to get away, too broken in health and spirits to more than barely exist.
A delicate woman, once the wife of the mayor of an Illinois city, does
our washing; her husband, a maimed and frozen cripple, sits penniless
and helpless while she earns a pittance at the tub. Our landlady lets
rooms to lodgers, her husband's body lying beneath the deep waters of
Teslin Lake.
A Cambridge Senior wrangler passed us yesterday on the road driving two
dogs hitched to a little wagon, peddling cabbages and fish. A few strike
gold, and, making their piles, depart, but the many toil hopelessly on,
working for a wage, or frozen or crippled, weary in spirit and out of
heart, sink into penury, or die mad.
[Illustration: GOVERNMENT MAIL CROSSING LAKE ATLIN.]
[Illustration: MINER'S CABIN ON SPRUCE CREEK--ATLIN GOLD DIGGINGS.]
After our dinner in the tent I joined another party, some of those
interested in the building of the dredge, and drove with them twenty
miles up into the interior to Otter Creek, where three of them have just
started an operation, sluicing for gold. We passed many cabins and small
tents, where live the men who are working claims and washing for gold.
Some were quite shut down for lack of water, others were eagerly at
work. At one point a Mr. S---- and I left the wagon and struck six miles
across a great grassy mountain. We must have ascended 2,000 feet or
more. An easy ascent over a vast expanse of moss and tufted grass; no
trees, no bushes, no hardy herbs, nothing but grass and moss. Only on
the south and west was the horizon bounded by jagged peaks and summits
of snow-topped mountains. Glacial action has everywhere worn down the
surface into rounded rolling domes and slopes, and for hundreds of miles
the land is one wide moorland of grass and moss.
Here are many flocks of wild sheep and mountain goats, and here moose
and caribou are said to abound. During the day, about the noon hour, a
giant bull moose had stalked deliberately through the midst of the camp,
neither quickening his pace, nor fearing man. So engrossed were the men
in their search for gold, that none dropped pick or shovel to molest
him.
On these higher slopes are multitudes of ptarmigan,--the birds breeding
close to the permanent snow line, remaining high up during the summer
heats, and gradually descending to the valleys as the fresh falling
autumnal snows little by little push them down.
In Atlin, the other day, a young Swedish engineer, a graduate of Upsala,
showed me a fine pair of ibex horns from one which he had shot high up
on the mountains beyond the lake. The animal, though not uncommon, is
difficult to get, inhabiting the most inaccessible summits and rarely
descending to even the levels where the mountain sheep and goats find
pasture.
A superb and seemingly boundless pasture land where great herds of
cattle ought also to be feeding, and would be, except for the terror of
the winter's cold. Perhaps the reindeer will some day here find a
congenial home.
We sat by fires after nightfall, and when day came icicles a foot long
hung all along the drip of the flume, and in the afternoon snow fell,
covering every rounded summit with its white mantle.
Returning, I walked another ten miles down the winding valley of Otter
Creek. A stretch of open, grassy moorland, where in the winter-time the
moose and caribou gather in numbers seeking shelter from the winds, and
finding the dried grass through the scraped-off snow.
[Illustration: FINDING "COLOR," A GOOD STRIKE, OTTER CREEK, B. C.]
[Illustration: SLUICING FOR GOLD, OTTER CREEK, B. C.]
[Illustration: AN ATLIN GOLD-DIGGER.]
To-day H----, Sutton and I have driven for hours along the valley of
Spruce Creek, visiting another industrious gold-washing section. We
picnicked for lunch in an abandoned miner's camp, and H---- saw her
first real washing for gold. We took the picture of one old man, a
Mr. Alfred Sutton, in whose cabin we had sought shelter from a passing
rain squall. He had hoped to return to England for the winter--he left
there many years ago--but the gold had not come in as rich as he had
hoped, so he must delay his going for one more year. Poor old fellow,
his beard was long and white, so, too, his uncombed hair. He had not yet
made his yellow pile, but was as hopeful as a boy of twenty. I promised
to send him a copy of the photograph and he thanked me joyfully, saying,
"And I shall send it to my family at home"--in England.
We are here two days longer, when we move on to Dawson and I mail these
lines to you.
September 2, 1903.
This is our last day in Atlin. The morning was cold like late November
in Virginia, the air keen and frosty. Ice has formed in the pools,
though the aspen and scrub willow and a sort of stunted alder are only
turned yellow in spots and patches. The mountain-tops are now all
whitened with the delicate early snows, extending like blankets of
hoar-frost out beyond the margins of the snow fields that never melt.
We dine sumptuously, and all through the gold fields it is the same. The
one thing men will and must have is food, good food and no stint. The
most expensive canned goods, the costliest preserves, the most
high-priced fresh fruits, oranges, bananas, pears and grapes, the
finest beef steaks and meats, the most ample variety of vegetables. Such
an average as New York gives only in her best hotels, is what the gold
digger demands, will have, and freely spends his nuggets to obtain. We
are astonished at such lavish eating. At the diggings where men work for
wages, $4.50 and $5.00 per day, board is always included and demanded,
and only this high-priced, costly food is accepted. The cooks are
connoisseurs. Their wages run from $125.00 to $150.00 per month and free
board. At the camp high amidst the desolate moorlands of Otter Creek,
the men eat beef steaks, thick, juicy, rare, California fresh fruit and
lemon meringue pie; with lemons $1.00 per dozen and eggs ten cents
apiece! Dundee marmalade is eaten by the ton; the costliest canned cream
is swallowed by the gallon--the one permitted, recognized and
established extravagance of the gold fields is the sumptuous eating of
every man who finds the gold.
This afternoon Sutton and ourselves with a few friends are going down to
see the great glacier at the south end of Lake Atlin.
SIXTH LETTER.
THE GREAT LLEWELLYN OR TAKU GLACIER.
CARIBOU CROSSING, September 4, 1903.
We have just come in on the steamboat from Atlin, and are waiting for
the train which will take us to White Horse this afternoon, where we
will take a river boat to Dawson.
Day before yesterday we took the little steamboat that plies across
Atlin Lake, having chartered it with Sutton, and having asked a Mr.
Knight, of Philadelphia, and Captain Irving, of Victoria, making a party
of five, and went to the head of the lake--forty-five miles. A lovely
sail. Up the narrow mountain-locked channel on the west of Goat Island
(named from the many wild goats on it). The water a clear, deep blue and
light green, according to its depth. The mountains chiefly granite,
rising sheer up on either hand four and five thousand feet; the fir
forest, dense and sombre, clothing their bases, then running out to
ground pine and low shrubs, then the grass and mosses, then the bare
rocks and jagged crags and the everlasting snows. The lake channel is
everywhere narrow, sometimes widening out to five or six miles, then
narrowing into a mile or two, but the air is so wonderfully translucent
that ten miles look like one, and distant shores seem close at hand. The
further we sailed the narrower grew the channel, until we were among
islands and cañons, with sheer snow-capped heights hanging above us, at
last slowly creeping through a tortuous passageway of still water out
into a long, silent arm, at whose head we tied up to the forest for the
night. These clear waters are filled with trout and grayling--the latter
chiefly, but of birds there were almost none. Only a belated and
startled great blue heron flapped lazily away to the west. Using our
glasses, we saw two or three wild goats up on the heights above us, and
probably many more saw us far down below.
In the morning we breakfasted early, and started for the glacier--the
great Llewellen or Taku glacier, said to be the largest in the British
possessions of North America, sixty miles long to where it comes to Taku
Bay, near Juneau, and is there known as Taku glacier. We clambered over
a mile of trail, through dense, close-growing fir, then out into a wide
plain of detritus, once covered by the ice, now two miles long by a mile
wide. Difficult walking, all glacial drift, and boulders great and
small. The distance to the vast slope of dirty ice seemed only a little
way; nothing but the walk would convince one that it was over two miles.
The glacier projects in a great bow. On its center, like a hog-back
mane, are piled masses of earth and rocks. It is there that the moving
ice river is. On either side the ice is almost still and white. For five
or ten miles the glacier rises toward an apparent summit and stretches
toward the coast, fed by a multitude of lesser ice streams issuing from
every mountain gorge and valley, while monstrous masses of rock, granite
and porphyry, tower into the snows and clouds above it. We had some
difficulty in climbing upon the glacier. Chasms opened on either side,
the front was a cracking ice cliff, crevasses yawned everywhere. Though
the surface was dirty and blackened, yet down in the cracks and
crevasses the wonderful blue ice appeared. From the base of the glacier
flows a river, and over its surface coursed a thousand rills.
We walked upon the ice and lingered near it till about noon, when our
boat took us back to Atlin through the greater lake, along the east
shores of Goat Island, a four hours' sail.
From Atlin we have returned as we went, and are now spending a few hours
here. There were very few birds on Atlin Lake, though I saw a superb
loon yesterday near the western shore.
Ice formed on the lake last night. Snow is in the air. We may be too
late to go down the Yukon from Dawson.
SEVENTH LETTER.
VOYAGING DOWN THE MIGHTY YUKON.
DAWSON, September 5, 1903.
This letter is headed Dawson, for I shall mail it there, but I begin it
at White Horse, a thriving town of over 2,000 people, on the west bank
of the Fifty Mile River, just below the famous rapids. The streets are
wide, of hard gravel, many large buildings. We are in the "Windsor"
Hotel, a three-storied wooden structure, iron bedsteads, wire
mattresses, modern American oak furniture--very comfortable, but as all
the partitions are of paper--no plaster--you can hear in one room all
that is said on six sides of you--above and below, too. The city and
hotel are electric-lighted. Many churches, a commodious public school,
public hall and reading-room supplied with all current American,
Canadian and English magazines. The town is up to date. It is at the
head of the Yukon navigation, where those "going out" take the White
Pass and Yukon Railway for Skagway, and those "going in" take the boats
for "Dawson." Just now the town is half deserted, many of its
inhabitants having stampeded to the new Kluhane gold strike, some one
hundred and forty miles away. It is here claimed that a new Eldorado as
rich as the Klondike has been found, and White Horse now expects to yet
rival Dawson. Extensive finds of copper ore of high grade are also
reported in the neighborhood.
[Illustration: BISHOP AND MRS. BOMPAS.]
[Illustration: THE GREAT LLEWELLYN GLACIER.]
We arrived at Caribou yesterday morning on the little S. S. "Scotia,"
built on Lake Bennett, after a very comfortable night, and went over to
Dawson Charlie's hotel for a good breakfast. By this time H---- and the
Indian housekeeper had become fast friends, and the girl accordingly
brought out her store of nuggets and nugget jewelry for H---- to see. A
lovely chain of little nuggets linked together, a yard or more long,
earrings, breastpins, buckles, and sundry nuggets, large and small. It
is Dawson Charlie's habit, when in a good humor, to give her one of the
pocketful of nuggets he usually carries around.
We crossed the bridge over the rushing outflow of Lake Bennett and went
down to the Indian village, and called on the man whom all Canadian
churchmen affectionately and reverently term the "Apostle of the North,"
old Bishop Bompas and his quaint, white-haired wife. For over forty-five
years he has wrought among the Indians of the Peace River, the Mackenzie
and Yukon watersheds. He is an old man, but as erect as a Cree brave.
His diocese is now limited to the Yukon waters, where, he says, are
about 1,000 Indians, and, of course, an increasing number of white men.
They lived in this back, wild country long before the white men thought
of gold, or the Indian knew of its value. I took their pictures and
promised to send them copies.
This morning we have walked a few miles up the river to see the
celebrated White Horse Rapids, and I went four miles further, and saw
also the Miles Cañon, where the waters of Lake Taggish and Fifty Mile
River begin their wild six miles before reaching here. The cañon is
sharply cleft in trap rock, and the sides rise sheer and pilastered as
though cut into right-angled pillars. These cliffs rise up 200 feet or
more and go down as deep below the foaming tide. The cleft does not seem
more than 100 yards wide, and through it the waters boil and roar. How
the early gold hunters ever got through the furious waters alive is the
wonder, and indeed very many did lose their lives here, as well as in
the dashing rapids below.
ON THE YUKON, September 7, 1903.
We have boarded the steamer "White Horse," whose captain is commodore of
the Yukon fleet--twenty-odd large steamers owned by the White Pass &
Yukon Ry. Co. We have a stateroom at the rear of the texas, with a
window looking out behind as well as at the side. I can lie in my berth
and see the river behind us. We swung out into the swift blue current
about a quarter to seven, yet bright day, the big boat turning easily in
the rather narrow channel. The boat is about the size of those running
between Charleston, W. Va., and Cincinnati or Pittsburg--165 feet long,
35 feet wide, and draws 2-1/2 feet, with a big stern wheel:--the
Columbia River type rather than the Mississippi, such as run from Dawson
down--sits rather high in the water and lower parts all enclosed.
She has powerful machinery fit for breasting the swift waters; a large,
commodious dining salon; a ladies' parlor in the rear; a smoking-room
for gentlemen forward; lighted with electricity, and all modern
conveniences. She was built at White Horse, as were also ten of the
sister boats run by the railway company. Six years ago no steamboat had
traversed these waters. With the current we travel fourteen to twenty
miles an hour, against the current only five! The river winds among
hills and flats, and mountains all fir-clad and yellowed with much
golden aspen, turned by the nightly frosts.
[Illustration: FISHING FOR GRAYLING--WHITE HORSE RAPIDS.]
[Illustration: MOONLIGHT ON LAKE LE BARGE.]
[Illustration: LAKE BENNETT FROM OUR CAR.]
We came down through Fifty Mile River, which is the name given to the
waters connecting Lake Taggish and Lake Lebarge. The moon hung full and
low in the south, giving a light as white as upon the table-lands of
Mexico, so clear is the atmosphere and free from atmospheric dust. We
sat upon the upper deck until late in the night, watching the varying
panorama. From the window of my stateroom, lying in my berth, I looked
an hour or more while we sailed through Lake Lebarge--five or six miles
wide, thirty miles long--hemmed in by lofty, rounded, fir-clad limestone
mountains, 4,000 or 5,000 feet in altitude--the full moon illuminating
the quiet waters. Only the frequent mocking laugh of the loon echoed on
the still night air--there seemed to be hosts of them. Once I heard the
melancholy howling of a timber wolf among the shadows of a deep bay.
From Lake Lebarge we entered the swift and dangerous currents of Thirty
Mile River. Here the boats usually tie up till daylight, but with the
full moon and our immense electric searchlight, the captain ventured to
go down. Again I sat up watching the foaming waters behind us and how
deftly we backed and swung round the many sharp bends:--high mountains
quite shutting us in, the foaming waters white and black in the
moonlight and shadow. At last, when the mountains seemed higher,
blacker, more formidable than ever, we suddenly rounded a precipitous
mass of limestone and granite and floated out into an immense pool,
while away to the east seemingly joined us another river as large as our
own, the Hootalinqua, fetching down the yet greater tides of Lake
Teslin, and forming with the Thirty Mile, the true Yukon--though the
stream is mapped as the Lewes, until joined by the Pelly, many miles
below.
We have now been descending this great river all day long; as wide as
the Ohio, but swifter and deeper and always dark blue water. The valley
is wide like the Ohio; the bottom lands lying higher above the water and
the country rising in successive benches till the horizon is bounded by
rounded mountains eight or ten miles away. Mountains green with fir,
golden yellow with the aspen and the birch, and red and scarlet with the
lutestring herb and lichens of the higher slopes. A magnificent
panorama, an immense and unknown land, not yet taken possession of by
man! The soil of many of these bottoms is rich, and will yield
wonderful crops when tilled. Some distant day, towns and villages will
be here. We have seen many loons upon the river, and probably twenty or
thirty golden eagles soaring high in mighty circles--more than I have
seen in a single day before. We caught sight of a black fox in the
twilight last evening, and surprised a red fox hunting mussel shells
upon a river bar to-day.
[Illustration: A YUKON SUNSET.]
[Illustration: THE UPPER YUKON.]
[Illustration: A YUKON COAL MINE.]
[Illustration: FIVE FINGERS RAPIDS ON THE YUKON.]
We have passed several steamers coming up the river and stopped twice to
take on firewood and a few times to put off mail at the stations of the
Northwest Mounted Police. About four o'clock P. M. we safely passed
through the dangerous rocky pass of the Five Fingers, where five basalt
rocks of gigantic size tower 100 feet into the air and block the passage
of the foaming waters. Just where we passed, the cliffs seemed almost to
touch our gunwales, so near are they together. The banks are high slopes
of sand and gravel, now and then striped by a white band of volcanic
dust. The trees are small and stunted, but growing thickly together, so
as scarcely to let a man pass between. We have seen two puny coal banks
where is mined a dirty bituminous coal, but worth $30.00 to $40.00 per
ton in Dawson. Better than a mine of gold!
We have just now run through the difficult passage known as Hell's
Gates, where on one side a mass of cliff and on the other a shifting
sand bar confine the waters to a swift and treacherous chute. So close
to the rocks have we passed that one might have clasped hands with a
man upon them, yet for a mile we never touched their jagged sides.
Clever steering by our Norwegian pilot!
Now we are past the mouth of the great Pelly River, itself navigable for
steamboats for some three hundred miles, as far as up to White Horse by
the main stream, and are hove to at Fort Selkirk, an old Hudson Bay
Company post. Here the mounted police maintain a considerable force.
They are standing on the bank, many of them in their red coats, together
with a group of the Pelly Indians, a tribe of famous fur hunters.
Passing safely through the treacherous Lewes Rapids above the mouth of
the Pelly, we have swung out into the true Yukon, an immense river, wide
as the Mississippi at St. Louis, many islands and sand bars. At high
water the river must here be two miles across. The moon hangs round and
white in the south, not much above the horizon, and we shall slowly
steam ahead all night.
September 7, 1903.
We are making a quick trip. We passed the mouth of the Stewart River in
the early dawn. Another great stream navigable for 200 miles. By the
Pelly Valley or by the Stewart, and their feeding lakes, will some day
enter the railroads from the valley of the Mackenzie, coming up from
Edmonton and the southeast. There is supposed to be yet much
undiscovered gold on both of these streams, and fine grass land and
black soil fit for root crops.
[Illustration: COMING UP THE YUKON.]
The Yukon, the mighty Yukon, is surely now become a gigantic river, its
deep blue waters carrying a tide as great as the St. Lawrence. We are
making a record trip, Ogilvie by 11 A. M., and Dawson, sixty miles
below, in three more hours! So the captain cheerily avers--the fuller
current and deeper tide of waters carrying us the more swiftly.
The mountains are lower, more rounded in outline, fir and golden aspen
and now red-leaved birch forests covering them to their summits. The air
is cold and keen. Ice at night, grey fogs at dawn, clear blue sky by the
time the sun feebly warms at nine or ten o'clock.
We are reaching lands where the ground is frozen solid a few feet below
the summer thaws, and the twilight still lingers till nine o'clock. They
tell us the days are shortening, but it is hard to credit it, so long is
yet the eventime.
I shall mail this letter at Dawson and send you yet another before we go
down the river to the Behring Sea.
To-day I saw the first gulls, white and brown, some ducks on wing, many
ravens and but few eagles. We are having a great trip, worth all the
time and effort to get here--on the brink of the Arctic north, and in
one of the yet but half-explored regions of the earth.
EIGHTH LETTER.
DAWSON AND THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE.
DAWSON, YUKON TERRITORY, }
Thursday, September 10, 1903. }
We came in on Tuesday afternoon, the steamer "White Horse" having had an
unusually good run. As we descended the river the stream grew larger,
wider, with more water, and when we passed the White River the blue
water there changed to a muddy white, discolored by the turgid, whitish
tide of that stream. It must flow somewhere through beds of the white
volcanic ash, that for so many miles marks the banks of the Yukon with
its threadlike white line a foot or two below the surface soil.
As we passed the swift water of Klondike shoals and rounded in toward
the landing, our own hoarse whistle was replied to by several steamers
lying at the various wharfboats. We were ahead of time;--our arrival was
an event.
The town lies well, upon a wide bottom, and now begins to climb the back
hill to a secondary flat. It is laid off with wide streets, the chief of
which are graveled and fairly kept. There are a few brick buildings, but
most are of wood, here and there an old-time (six years old) log
building appearing among the more modern ones built of sawed lumber--for
logs are now too precious and too costly to squander.
[Illustration: THE "SARAH" ARRIVING AT DAWSON, 1,600 MILES UP FROM ST.
MICHAELS.]
[Illustration: THE LEVEE, DAWSON. OUR STEAMER.]
The town has telephones and electric lights, which latter must pay
finely when you realize that for nearly seven months darkness prevails
over day. There are two morning daily, and one evening daily newspapers,
with all Associated Press telegraphic news. I send you a copy of one of
them. Two banks handle the gold, buying the miners' "dust" and doing a
thriving business.
There are half a dozen quite handsome churches, two hospitals,
government buildings, the "Governor's Palace," and a number of
residences that would do credit to any town. There are two large
sawmills near the mouth of the Klondike River, which is crossed by two
fine bridges, one iron and one wood. Of foundries and machine shops
there are many. The stores and shops are many of them pretentious and
filled with the most expensive high-class goods and wares--for, in the
first place, the gold miner is lavish, extravagant, and will only have
the very best, while it costs as much freight to bring in a cheap
commodity as an expensive one. You can buy as handsome things here as in
San Francisco or New York, if you don't mind the price. The daily
newspapers are sold by newsboys on the streets at 25 cents a copy. Fine
steaks and roasts, mutton and veal, are thirty-five to sixty-five cents
per pound. Chickens, $2.00 to $3.00 each. A glass of beer, twenty-five
cents.