Read Ebook: Alaska Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago by Scidmore Eliza Ruhamah

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Emerging from Grenville Channel, the church and houses of Metlakatlah, the one model missionary settlement on the coast, and an Arcadian village of civilized and Christianized Indians, were seen shining in the afternoon sun. At that point the water is tinged a paler green by the turbid currents of the Skeena River, and up that river the newest El Dorado has lately been found. Miners have gone up in canoes, and fishermen have dropped their lines and joined them in the hunt for gold, which is found in nuggets from the size of a pea to solid chunks worth and . "Jerry," the first prospector, took out 0 in two days, and in the same week two miners panned out 0 in six hours. One nugget, taken from a crevice in a rock, was sent down to Victoria, and found to be pure gold and worth . Other consignments of treasure following, that quiet colonial town has been shaken by a gold fever that is sending all the adventurous spirits off to the Lorne Creek mines.

Before the sunset hour we crossed Dixon Entrance and the famous debatable line of 59? 40?, and the patriots who said the northern boundary of the United States should be "Fifty-nine Forty, or Fight," are best remembered now, when it is seen that the Alaska possessions begin at that line. We were within the Alaska boundaries and standing on United States soil again at the fishing station of Tongass, on Wales Island. It is a wild and picturesque little place, tucked away in the folds of the hills and islands, and the ship rounded many points before it dropped anchor in front of two new wooden houses on a rocky shore that constituted Tongass. A cluster of bark huts and tents further down the beach was the home of the Indians who catch, salt, and barrel the salmon. There was one white man as host at the fish house, a fur-capped, sad-eyed mortal, who wistfully said that he had not been "below" in seven years, and entertained us with the sight of his one hundred and forty barrels of salmon, and the vats and scow filled with split and salted or freshly caught fish. He showed us a string of fine trout that set the amateur fishermen wild, and then gallantly offered to weigh the ladies on his new scales. Over in the group of Tongass Indians, sitting stolidly in a row before their houses, there was a "one-moon-old" baby that gave but a look at the staring white people, and then sent up one pitiful little barbaric yawp. A clumsy, flat-bottomed scow was rowed slowly out to the steamer, and while the salt, the barrel hoops, barrel staves, and groceries were unloaded to it from the ship, a ball was begun on deck. A merry young miner bound for the Chilkat country gave rollicking old tunes on his violin, and a Juneau miner called off figures that convulsed the dancers and kept the four sets flying on the after deck. "The winnowing sound of dancers' feet" and the scrape of the fiddle brought a few Indian women out in canoes, and they paddled listlessly around the stern, talking in slow gutturals of the strange performances of the "Boston people," as all United States citizens have been termed by them since Captain Gray and John Jacob Astor's ships first came to the Northwest coast. At half-past ten o'clock daylight still lingered on the sky, and the Chicago man gravely read a page of a Lake Shore railroad time-table in fine print for a test, and then went solemnly to bed, six hundred miles away from the rest of the United States.

From the Tongass fishery, which is some miles below the main village of the Tongass Indians and the deserted fort where United States troops were once stationed, the ship made its way by night to Cape Fox. At this point on the mainland shore, beyond Fort Tongass, the Kinneys, the great salmon packers of Astoria, have a cannery that is one of the model establishments up here. Two large buildings for the cannery, two houses, a store, and the scattered line of log houses, bark houses and tents of the Indian village, are all that one sees from the water. In the cannery most of the work is done by the Indians, but a few Chinamen perform the work which requires a certain amount of training and mechanical skill. The Indians cast the nets and bring in the shining silver fish with their deep moss-green backs and fierce mouths, and heap them in slippery piles in an outside shed overhanging the water. A Chinaman picks them up with a long hook, and, laying them in a row across a table, goes through a sleight-of-hand performance with a sharp knife, which in six minutes leaves twenty salmon shorn of their heads, tails, fins, and inwards. Experienced visitors to such places took out their watches and timed him, and in ten seconds a fish was put through his first rough process of trimming, and passed on to men who washed it, cleaned it more thoroughly, scraped off a few scales, and by a turn of revolving knives cut it in sections the length of a can. Indian women packed the tins, which were soldered, plunged into vats of boiling water, tested, resoldered, laquered, labelled, and packed in boxes in quick routine. There was the most perfect cleanliness about the cannery, and the salmon itself is only touched after the last washing by the fingers of the Indian women, who fill the cans with solid pieces of bright red flesh. In 1883 there were 3,784 cases of canned salmon shipped from this establishment as the result of the first season's venture. In the following year, 1,156 cases were shipped by the July steamer, and the total for the season was about double that of the preceding year.

Owing to the good salmon season and the steady employment given them at the cannery, the Indians held their things so high that even the most insatiate and abandoned curio-buyers made no purchases, although there has been regret ever since at the thought of the wide old bracelets and the finely-woven hats that they let escape them. At Cape Fox a shrewd Indian came aboard, and spied the amateur photographer taking groups on deck. Immediately he was eager to be taken as well, and followed the camera around, repeating, "How much Siwash picture?" He was not to be appeased by any statements about the photographer doing his work for his own amusement, and pleaded so hard that the artist finally relented and turned his camera upon him. The Indian stiffened himself into his most rigid attitude, when directed to a corner of the deck between two lifeboats, and when the process was over he could hardly be made to stir from his pose. When we pressed him to tell us what he wanted his picture for, he chuckled like any civilized swain, and confessed the whole sentimental story by the mahogany blush that mantled his broad cheeks.

Up Revillagigedo Channel the scenery is more like that of the Scotch lakes, broad expanses of water walled by forest ridges and mountains that in certain lights show a glow like blooming heather on their sides. The Tongass Narrows, which succeed this channel of the long name, give more views of ca?ons filled with water, winding between high bluffs and sloping summits. It was a radiant sunny morning when we steamed slowly through these beautiful waterways, and at noon the ship turned into a long green inlet on the Revillagigedo shore, and cast anchor at the head of Naha Bay. Of all the lovely spots in Alaska, commend me to this little landlocked bay, where the clear green waters are stirred with the leaping of thousands of salmon, and the shores are clothed with an enchanted forest of giant pines, and the undergrowth is a tangle of ferns and salmon-berry bushes, and the ground and every log are covered with wonderful mosses, into which the foot sinks at every step.

The splash of the leaping salmon was on every side and at every moment, and the sight of the large fish jumping above the surface and leaping through the air caused the excitable passenger at the stern to nearly capsize the small boat and steer wildly. As the sailors rowed the boat up the narrow bay, where the ship could barely swing round with the tide, the Chicago man pensively observed: "There's a thousand dollars jumping in the air every ten minutes!"

The anglers were maddened at the sight of these fish, for although these wild northern salmon can sometimes be deluded by trolling with a spoon-hook, they have no taste for such small things as flies, and are usually caught with seines or spears, except during those unusual salmon runs when the Indians wade in among the crowded fins and shovel the fish ashore with their canoe paddles.

At the head of Naha Bay, over a narrow point of land, lies a beautiful mountain lake, whose surface is a trifle below the high-water mark, and at low tide there is a fine cascade of fresh water foaming from between the rocks in the narrow outlet. During the run of salmon, the pool at the foot of the fall is crowded with the struggling fish; but the net is cast in the lake as often as in the bay, and the average catch is eighty barrels of salmon a day. The salmon are cleaned, salted, and barrelled in a long warehouse overhanging the falls, and a few bark houses belonging to the Indians who work in the fishery are perched picturesquely on the little wooded point between the two waters. Floating across this lovely lake in a slimy boat that the Indians had just emptied of its last catch of salmon, the beauty of its shores was more apparent, and the overhanging trees, the thickets of ferns, bushes, and wild grasses, the network of fallen logs hidden under their thick coating of moss, and the glinting of the sunshine on bark and moss and lichens, excited our wildest enthusiasm. In Alaska one sees the greatest range of greens in nature, and it is an education of the eye in that one color to study the infinite shades, tints, tones, and suggestions of that primary color. Of all green and verdant woods, I know of none that so satisfy one with their rank luxuriance, their beauty and picturesqueness; and one feels a little sorrow for those people who, never having seen Alaska, are blindly worshipping the barren, burnt, dried-out, starved-out forests of the East. In still stretches of this lake at Naha there are mirrored the snow-capped summits whose melting snows fill its banks, and the echo from a single pistol-shot is flung back from side to side before it dies away in a roar. Beyond this lake there is a chain of lakes, reached by connecting creeks and short portages, and the few white men who have penetrated to the farthest tarn in the heart of Revillagigedo Island say that each lake is wilder and more lovely than the last one. A mile below the fishery, and back in the woods, there is a waterfall some forty feet in height; and a mountain stream, hurrying down from the clear pools and snow-banks on the upper heights, takes a leap over a ledge of rocks and covers it with foam and sparkling waters.

The fishery and trading-post at Naha Bay was established in 1883, and shipped 338 barrels of salted salmon that first season. In 1884 over 500 barrels were shipped, and throughout June and July the salmon were leaping in the bay so thickly that at the turn of the tide their splashing was like falling rain.

Smaller inlets opening from the bay afford glimpses into shady recesses in the mountain-sides, and one little gap in the shores at last gave us a sight of the trader's store, the long row of lichen-covered and moss-grown sheds of the fishery, with the usual cluster of bark houses and tents above a shelving beach strewn with narrow, black canoes. A group of Indians gathered on shore, their gay blankets, dresses, and cotton kerchiefs adding a fine touch of color to the scene, and the men in the fishery, in their high rubber boots and aprons, flannel shirts and big hats, were heroic adjuncts to the picturesque and out-of-the-way scene.

This queer old fellow married one of the daughters of Skowl, the Haida chief who ruled the bay. She is said to have been a very comely maiden when Baronovich married her, and is now a stately, fine-looking woman, with good features and a creamy complexion. While Baronovich was cleaning his gun one day, it was accidentally discharged, and one of his children fell dead by his own hand. The Indians viewed this deed with horror, and demanded that Skowl should take his life in punishment. As it was proved an accident, Skowl defended his son-in-law from the charge of murder, and declared that he should go free. Ever after that the Indians viewed Baronovich with a certain fear, and ascribed to him that quality which the Italians call the "evil eye."

With the passion of his race for fine weapons and fine metal work, Baronovich possessed many old arms that are worthy of an art museum. A pair of duelling pistols covered with fine engraving and inlaying were bought of his widow by one of the naval officers in command of the man-of-war on this station, and an ancient double-barrelled flint-lock shot-gun lately passed into the hands of another officer. The shot-gun has the stock and barrels richly damascened with silver and gold, after the manner of the finest Spanish metal work, and the clear gray flints in the trigger give out a shower of sparks when struck. Gunnell of London was the maker of this fine fowling-piece, and it is now used in the field by its new owner, who prefers it to the latest Remington.

The wandering salmon that swarm on this coast by millions show clear instincts when they choose, without an exception, only the most picturesque and attractive nooks to jump in. They dart and leap up Kasa-an Bay to the mouths of all the little creeks at its head, and three times during the year the water is alive with them. The best salmon run in June and July, and in one day the seine brought in eighteen hundred salmon in a single haul. Two thousand and twenty-one hundred fish have weighted the net at different hauls, and the fish-house was overrunning with these royal salmon. Indian women do the most of the work in the fishery--cleaning and splitting the fish and taking out the backbones and the worthless parts with some very deft strokes from their murderous-looking knives. The salmon are washed thoroughly and spread between layers of dry salt in large vats. Brine is poured over them, and they are left for eight days in pickle. Boards and weights are laid on the top of the vats, and they are then barrelled and stored in a long covered shed and treated to more strong brine through the bung-hole until ready for shipment. Of all salt fish the salt salmon is the finest, and here, where salmon are so plentiful, a barrelled dainty is put up in the shape of salmon bellies, which saves only the fattest and most tender portions of these rich, bright red Kasa-an salmon.

Those who believe that all Alaska is a place of perpetual rain, fog, snow, and ice would be quickly disabused could they spend some of the ideal summer days in that most lovely harbor of Fort Wrangell. Each time the sky was clearer and the air milder than before, and on the day of my third visit the fresh beams of the morning sun gave an infinite charm to the landscape, as we turned from Clarence Straits into the narrower pass between the islands, and sailed across waters that reflected in shimmering, pale blue and pearly lights the wonderful panorama of mountains. Though perfectly clear, the light was softened and subdued, and even on such a glorious sunny morning there was no glare nor harshness in the atmosphere. This pale, soft light gave a dreamy, poetic quality to the scenery, and the first ranges of mountains above the water shaded from the deep green and russet of the nearer pine forests to azure and purple, where their further summits were outlined against the sky or the snow-covered peaks that were mirrored so faithfully in the long stretches of the channel. The sea water lost its deep green tints at that point, and was discolored and tinged to a muddy tea green by the fresh current of the Stikine River, which there reaches the ocean.

During the second occupation of the barracks and quarters at Fort Wrangell, the War Department helped itself to the property, and, assigning a nominal sum for rent, held the fort against the protest of the owner. The Cassiar mines were booming then, and Fort Wrangell took on something of the excitement of a mining town itself, and being at the head of ocean navigation, where all merchandise had to be transferred to small steamers and canoes, rents for stores and warehouses were extravagantly high. Every shed could bring a fabulous price. The unhappy owner, who rejoices in the euphonious name of W. King Lear, could only gnash his teeth and violently protest against the monthly warrants and vouchers given him by the commandant of the post. Since the troops have gone, the Government has done other strange things with the property that it once sold in due form, and Mr. Lear has a just and plain claim against the War Department for damages. The barracks and hospital of the old fort are now occupied by the Presbyterian Mission. No alteration, repairs, or improvements having been made for many years, the stockade is gradually becoming more ruinous, weather-worn, and picturesque each year, and the overhanging block-house at one corner is already a most sketchable bit of bleached and lichen-covered logs.

On the water side of the main street there is a queer old flat-bottomed river-boat, stranded high and dry, that in its day made 5,000 clear each season that it went up the Stikine. It enriched its owner while in the water, and after it went ashore was a profitable venture as a hotel. This Rudder Grange, built over from stem to stern, and green with moss, is so settled into the grass and earth that only the shape of the bow and the empty box of the stern wheel really declare its original purpose. There is a bakeshop in the old engine-room, and for the rest it is the Chinatown of Fort Wrangell. A small cinnamon-bear cub gambolled in the street before this boat-house, and it stood on its hind legs and sniffed the air curiously when it saw the captain of the ship coming down the street, bestowing sticks of candy on every child in the way. Bruin came in for his share, and formed the centre for a group that watched him chew up mint sticks and pick his teeth with his sharp little claws.

In the summer season Fort Wrangell is a peaceful, quiet place; the climate is a soothing one, and Prof. Muir extolled the "poultice-like atmosphere" which so calms the senses. The Indians begin to scatter on their annual fishing trips in June, and come back with their winter supplies of salmon in the early fall. Many of the houses were locked or boarded up, while the owners had gone away to spend the summer at some other watering-place. One absentee left this notice on his front door:--

LET NO ONE OPEN OR SHUT THIS HOUSE DURING MY ABSENCE.

Over another locked door was this name and legend, which combines a well-witnessed and legal testament, together with the conventional door-plate of the white man:--

ANATLASH.

Let all that read know that I Am a friend to the whites. Let no One molest this house. In case of my Death it belongs to my wife.

Far less picturesque than the natives in their own houses were the little Indian girls at the mission-school in the old fort. Combed, cleaned, and marshalled in stiff rows to recite, sing, and go through calisthenic exercises, they were not nearly so striking for studies and sketches aboriginal, but more hopeful to contemplate as fellow-beings. Clah, a Christianized Indian from Fort Simpson, B. C., was the first to attempt mission work among the Indians at Fort Wrangell. In 1877 Mrs. McFarland was sent out by the Presbyterian Board of Missions, after years of mission work in Colorado and the west, and, taking Clah on her staff, she labored untiringly to establish the school and open the home for Indian girls. Others have joined her in the work at Fort Wrangell, and everyone on the coast testifies to good results already attained by her labors and example. She is known and reverenced among all the tribes, and the Indians trust in her implicitly, and go to her for advice and aid in every emergency. With the establishment of the new industrial mission-school at Sitka, Mrs. McFarland will be transferred to the girls' department of that institution. The Rev. Hall Young and his wife have devoted themselves to the good cause at Fort Wrangell, and will continue there in charge of the church and school. The Presbyterian missions have the strongest hold on the coast, and the Catholics, who built a church at Fort Wrangell, have given up the mission there, and the priest from Nanaimo makes only occasional visits to his dusky parishioners.

The steep hillside back of Fort Wrangell was cleared of timber during military occupancy, and on the lower slopes the companies had fine gardens, which remain as wild overgrown meadows now. In them the wild timothy grows six feet high, the blueberry bushes are loaded with fruit, salmon berries show their gorgeous clusters of gold and scarlet, and the white clover grows on long stems and reaches to a fulness and perfection one can never imagine. This Wrangell clover is the common clover of the East looked at through a magnifying glass, each blossom as large and wide-spread as a double carnation pink, and the fragrance has a strong spicy quality with its sweetness. The red clover is not common, but the occasional tops are of the deepest pink that these huge clover blossoms can wear. While the hillside looked cleared, there was a deep and tangled thicket under foot, the moss, vines, and runners forming a network that it took some skill to penetrate; but the view of the curved beach, the placid channel sleeping in the warm summer sunshine like a great mountain lake, and the ragged peaks of the snowy range showing through every notch and gap, well repaid the climb through it. It was a most perfect day when we climbed the ridge, the air as warm and mellow as Indian summer, with even its soft haze hung round the mountain walls in the afternoon, and from those superior heights we gazed in ecstasy on the scene and pitied all the people who know not Alaska.

When Professor Muir was at Fort Wrangell one autumn, he climbed to the summit of this first mountain on a stormy night to listen to the fierce music of the winds in the forest. Just over the ridge he found a little hollow, and gathering a few twigs and branches he started a fire that he gradually increased to quite a blaze. The wind howled and roared through the forest, and the scientist enjoyed himself to the utmost; but down in the village the Indians were terrified at the glow that illuminated the sky and the tree-tops. No one could explain the phenomenon, as they could not guess that it was Professor Muir warming himself during his nocturnal ramble in the forest, and it was with difficulty that the minister and the teachers at the mission could calm the frightened Indians.

The trade with the Cassiar mines at the head of the Stikine River once made Fort Wrangell an important place, but the rival boats that used to race on the river have gone below, and the region is nearly abandoned. As early as 1862 the miners found gold dust in the bars near the mouth of the river; but it was twelve years later before Thibert and another trapper, crossing from Minnesota, found the gold fields and quartz veins at the head-waters of the stream, three hundred miles distant from Fort Wrangell, within the British Columbia lines. Immediately the army of gold-seekers turned there, leaving California and the Frazer River mines, and in 1874 there were two thousand miners on the ground, and the yield was known to have been over one million dollars. Light-draught, stern-wheel steamers were put on the river, and the goods and miners transferred from ocean steamers at Fort Wrangell were taken to Glenora at the head of navigation, one hundred and fifty miles from the mouth. From that point there was a steep mountain trail of another one hundred and fifty miles, and pack trains of mules carried freight on to the diggings. Freights from Fort Wrangell to the mines ranged at times from twenty to eighty and one hundred and sixty dollars per ton; and in consequence, when the placers were exhausted, and machinery was necessary to work the quartz veins, the region was abandoned.

The official returns as given by the British Columbia commissioners are not at hand for all of the years since the discovery of these mines, but for the seven years here given they show the great decrease in the bullion yield of the Cassiar fields:--

Years. Number of Gold miners. product.

During this year of 1884 the steamers have been taken off the river, and Indian canoes are the only means of transportation. There are few besides Chinamen left to work the exhausted fields, and another year will probably find them in sole possession. While the mines were at their best, Fort Wrangell was the great point of outfitting and departure; and after the troops were withdrawn, the miners made it more and more a place of drunken and sociable hibernation, when the severe weather of the interior drove them down the river. They congregated in greatest numbers early in the spring, many going up on the ice in February or March, before the river opened; although no mining could be done until May, and the water froze in the sluices in September.

The Cassiar mines being in British Columbia, the rush of trade on the Stikine River caused many complications and infractions of the revenue laws of both countries, and great license was allowed. The exact position where the boundary line crosses the Stikine has not yet been determined by the two governments, and in times past it has wavered like the isothermal lines of the coast. The diggings at Shucks, seventy miles from Fort Wrangell, were at one time in Alaska and next time in British Columbia; and the Hudson Bay Company's post, and even the British custom house, were for a long time on United States soil before being removed beyond the debatable region. The boundary, as now accepted temporarily, crosses the river sixty-five miles from Fort Wrangell at a distance of ten marine leagues from the sea in a direct line, and, intersecting the grave of a British miner, leaves his bones divided between the two countries; his heart in the one, and the boots in which he died in the other.

Leaving Fort Wrangell in the afternoon, it was an enchanting trip up that narrow channel of deep waters, rippling between bold island shores and parallel mountain walls. Besides the clear, emerald tide, reflecting every tree and rock, there was the beauty of foaming cataracts leaping down the sides of snow-capped mountains, and the grandeur of great glaciers pushing down through sharp ravines, and dropping miniature icebergs into the water. Three glaciers are visible at once on the east side of the Narrows, the larger one extending back some forty miles, and measuring four miles across the front, that faces the water and the terminal moraine it has built up before it. The great glacier is known as Patterson Glacier, in honor of the late Carlisle Patterson, of the United States Coast Survey, and is the first in the great line of glaciers that one encounters along the Alaska coast. Under the shadow of a cloud the glacier was a dirty and uneven snow field, but touched by the last light of the sun it was a frozen lake of wonderland, shimmering with silvery lights, and showing a pale ethereal green, and deep, pure blue, in all the rifts and crevasses in its icy front.

With the appearance of this first glacier, and the presence of ice floating in the waters around us, the conversation of all on board took a scientific turn, and facts, fancies, and wild theories about glacial origin and action were advanced that would have struck panic to any body of geologists. Being all laymen, there was no one to expound the mysteries and speak with final authority on any of these frozen and well-established truths; and we floundered about in a sea of suppositions, and were lost in a labyrinth of lame conclusions.

A long chain of snow-capped mountains slowly unrolled as the ship emerged from Wrangell Narrows, more glaciers were brought to view, and that strange granite monument, the "Devil's Thumb," as named by Commander Meade, signalled us from a mountain top.

Winding north, through a broad channel with noble mountain ranges on either side, we passed the old Hudson Bay Company's trading post of Taku, and at mention of this name those who believe in the Asiatic origin of the Alaska Indians cried out in delighted surprise: "There is a Chinese city of the same name and spelled in the same way as this--Taku."

Reaching the mouth of Taku Inlet, into which the Taku River empties, the floating ice gave evidence of the great glaciers that lie within; and, following up this fiord for about fifteen miles to a great basin, we came suddenly in sight of three glaciers. One sloped down a steep and rather narrow ravine, and its front was hidden by another turn in the overlapping hills. The second one pushed down between two high mountains, and, resting its tongue on the water, dropped off the icebergs and cakes that covered the surface of the dull, gray-green water. The front of this icy cliff stretched entirely across the half-mile gap between the mountains, and its face rose a hundred and two hundred feet from the water, every foot of it seamed, jagged, and rent with great fissures, in which the palest prismatic hues were flashing. As the tide fell, large pieces fell from this front, and avalanches of ice-fragments crashed down into the sea and raised waves that rocked our ship and set the ice-floes grinding together. On the other point of the crescent of this bay there lay the largest glacier, an ice-field that swept down from two mountain gorges, and, spreading out in fan shape, descended in a long slope to a moraine of sand, pebbles, and boulders. Across its rolling front this glacier measured at least three miles, and the low, level moraine was one mile in width. The moraine's slope was so gradual that when the small boats were lowered and we started for shore, they grounded one hundred feet from the water-mark and there stuck until the passengers were taken off one by one in the lightest boat, and then carried over the last twenty feet of water in the sailors' arms. It was a time for old clothes, to begin with, and everyone wore their worst when they started off; but at the finish, when the same set waded through a quarter of a mile of sand and mineral mud left exposed by the falling tide, and were dumped into the boats by the sailors, a near relative would not have owned one of us. The landing of the glacier pilgrims was a scene worthy of the nimblest caricaturist, and sympathy welled up for the poor officers and sailors who shouldered stout men and women and struggled ashore through sinking mud and water. The burly captain picked out the slightest young girl and carried her ashore like a doll; but the second officer, deceived by the hollow eyes of one tall woman, lifted her up gallantly, floundered for a while in the mud and the awful surprise of her weight, and then bearer and burden took a headlong plunge. The newly-married man carried his bride off on his back, and had that novel incident to put down in the voluminous journal of the honeymoon kept by the young couple.

We trailed along in files, like so many ants, across the sandy moraine, sinking in the soft "mountain meal," stumbling over acres of smooth rocks and pebbles, and jumping shallow streams that wandered down from the melting ice. Patches of epilobium crimsoned the ground with rank blossoms near the base of the glacier, and at last we began ascending the dull, dirty, gray ice hills.

Where the two arms of the glacier united, the lines of converging ice-streams were marked by great trains of boulders and patches of dirt; and fragments of quartz and granite, and iron-stained rocks were souvenirs that the pilgrims carried off by the pocketful. We sat on rough boulders and looked down into the ice-ravines on every side, and sighed breathlessly in the ecstasy of joy. An earthly and material soul roused the scorn of the young Catholic divine by sitting down in that exalted spot to eat--to munch soda crackers from a brown-paper bundle--while the wreck of glaciers, the crash of icebergs, the grinding of ice-floes, and world-building were going on about him.

We ran down the glacier slopes hand in hand, in long lines that "snapped the whip" and went all-hands-round on the more level places, or crept in cautious file along the narrow ridges between crevasses. We drank from icy rills that ran in channels of clear green ice, and crossing the moraine, we waded through mud ankle deep and were carried to the boats. The receding tide had obliged the sailors to push the boats further and further off, and when one frail bark was about full there was a crash, an avalanche of ice went splashing into the sea from the smaller glacier up the bay, and a great wave curling from it washed the boat back and left it grounded. Men without rubber boots were then so well soaked and so plastered with glacier mud that they just stepped over the boat's side and helped the rubber-clad sailors float it off. The lower deck and the engine-room were hanging full and strewn with muddy boots and drying clothes all day, and the stewards were heard to wonder "what great fun there was in getting all their clothes spoiled, that the passengers need take on so over a glacier."

When Vancouver went to the head of Taku Inlet in 1794 he found "frozen mountains" surrounding it on every side, and his boats were so endangered by the floating ice, that his men gladly hurried away from it. Prospectors have had their camps at the mouth of the river at the head of the basin, and have searched the bars and shores of Taku River for miles across the mountain wall. Their evidence and that of the fur traders, who give scant notice to such things, prove the Indian traditions, that the ice is receding rapidly, and that the ice mountain that now sets back with a great moraine before it, came down to the water's edge in their fathers' days.

That day on the Taku glacier will live forever as one of the rarest and most perfect enjoyment. The grandest objects in nature were before us, the primeval forces that mould the face of the earth were at work, and it was all so far away and out of the everyday world that we might have been walking a new planet, fresh fallen from the Creator's hand. The lights and shadows on the hills, and the range of colors, were superb,--every tiny ice-cake in the water showing colors as rare and fleeting as the shades of an opal, while the gleaming ice-cliff, from which these jewels dropped, was aglow with all the prismatic lights and tinted in lines of deepest indigo in the great caverns and rifts of its front. The sunny, sparkling air was most exhilarating, and we sat on the after-deck basking in the golden rays of the afternoon sun, and looked back regretfully as the glaciers receded and were lost to sight by a turn in the fiord.

Turning north from the mouth of Taku Inlet, and running up Gastineaux Channel, we were between the steepest mountain walls that vegetation could cling to, and down all those verdant precipices poured foaming cascades from the snow-banks on the summits. This channel between the mainland shore and Douglass Island is less than a mile in width, and the mountains on the eastern shore rise to two thousand feet and more in their first uplift from the water's edge. The snowy summits of the ranges back of it reach twice that altitude, and are the same mountains that shelter the glaciers of the north shore of Taku Inlet.

The town of Juneau straggles along the beach and scatters itself after a broken, rectangular plan, up a ravine that opens to the water front. Lying at the foot of a vertical mountain-wall, with slender cascades rolling like silver ribbons from the clouds and snow-banks overhead, and sheltered in a curve of the still channel, Juneau has the most picturesque situation of any town on the coast. There were about fifty houses in 1884, and the place claimed between three hundred and four hundred white inhabitants, with a village of Taku Indians on one side of the town, and Auk Indians on the other. The Northwest Trading Company has a large store at Juneau, and a barber's shop and the sign of "Russian Baths, every Saturday, fifty cents," shows that the luxuries of civilization are creeping in.

It is very difficult to ascertain the exact amounts produced by these mines, although from ten to fifty thousand dollars in gold is sent down by each steamer during the summer months. To avoid the heavy express charges, many of the provident miners carry down their own hard earnings in the fall, and buckskin bags, tin cans, and bottles of gold dust are among the curios put in the purser's safe. As far as known, 5,000 was washed from the placers in 1881, 0,000 in 1882, and about 0,000 in 1883.

After the first season's stir Juneau experienced a slow and steady growth, and has not yet set up its pretensions to a "boom." There is a calm and quiet to the town that disappoints one who looks for the wild and untrammelled scenes of an incipient Leadville. The roving prospectors and the improvident miners gather at Juneau when the frosts and snows of winter drive them from the basins and valleys of the mainland, and in that season Juneau comes nearest to wearing the air of a mining town with the fever and delirium of a boom about to come on. Tales of fabulous riches are then current, and around the contraband whiskey-bottle prospectors tell of finds that put Ormus and the Ind, Sierra Nevada and Little Pittsburg far behind.

The first time that I visited Juneau it was getting a large instalment of its annual rainfall of nine feet, and it was only by glimpses through the tattered edges of the clouds that one could see the slopes of the steep, green mountains, with the roaring cascades waving like snowy pennants against the forest screen. The ground was soaked and miry, and the least step from the gravelly beach or the plank walks plunged one ankle-deep in the black mud. Of the two beasts of burden in the town, the horse was busy hauling freight from the wharf, and the mule struck a melancholy pose beside an ancient schooner on the beach and refused to move. Depending upon such transportation, travel to the Basin mines was rather limited, and a few miners and Indians descending the steep trail from the forest, like Fra Diavolo in the first act, quite excited the fancy. After a contest with the best two hundred feet of the three miles of the steep yet miry trail, we were convinced that the mines would not pay on that drizzly afternoon. With the trees dripping around us and little rills running down on every side, it was rather paradoxical to have a wayfarer tell us that the miners were doing very little just then, for want of water. It was strange enough in a country of perpetual rain, with streams dropping down from eternal snows, that the system of reservoirs, ditches, and flumes should be incomplete. A sociable miner, with his hands in his pockets as far as his elbows, engaged us in conversation on a street corner, and we surrounded him with a cordon of dripping umbrellas and listened to his apologies for the state of the weather, couched in many strange idioms.

"We haven't any Indian agents, or constables, so there's never any trouble between us peaceable white men and the natives," said the miner. "There's no caboose and no tax-collector; and as fish is plenty, it's as good a place as any for a poor miner. Want of whiskey is the greatest drawback to the development of this country, and something will have to be done about it. Congress and them folks in Washington don't pay much attention to us, but we had an earthquake a while ago, so the Lord ain't forgotten us, if the government has," said the friendly miner, with a solemn smile. He promised to bring some quartz specimens to the ship for the ladies; but we never saw that friend again.

The miners thus failing us in picturesqueness and thrilling incidents, the Indians came in for a full share of attention. One village wanders along the beach below the wharf, and the other settlement is hidden behind a knoll at the other side of the town. In the latter, Sitka Jack has a summer-house as well as at Fort Wrangell, but, instead of finding this potentate at home, his door was locked, and the neighbors said that he had gone up to Chilkat for the salmon fishing. On one of the largest houses in the village was the sign: "Klow-kek, Auke Chief." Over another doorway was written:

"Jake is a good boy, a working man, Friend of the whites, and demands protection."

The Indians came from both villages and huddled in groups on the wharf. Nearly all of them were barefooted, for those rich enough to afford shoes take them off and put them away when the ground is wet or muddy. They seemed quite unconscious of the weather, and, though unshod, were wrapped in blankets and in many cases carried umbrellas. The women and children tripped down in their bare feet, and sat around on the dripping wharf with a recklessness that suggested pneumonia, consumption, rheumatism, and all those kindred ills from which they suffer so severely. Nearly all the women had their faces blacked, and no one can imagine anything more frightful and sinister on a melancholy day than to be confronted by one of these silent, stealthy figures, with the great circles of the whites of the eyes alone visible in the shadow of the blanket. A dozen fictitious reasons are given for this face-blacking. One Indian says that the widows and those who have suffered great sorrow wear the black in token thereof. Another native authority makes it a sign of happiness, while occasionally a giggling dame confesses that it is done to preserve the complexion. Ludicrous as this may seem to the bleached Caucasian and the ladies of rice-powdered and enamelled countenances, the matrons of high fashion and the swell damsels of the Thlinket tribes never make a canoe voyage without smearing themselves well with the black dye, that they get from a certain wild root of the woods, or with a paste of soot and seal oil. On sunny and windy days on shore they protect themselves from tan and sunburn by this same inky coating. On feast days and the great occasions, when they wash off the black, their complexions come out as fair and creamy white as the palest of their Japanese cousins across the water, and the women are then seen to be some six shades lighter than the tan-colored and coffee-colored lords of their tribe. The specimen women at Juneau wore a thin calico dress and a thick blue blanket. Her feet were bare, but she was compensated for that loss of gear by the turkey-red parasol that she poised over her head with all the complacency of a Mount Desert belle. She had blacked her face to the edge of her eyelids and the roots of her hair; she wore the full parure of silver nose-ring, lip-ring, and ear-rings, with five silver bracelets on each wrist, and fifteen rings ornamenting her bronze fingers; and a more thoroughly proud and self-satisfied creature never arrayed herself according to the behests of high fashion. The children pattered around barefooted and wearing but a single short garment, although the day was as cold and drear as in our November. Not one of these poor youngsters even ventured on the croopy cough, that belongs to the civilized child that has only put his head out of doors in such weather. One can easily believe the records and the statements as to the terrible death rate among these people, and marvel that any ever live beyond their infancy. So few old people are seen among them as to continually cause remark, but by their Spartan system only the strongest can possibly survive the exposure and hardships of such a life. Consumption is the common ailment and carries them away in numbers, yet they have no medicines or remedies of their own, trust only to the incantations and hocus-pocus of their medicine-men, and take not the slightest care to protect themselves from exposure. Great epidemics have swept these islands at times, and forty years ago the scourge of smallpox carried off half the natives of Alaska. The tribes never regained their numbers after that terrible devastation, and since then black measles and other diseases have so reduced their people that another fifty years may see these tribes extinct. The smoke of their dwellings and the glare from the snow in winter increases diseases of the eye, and most interesting cases for an oculist are presented in every group.

Indian women crouched on the wharf with their wares spread before them, or wandered like shadows about the ship's deck, offering baskets and mats woven of the fine threads of the inner bark and roots of the cedar, and extending arms covered with silver bracelets to the envious gaze of their white sisters. There was no savage modesty or simplicity about the prices asked, and their first demands were generally twice what the articles were worth. They are keen traders and sharp at bargaining, and no white man outwits these natives. Conversation was carried on with them in the Chinook jargon, the language compounded by Hudson Bay Company traders from French, English, Russian, and the dialect of the Chinook tribe once living at the mouth of the Columbia River. The Indians from California to the Arctic Ocean understand more or less of this jargon, and in Oregon and Washington Territory Chinook is a most necessary accomplishment.

Even Indian society is dull in the summer time, as they all go off in great parties to catch their winter supplies of fish. While the salmon are running no Indian wants to stay at home in the village, but no angler can imagine that they need go far to drop the line, when one copper-colored Izaak dropped his halibut hook off the Juneau wharf and pulled up a fish weighing nine hundred pounds. Being clubbed on the head and hauled up with much help, the monster halibut was sold for two dollars and fifty cents, which statement completes about as remarkable a fish story as one dares to tell, even at this distance.

The second time that I saw Juneau it was like another place in the last golden glow of the afternoon sun. They had been having clear weather for weeks, and under a radiant blue sky Juneau was the most charming little mountain nook and seashore village one could look for. The whole summit ranges of the mountains on the Juneau shore and on the island were visible, and at a distance the little white houses of the town looked like bits of the snowbanks, that had slid three thousand feet down the track of the cascades to the beach. We determined on an early start for the mines the next morning, anxious to see the places that baffled the pilgrims the first time.

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