Juneau.
Sitka, the capital of Alaska, sleeps, save when she is awakened for a
day or two by the arrival of a steamer-load of tourists. Fort Wrangell,
the premature offspring of a gold rumor, died, but rose again from the
dead when the lust of gold turned the human tide toward the Klondike.
Juneau, the metropolis, was the only settlement that showed any signs of
vigor before the Klondike day; and she lived a not over-lively village
life on the strength of the mines on Douglas Island, across the narrow
straits. There were sea-birds skimming the water as we threaded the
labyrinthine channels that surround Juneau. We were evidently not very
far from the coast-line; for the gulls were only occasional visitors on
the Alaskan cruise, though the eagles we had always with us. They soared
aloft among the pines that crowned the mountain heights; they glossed
their wings in the spray of the sky-tipped waterfalls, and looked down
upon us from serene summits with the unwinking eye of scorn. It is
awfully fine sailing all about Juneau. Superb heights, snow-capped in
many cases, forest-clad in all, and with cloud belts and sunshine
mingling in the crystalline atmosphere, form a glorious picture, which,
oddly enough, one does not view with amazement and delight, but in the
very midst of which, and a very part of which, he is; and the proud
consciousness of this marks one of the happiest moments of his life.
Steaming into a lagoon where its mountain walls are so high it seemed
like a watery way in some prodigious Venice; steaming in, stealing in
like a wraith, we were shortly saluted by the miners on Douglas Island,
who are, perhaps, the most persistent and least harmful of the
dynamiters. It was not long before we began to get used to the batteries
that are touched off every few minutes, night and day; but how strange
to find in that wild solitude a 120-stamp mill, electric lights, and all
the modern nuisances! Never was there a greater contrast than the one
presented at Douglas Island. The lagoon, with its deep, dark waters,
still as a dead river, yet mirroring the sea-bird's wing; a strip of
beach; just above it rows of cabins and tents that at once suggest the
mining camps of early California days; then the rather handsome quarters
of the directors; and then the huge mill, admirably constructed and set
so snugly among the quarries that it seems almost a part of the ore
mountain itself; beyond that the great forest, with its eagles and big
game; and the everlasting snow peaks overtopping all, as they lose
themselves in the fairest of summer skies. Small boats ply to and fro
between Douglas Island and Juneau, a mile or more up the inlet on the
opposite shore. These ferries are paddled leisurely, and only the
explosive element at Douglas Island gives token of the activity that
prevails at Gastineaux Channel.
Soon, weary of the racket on Douglas Island, and expecting to inspect
the mine later on, we returned across the water and made fast to the
dock in the lower end of Juneau. This settlement has seen a good deal of
experience for a young one. It was first known as Pilsbury; then some
humorist dubbed it Fliptown. Later it was called Rockwell and
Harrisburg; and finally Juneau, the name it still bears with more or
less dignity. The customary Indian village hangs upon the borders of the
town; in fact, the two wings of the settlement are aboriginal; but the
copper-skin seems not particularly interested in the progress of
civilization, further than the occasional chance it affords him of
turning an honest penny in the disposal of his wares.
No sooner was the gang-plank out than we all made a rush for the trading
stores in search of curios. The faculty of acquisitiveness grows with
what it feeds on; and before the Alaskan tour is over, it almost amounts
to a mania among the excursionists. You should have seen us--men, women
and children--hurrying along the beach toward the heart of Juneau, where
we saw flags flying from the staves that stood by the trading-stores. It
was no easy task to distance a competitor in those great thoroughfares.
Juneau has an annual rainfall of nine feet; the streets are guttered:
indeed the streets are gutters in some cases. I know of at least one
little bridge that carries the pedestrian from one sidewalk to another,
over the muddy road below. I was headed off on my way to the N. W. T.
Co.'s warehouse, and sat me down on a stump to write till the rush on
bric-a-brac was over. Meanwhile I noticed the shake shanties and the
pioneers who hung about them, with their long legs crooked under rush
chairs in the diminutive verandas.
Indian belles were out in full feather. Some had their faces covered
with a thick coating of soot and oil; the rims of the eyelids, the tip
of the nose and the inner portions of the lips showing in striking
contrast to the hideous mask, which they are said to wear in order to
preserve their complexion. They look for the most part like black-faced
monkeys, and appear in this guise a great portion of the time in order
to dazzle the town, after a scrubbing, with skins as fair and sleek as
soft-soap. Even some of the sterner sex are constrained to resort to art
in the hope of heightening their manly beauty; but these are, of course,
Alaskan dudes, and as such are doubtless pardonable.
There is a bath-house in Juneau and a barber-shop. They did a big
business on our arrival. There are many billiard halls, where prohibited
drinks are more or less surreptitiously obtained. A dance-hall stands
uninvitingly open to the street. At the doorway, as we passed it, was
posted a hand-lettered placard announcing that the ladies of Juneau
would on the evening in question give a grand ball in honor of the
passengers of the _Ancon_. Tickets, 50 cents.
It began to drizzle. We dodged under the narrow awnings of the shops,
and bargained blindly in the most unmusical lingos. Within were to be
had stores of toy canoes--graceful little things hewn after the Haida
model, with prows and sides painted in strange hieroglyphics; paddles
were there--life-size, so to speak,--gorgeously dyed, and just the
things for hall decorations; also dishes of carved wood of quaint
pattern, and some of them quite ancient, were to be had at very moderate
prices; pipes and pipe-bowls of the weirdest description; halibut
fish-hooks, looking like anything at all but fish-hooks; Shaman rattles,
grotesque in design; Thlinket baskets, beautifully plaited and stained
with subdued dyes--the most popular of souvenirs; spoons with bone bowls
and handles carved from the horns of the mountain goat or musk-ox; even
the big horn-spoon itself was no doubt made by these ingenious people;
Indian masks of wood, inlaid with abalone shells, bears' teeth, or
lucky stones from the head of the catfish; Indian wampum; deer-skin
sacks filled with the smooth, pencil-shaped sticks with which the native
sport passes the merry hours away in games of chance; bangles without
end, and rings of the clumsiest description hammered out of silver coin;
bows and arrows; doll papooses, totem poles in miniature. There were
garments made of fish-skins and bird-skins, smelling of oil and
semi-transparent, as if saturated with it; and half-musical instruments,
or implements, made of twigs strung full of the beaks of birds that
clattered with a weird, unearthly Alaskan clatter.
There were little graven images, a few of them looking somewhat
idolatrous; and heaps upon heaps of nameless and shapeless odds and ends
that boasted more or less bead-work in the line of ornamentation; but
all chiefly noticeable for the lack of taste displayed, both in design
and the combination of color. The Chilkat blanket is an exception to the
Alaskan Indian rule. It is a handsome bit of embroidery, of significant
though mysterious design; rich in color, and with a deep, knotted fringe
on the lower edge--just the thing for a lambrequin, and to be had in
Juneau for $40, which is only $15 more than is asked for the same
article in Portland, Oregon, as some of us discovered to our cost. There
were quantities of skins miserably cured, impregnating the air with
vilest odors; and these were waved at you and wafted after you at every
step. In the forest which suddenly terminates at the edge of the town
there is game worth hunting. The whistler, reindeer, mountain sheep and
goat, ermine, musk-rat, marmet, wolf and bear, are tracked and trapped
by the red-man; but I doubt if the foot of the white-man is likely to
venture far into the almost impenetrable confusion of logs and brush
that is the distinguishing feature of the Alaskan wilderness. Beautiful
antlers are to be had in Juneau and elsewhere; and perhaps a cinnamon or
a black cub as playful as a puppy, and full of a kind of half-savage
fun.
In the upper part of the town, where the stumps and brush are thickest,
there are cosy little log-cabins, and garden patches that seem to be
making the most of the summer sunshine. In the window of one of these
cabins we saw a face--dusky, beautiful, sensitive. Dreamy eyes slumbered
under fringes that might have won a song from a Persian poet; admirably
proportioned features, delicious lips, almost persuaded us that a
squaw-man might in some cases be excusable for his infatuation. Later we
discovered that the one beauty of Alaska was of Hawaiian parentage; that
she was married, and was as shy of intruders as a caged bird. Very
dissimilar are the ladies of Juneau.
In the evening the town-crier went to and fro announcing the opening of
the ball. It was still drizzling; the cliffs that tower above the
metropolis were capped with cloud; slender, rain-born rivulets plunged
from these airy heights into space and were blown away like smoke.
Sometimes we caught glimpses of white, moving objects, far aloft against
the black wall of rock: these were mountain sheep.
The cannonading at Douglas Island continued--muffled thunder that ceases
neither night nor day. Nobody seemed to think of sleeping. The dock was
swarming with Indians; you would have known it with your eyes shut, from
the musky odor that permeated every quarter of the ship. The deck was
filled with passengers, chatting, reading, smoking, looking off upon the
queer little town and wondering what its future was likely to be. And
so, we might have lingered on indefinitely, with the light of a dull
day above us--a light that was to grow no less till dawn, for there is
no night there,--were it not that some one looked at his watch, and lo!
it was the midnight hour.
Then we went to the ball given by the ladies of Juneau in our honor.
Half a dozen young Indian maidens sat on a bench against the wall and
munched peanuts while they smiled; a few straggling settlers gathered at
the bar while they smiled; two fiddlers and a guitar made as merry as
they could under the circumstances in an alcove at the top of the hall.
Round dances were in vogue,--round dances interspersed with flirtations
and fire-water; round dances that grew oblong and irregular before
sunrise--and yet it was sunrise at the unearthly hour of 3.30 a. m., or
thereabout. We all felt as if we had been cheated out of something when
we saw his coming; but perhaps it was only the summer siesta that had
been cut short,--the summer siesta that here passes for the more
wholesome and old-fashioned sleep of the world lower down on the map.
During the night, having discharged freight and exhausted the resources
of Juneau, including a post-office, and a post-mistress who sorts the
mail twice a month, we steamed back to Douglas Island, and dropped many
fathoms of noisy chain into the deep abreast of the camp. The eve of the
Fourth in the United States of America is nothing in comparison with the
everlasting racket at this wonderful mine. The iron jaws of the
120-stamp mill grind incessantly, spitting pulverized rock and ore into
the vats that quake under the mastication of the mighty molars; cars
slip down into the bowels of the earth, and emerge laden with precious
freight; multitudinous miners relieve one another, watch and watch.
Electric light banishes even a thought of dusk; and were it now
winter--the long, dark, dreary winter of the North, with but half a
dozen hours of legitimate daylight out of the four and twenty--the work
at Douglas Island would go on triumphantly; and it will go forever--or,
rather, until the bottom drops out of the mine, just as it drops out of
everything in this life. All night long the terrible rattle and rumble
and roar of the explosive agent robbed us of our rest. I could think of
nothing but the gnomes of the German fairy tale; the dwarfs of the black
mountain, with their glowworm lamps, darting in and out of the tunnels
in the earth like moles, and heaping together the riches that are the
cause of so much pleasure and pain, and envy and despair, and sorrow and
sin, and too often death.