen of good family--in cowboy hats and red coats. While
here in Atlin, we are just over the line in the Province of British
Columbia, a state with its own laws and civil magistrates.
We left Caribou on a little steamer with a big sternwheel--all of which,
timber and machinery, had been carried from Skagway over the White Pass
on horses' backs, and sledges, dragged by men and dogs, and put together
on Lake Bennett, before the railway was even thought of. How in the name
of heaven a ten-ton boiler, and the engines and big timbers, were got
over that foot-path trail, is even yet a standing marvel--the boat is as
big as the steamer "Calvert" on the Kanawha River--but it was done, and
to-day I have talked with the man who bossed and directed the job,
Captain Irving, now a gold hunter of Atlin and a member of the British
Columbia Parliament.
We first came slowly through a well-marked track on a little lake, Lake
Marsh, for about ten miles, then through a short river, and then out
into Lake Taggish, a sheet of water larger than Lake Bennett, and one
arm of which is famous for its desperate winds from the glaciers--the
"hurricane" arm--another arm of which heads toward the White Horse
Rapids, and a third arm, "The Taku Arm," which extends southerly toward
Lake Atlin, a lake more than one hundred miles in length, which empties
into it through a short, swift, turbulent river. This southerly portion
of the lake is eight or ten miles wide and we were all night steaming on
it to Taku, where we landed this morning--a distance of forty or fifty
miles--when, taking a little, short, two-mile railway, we were pulled
over to Atlin Lake, a yet bigger body of water. There embarking on
another steamboat, we were ferried ten miles across to Atlin, a town
with a courthouse, several churches, a little hospital, a newspaper, a
bank, a dozen hotels, a multitude of restaurants, bicycles, numerous
livery stables, and which is the center of a gold-mining region from
which already several millions of dollars have been taken since the
first pay dirt was found in 1898. We dined at a restaurant where a
colored French cook presides, and you may have any delicacy New York
could afford. At the bars men preside with diamonds the size of
hickory nuts in their shirts, drinks are twenty-five cents each and
cigars the same. The hotels are full of keen-faced men; well-gowned and
refined women are to be seen on the streets; the baby carriages are
pulled by great big dogs, and even the water carts and delivery wagons
are hauled by teams of eight and ten dogs--Newfoundland or wolfish
Esquimaux.
[Illustration: THE TAKU RIVER.]
[Illustration: LAKE ATLIN.]
[Illustration: DOGS--ATLIN.]
"The Camp," or city, is now in the midst of a boom, and this morning we
were shown several buckets of gold nuggets just brought in last night
from a recent "clean up."
When in the midst of Lake Taggish, yesterday afternoon, we were hailed
by a naphtha launch of the Mounted Police, and, on our lying to, three
gentlemen climbed in. One face seemed in some way familiar to me, and
when I presently heard some one call him Mr. Sutton I recognized one of
my old Port Hope schoolmates, who had also been at Cornell, and who had
been an especial friend. He was as well pleased as I at the meeting, and
is now here with me. He was a brilliant scholar, and is now British
Columbia's most eminent geologist and mining expert. We have been out
together to-day, and to have his expert opinion here on what I see is
invaluable. We have also met here a Mr. and Mrs. R----, of Philadelphia,
to whom I had a letter, a promoter of the largest hydraulic company
here, and H---- has been off with Mrs. R---- to-day and panned her first
chunks of real, true, genuine gold, of which performance she is not a
little proud. The whole country seems to be more or less full of gold;
it is in the gravels and sands everywhere, and a number of very large
gold-getting enterprises are under way, mostly hydraulic placer mining,
but also some fine quartz veins carrying free gold are being opened up,
and I have been off with Sutton all the afternoon looking at one.
September 1, 1903.
We have had three days of outing; at least, I have. Saturday morning I
made an early start with Sutton and three other men for a visit to some
hydraulic mining operations up on Pine Creek, and to the great dredge
now being built. At one of these, an operation called "The Sunrise Gold
Co.," I found in charge a Mr. Ruffner, of Cincinnati, a cousin to the
Kanawha family, grandson of one of the original Ruffner brothers, who,
hating slavery, had freed his slaves and removed to free soil in Ohio. A
bright young fellow, managing a large operation. Then we went on further
to Gold Run, where an enormous dredge is being built. An experiment in
this country, about the final success of which there is yet much
question. Here I dined in a tent, which is warmer, they say, than any
timber building, even when the temperature is 50 degrees below zero. The
valley is a broad, open one, all of glacial formation. It is very level,
with Pine Creek cutting deeply between high gravel banks. A black top
soil of a foot or two, eight or ten feet of grey gravel, then as much
more yellowish sandy gravel, and often a foot or two of black sand at
the bottom, lying upon a bed of serpentine rock; and it is in this
lowest ten feet of yellow gravel and black sand that the free gold is
found, nuggets of a pound or two down to minute gold dust, a red gold of
about 22 to 23 carats in combination with copper or silver. Through this
gravel are also immense stones and boulders, and these are the gold
diggers' particular bete noir. Most of the digging is done by getting
out this gravel, freeing it of the boulders and washing it. Pine Creek
is the overflow of Surprise Lake, a sheet of water twenty miles long and
one-half to one mile wide; and although a considerable stream, yet its
waters are so much needed in these gold-washing operations that a
constant water-war among the diggers and digging companies goes on.
There is much waste also in the present methods, and it is to prevent
the wars as well as to save the fine gold that now largely escapes that
the dredging method is to be applied. Then, too, there are only four, or
at most five, months in the year when men can work, so that great energy
must be expended during the open season. There is no night up here for
these four months, and men work all the twenty-four hours in eight-hour
shifts; thus, really, more work is done than one would at first imagine.
The life of the ideally successful gold digger is to toil with
unflagging vigor for the four or five months of daylight and open
weather, then "come out" and blow it in leisurely luxury in some
comfortable city. But not all are so able to make their summer pile.
They may not strike rich pay dirt, but may find it lean, or even barren,
and such must just live on through ice and snow and mighty frost, hoping
for more luck another year. Many are the tales of hardship and suffering
and dire wreck one hears. The little graveyard out along the Pine Creek
pike has many graves in it. One man died a natural death, they say, but
all the rest went to their graves stark mad from disappointment, poverty
and privation. Every train passing out over the White Pass Railway
carries its complement of the hopelessly insane, gone mad in the hunt
for gold.
[Illustration: ATLIN BAGGAGE EXPRESS.]
[Illustration: ATLIN CITY WATER WORKS.]