FROM WHITE HORSE TO DAWSON
Within the last fifteen days I have travelled by foot, by rail, and by
steamer from the headwaters of the Yukon to Dawson, a distance of five
hundred miles. The river has one of its sources in the coast range of
mountains only fifteen miles from the Pacific Ocean. It starts as a
trickling stream of icy cold water and winds its way down the hills to
Lake Bennett. On the White Pass Railway I rode twenty-five miles along
the east shore of that lake to Caribou, and thence for an hour or so
farther to White Horse. That town is at the head of steam navigation on
the Yukon, from where one can go for more than two thousand miles to
the mouth of the river on Bering Sea, not far from the Arctic Ocean.
The Yukon makes one think of Mark Twain’s description of the
Mississippi, which he knew so well as a pilot. He said: “If you will
peel an apple in one long paring and throw it over your head, the shape
it will have when it falls on the floor will represent the ordinary
curves of the river.”
Let me take you with me on my trip down this looping river. In its
upper reaches, it winds about like a snake. It narrows and widens, now
measuring only a few hundred feet from shore to shore, and now almost
as broad as a lake. It is full of sand banks, and there are rocky
cañons through which our boat shoots, its sides almost grazing the
cliffs.
Our ship down the Yukon from White Horse is the little steamer
_Selkirk_, drawing between four and five feet of water. Nevertheless,
it is so skilfully handled that it twists and turns with the current
and at times swings about as though on a pivot. Now the pilot throws
the boat across the stream and lets the current carry it along, and now
he drives it through the rapids, putting on steam to make the paddles
go faster.
In addition to the boat itself we have a great barge to care for. Most
of the freight that goes down the Yukon is carried on barges pushed
along in front of the steamers. The load of to-day consists largely
of cattle. The barge is enclosed in a high board fence, within which
are eight cow pens, with a double-deck sheep-fold at the back. There
are one hundred and fifty beef cattle in the pens and two hundred live
sheep in the fold. The animals were brought by rail from Calgary to
Vancouver. There they were loaded on a Canadian Pacific steamer and
carried through the thousand miles of inland waterways that border
the west coast of the continent to Skagway. They were then taken over
the mountains on the White Pass Railway, and are now on their way to
Dawson, where they will be transferred to another steamer that will
push them a thousand or fifteen hundred miles more down the Yukon.
The freight charges are so heavy that the animals selected must be of
a high grade. The steers average three fourths of a ton and several of
them weigh close to two thousand pounds each. They were raised on grass
and are now fed on the bales of alfalfa piled around the edge of the
barge.
[Illustration: From White Horse, at the head of navigation on the
Yukon, during the open season from June to October one can travel by
steamer down that river for two thousand miles to Nome on Bering Sea.]
[Illustration: A wood-burning heating stove common throughout Alaska
and the Yukon is made from a gasoline tank turned on its side and
fitted with legs of iron pipe.]
We have other live stock on board. Down in the hold are eight hundred
chickens bound for the hen fanciers of interior Alaska. They crow night
and morning, and with the baaing of the sheep and the mooing of the
cattle we seem to be in a floating barnyard. The barge is swung this
way and that, and whenever it touches the bank, the sheep pile up one
over the other, some of the cattle are thrown from their feet, and the
chickens cackle in protest.
The _Selkirk_ burns wood, and we stop several times a day to take on
fuel, which is wheeled to the steamer in barrows over a gangplank from
the piles of cord wood stacked up on the banks. At many of the stops
the only dwelling we see is the cabin of the wood chopper, who supplies
fuel for a few dollars a cord. The purser measures with a ten-foot
pole the amount in each pile loaded on board. Going down stream the
_Selkirk_ burns about one cord an hour, and in coming back against
the current the consumption is often four times as much. The wood is
largely from spruce trees from three to six inches in diameter. Many of
the little islands we pass are covered with the stumps of trees cut for
the steamers, but most of the wood stations are on the mainland, the
cutting having been done along the banks or in the valleys back from
the river.
Except where we take on fuel there are no settlements on the Yukon
between White Horse and Dawson. The country is much the same as it
was when the cave dwellers, the ancestors of the Eskimos, wrought
with their tools of stone. For a distance of four hundred and sixty
miles we do not see a half dozen people at any stop of the steamer,
although here and there are deserted camps with the abandoned cabins
of prospectors and wood choppers. One such is at Chisana, near the
mouth of the White River. The town was built during the rush to the
Chisana gold mines, and it was for a time a thriving village, with a
government telegraph office, a two-story hotel, and a log stable that
could accommodate a dozen horses and numerous sled dogs. The White Pass
and Yukon Company built the hotel and the stable, expecting to bring
the miners in by its steamers and to send them into the interior with
horses and dogs. It did a good business until the gold bubble burst and
the camp “busted.” To-day the Chisana Hotel is deserted, all the cabins
except that of the wood chopper are empty, and under the wires leading
into one of them is a notice: “Government telegraph, closed August 3,
1914.”
The woodman’s cabin is open. A horseshoe is nailed over the door and a
rifle stands on the porch at the side. On the wall at the back of the
hut a dog harness hangs on a peg. The skin of a freshly killed bear is
tacked up on one side, and bits of rabbit skins lie here and there on
the ground. The cabin itself is not more than eight feet in height. It
is made of logs, well chinked with mud and with earth banked up about
the foundation. There is a weather-strip of bagging nailed to the door
posts. The door is a framework filled in with pieces of wooden packing
boxes for panels.
Entering, we find that there are two rooms. One is a kitchen, and the
other a living room and bedroom combined. Three cots, made of poles and
covered with blankets, form the beds. There are some benches for seats
and a rude table stands under the window. Various articles of clothing
hang from the walls or lie upon the floor. In the kitchen a table is
covered with unwashed dishes. There is a guitar on the shelf near the
stove and a pack of cards on a ledge in the logs. The whole is by no
means inviting, but I doubt not it is a fair type of the home of the
prospectors and woodsmen throughout this whole region.
I have seen most of the great rivers of the world--the Rhine, the
Danube, the Volga, the Nile, the Zambesi, the Yangtse, and the Hoang
Ho. I know the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Indus, and the
Irrawaddy, as well as the Amazon and the Parana, and many other streams
of more or less fame. But nowhere else have I seen scenery like that
along the Yukon. We seem to have joined the army of early explorers and
to be steaming through a new world. We pass places
Where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where.
Much of the country is semi-desert, but some of it is as green as the
valley of the Nile. In places the hills, sloping almost precipitously
back from the river, are wrinkled with dry waterways filled with
scrubby forests. In others there are series of ledges rising one over
the other, making great terraces from the edge of the stream to the
tops of the mountains.
The Yukon changes its course like the Yellow River of China. Now we
pass through gorges of silt where the sand walls rise above us to
the height of a twenty-story office building; and now swing around
beds where we seem to be walled in by the cuttings made by the water.
The hills are composed of earth washings, and from year to year the
snaggy teeth of old Father Time have been gouging long furrows out of
their sides. These furrows have caught the moisture, forests of small
evergreens have grown up in them, and the landscape for miles looks as
though it had been ploughed by the gods and drilled in with these crops
of green trees. This makes the country, when seen from a distance,
seem to be cultivated. There is a scanty grass between the patches of
forests, and the whole is like a mighty farm planted by the genii of
the Far North.
As we go down the river the scenery changes. Here the banks are almost
flat and are covered with bushes. There on the opposite side they are
of a sandy glacial alluvial formation, perfectly bare. At times the
soil is so friable that it rolls down in avalanches, and a blast from
our steam whistle starts the sand flowing. It makes one think of the
loess cliffs on the plains of North China. Those cliffs contain some
of the richest fertilizing matter on earth, and their dust, carried by
the wind, enriches the country upon which it drops as the silt from the
Abyssinian highlands enriches the Nile Valley.
The soil from the upper Yukon, on the other hand, is poorer than that
which surrounds the Dead Sea at the lower end of the Jordan. It lacks
fertilizing qualities, and some of it rests on a bed of prehistoric
ice, which carries off the rainfall, leaving no moisture for plant
life. A geological expert in our party says it is as though the land
were laid down on plates of smooth copper tilted toward the valleys to
carry the rain straight to the rivers. He tells me that the region has
only ten or twelve inches of water a year, or a rainfall similar to
that of California in the neighbourhood of Los Angeles. He says also
that sixty-five per cent. of the water that falls finds its way to the
streams.
[Illustration: The upper Yukon River in places is only a few hundred
feet from bank to bank, and in others as wide as a lake. Throughout
most of its length it is dotted with islands in all stages of
formation.]
[Illustration: The Yukon twists and turns in great loops and curves
throughout its entire length, and at Five Finger Rapids presents a
stretch of water that can be navigated only by the exercise of the
utmost skill in piloting.]
Much of our way down the Yukon is in and out among islands. The stream
is continually building up and tearing down the land through which it
flows, and the islands are in every stage of formation. Here they are
sand bars as bare as the desert of Sahara; there they are dusted with
the green of their first vegetation. A little farther on are patches of
land with bushes as high as your waist, and farther still are islands
covered with forest. Each island has its own shade of green, from the
fresh hue of the sprouts of a wheatfield to the dark green mixed with
silver that is common in the woods of Norway and Sweden. Not a few of
the islands are spotted with flowers. Some from which the trees have
been cut are covered with fireweed, and a huge quilt of delicate pink
rises out of the water, the black stumps upon it standing out like
knots on the surface. Such islands are more gorgeous than the flower
beds of Holland.
In places the Yukon is bordered by low hills, behind which are
mountains covered with grass, and, still farther on, peaks clad in
their silvery garments of perpetual snow. At one place far back from
the river, rising out of a park of the greenest of green, are rocky
formations that look like castles, as clean cut and symmetrical as any
to be seen on the banks of the Rhine. Down in the river itself are
other great rocks, more dangerous than that on which the Lorelei sat
and with her singing lured the sailors on to their destruction.
One such formation is known as the “Five Fingers.” It consists of
five mighty masses of reddish-brown rock that rise to the height of a
six-story building directly in the channel through which the steamers
must go. The current is swift and the ship needs careful piloting to
keep it from being dashed to pieces against the great rocks. The
captain guides the barge of cattle to the centre of the channel. He
puts the barge and the steamer in the very heart of the current and we
shoot with a rush between two of these mighty fingers of rock down into
the rapids below. As we pass, it seems as though the rocks are not more
than three feet away on each side of our steamer.
A little farther on we ride under precipices of sand that extend
straight up from the water as though they were cut by a knife, with
strata as regular as those of a layer cake. They seem to be made of
volcanic ash or glacial clay. They rise to the height of the Washington
Monument and are absolutely bare of vegetation, save for the lean
spruce and pine on the tops.
We pass the “Five Fingers” between one and two o’clock in the morning,
when the sun is just rising. This is the land of the midnight sun, and
there are places not far from here where on one or two days of the year
the sun does not sink below the horizon. Even here, at midnight it is
hard to tell sunrise from sunset. There is a long twilight, and the
glories of the rising and the setting sun seem almost commingled. At
times it has been light until one o’clock in the morning, and I have
been able to make notes at midnight at my cabin windows.
There is a vast difference between this region and the rainy districts
near the Pacific coast. We have left the wet lands, and we are now in
the dry belt of the great Yukon Valley. The air here is as clear as
that of Colorado. The sky is deep blue, the clouds hug the horizon, and
we seem to be on the very roof of the world, with the “deep deathlike
valleys below.” We are in the country of Robert Service, the poet of
the Yukon, and some of his verses come to our minds:
I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.