Chapter XX: Along Iowa and Into Missouri to St. Louis 314 (2)

In the village, which claims to be the second town in Alaska, we have walked about and seen some of the totem poles which stand before many of the Indian cabins. Grotesque things, surely.

It is now near nine o'clock and yet the lingering twilight permits one to read. At Dawson, they tell me, there is in June no night, and baseball matches are played at 10 P. M.

August 25, 1903.

We did not leave Wrangel till 2 A. M., lying there waiting for the flood of the tide. We were to pass through the very tortuous, narrow and difficult straits and passages between Wrangel Bay and Frederick Sound, through which the tides rush with terrific fury--the tides rise twenty or thirty feet along these shores--and the ship would only venture at flood tide and after dawn. In order to see these picturesque passages, I climbed out between three and four o'clock this morning, wrapped in a blanket shawl above my overcoat, and stood in the ice-chilled air while we threaded slowly our dangerous way. Along sheer mountain-sides, between low wooded islands (all fir), a channel carefully marked with many buoys and white beacons, with many sharp turns, finally entering the great Frederick Sound, where many whales were blowing, and we saw our first real icebergs--masses of ice, blue and green, translucent, with deep, clear coloring.

All day we have sailed up this great land-locked sheet of blue water, the icebergs and floes increasing in number as we approached Taku Inlet, from whose great live glaciers they are incessantly shed off.

4 P. M.--We have landed at the Treadwell Mines on Douglas Island, where the largest stamp mill in the world crushes a low grade quartz night and day the year around, and where is gathered a mining population of several thousand. Then we crossed the fjord to the bustling port of Juneau, the would-be capital of Alaska, the rival of Sitka. A curious little town of wooden buildings, wooden streets, wooden sidewalks, nestling under a mighty snow-capped mountain, and, like those other towns, largely built on piles, on account of the tides.

Now we are off for Skagway, a twelve hours' run with our thirteen-knot speed.

To-day we have fallen in with two more fellow-travelers. One a young fellow named Baldwin, attached to the U. S. Fish Commission, who tells me much about the fishing on these coasts, and the efforts now being made to stay the indiscriminate slaughter. Another, a grave-faced, sturdy man from Maine who is panning free gold near Circle City, and has endured much of hardship and suffering. He hopes to win enough this winter and coming summer from his claim to go back to California and make a home for his old mother who waits for him there.

SKAGWAY, ALASKA, Wednesday, August 25.

Here we are, safe and sound after a voyage due north four days and four nights, more than 1,500 miles--I do not know just how far. We came out from Juneau last night in a nasty rain, mist (snow-rain almost) and wind driving against the rushing tides. Coming around Douglas Island in the teeth of the gale, we passed over the very spot where a year or two ago the ill-fated S. S. "Islander" struck a sunken iceberg, and went down into the profound depths with all on board. As I heard the moan of the winds, the rain splash on our cabin window, and hearkened to the roar of the whirling tides against whose currents we were entering the great Lynn Canal--fjord we should say--ninety miles or more long--ten to fifteen miles wide--I could not help thinking of the innumerable frail and lesser boats that dared these dangerous waters in the first mad rush to the Klondike but a few short years ago. In the darkness we have passed many fine glaciers, and along the bases of immense snow and ice crested mountains, which we are sorry not to have seen, but so much is now before us that our minds are already bent toward the great Yukon.

We are tied to an immense pier, and mechanical lifters seem to be dragging out the very entrails of the ship. Across the line of the warehouses I see the trucks of the railway, the hackmen are crying out their hotels. "This way, free 'bus to the Fifth Avenue Hotel."

FIFTH LETTER.

SKAGWAY, CARIBOU CROSSING[A] AND ATLIN.

ATLIN, BRITISH COLUMBIA, August 29, 1903.

Here we are at the mining camp of Atlin, on Atlin Lake. We left Skagway the same morning we arrived. Our boat, the "City of Seattle," came in early Wednesday morning, and long before we got up we heard them discharging cargo, all hands at work. The day was cloudy, cold, and icy winds swept down from the glaciers. It seemed November. The little town is built on a low sand tongue of detritus carried down from the glaciers by the snow rivers, the river Skagway here pouring out a flood of muddy white water like the Swiss streams.

[A] Caribou Crossing now called Carcross.

The railway is a narrow, three-foot gauge, and the cars are low but roomy. Our train consisted of nine freight cars, a baggage, two passenger cars and three locomotives, one in front and two in the middle. The famous ride was all that has been said of it. First, a gradual ascent up the deep valley of the Skagway, then steep climbing and many doubles and winds up through the cañon to the summit, twenty miles away, and 3,200 feet above the sea. In many places the road-bed is blasted out of the granite rock, sheer precipices above and below, a most costly piece of work, and ever down below winds the difficult, dangerous trail, over which fifty to one hundred thousand men and women footed it in the winters of 1897-1898, in the strange, mad world-rush to the fabulous gold fields of the interior. How they got up and through at all is the wonder; yet men tell me that men, pack-laden, footsore, determined, were so closely massed along the trail that it was one continuous line from Skagway to summit and beyond, for months at a time. The various views from our car were magnificent and even appalling; sometimes we seemed to hang in mid-air as we crawled upward. As we approached the summit we came among snow fields and near many glaciers, and then passed through long snow-sheds over which the avalanches often slip and thunder into the abysses below.

Near the divide is the international boundary line, and the customs station for Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada, and where the red-coated Canadian mounted police come first in evidence. Here our bags were examined by the customs. Then we began a gradual descent into wide, open, flat valleys, over bare granite rock masses and through a stunted fir wilderness into the basin of the Yukon, 2,600 miles from the Behring Sea at St. Michaels. Flocks of ptarmigan flew up as the train rolled down, and a few eagles soared high above the snow summits.

Our first stop was at a railway eating-house near the head of Lake Bennett, a sheet of light green water, two to ten miles wide and over thirty miles long, all shut in by gigantic granite mountains whose summits were covered with glittering snow. The railway skirts the water for the entire distance until it crosses at a bridge over a swift current where Lake Bennett flows into Lake Marsh, and where is the station of Caribou.

Here we were put off, and here we would, two days later, take the bi-weekly steamer for Atlin, on Atlin Lake, where we now are, and here the railway leaves the lakes and takes a short cut across a low divide to White Horse Rapids, where begins the steamboat navigation on the Yukon River.

Caribou is a collection of cabins and tents, and is the first settlement where, they say, will some day be a city.

It was on Lake Bennett that the weary pilgrims used to camp to build their boats and rafts and begin their long water journey of five hundred miles to Dawson and the golden Klondike.

Our hotel we found surprisingly neat and clean; owned and kept by a famous Indian, "Dawson Charlie," who was one of the discoverers of the gold of Bonanza Creek in the Klondike, and who had the sense to himself stake out several claims, the gold from which has made him now a magnate worth several hundred thousand dollars, and who lives and entertains like a white man. He housed us in a neat, comfortable room, iron bedstead, wire mattress, carpeted floor. He fed us at fifty cents a meal as well, as abundantly as in West Virginia, and only his Indian daughter, who waited on us, dressed neatly and fashionably, with big diamonds in her ears, made us realize that we were not in our own land. Here we have spent two delightful days. The air is as wonderfully clear as on the table-lands of Mexico, full of ozone, but cold in the shadow even in midday, though the sun is warm.

On the ship we met a delightful naturalist, Mr. Baldwin, of New Haven, artist of the U. S. Fish Commission, and who came with us to try and catch some grayling, in order to make drawings for the Commission, and for two days we have been out in the woods, he with my rod, H---- with your butterfly net, and I with my gun. He caught his grayling, several of them. I shot several mallard ducks, but H---- caught no butterflies, nor saw one. It was too late in the season for that.

On the way up we fell in with a very intelligent Swede, whose partner in the Klondike is a Dane, and who, when he learned H----'s nationality, and she had talked Danish with him, was all courtesy and friendliness. He had come in with the "mushers" (corruption of the French _marche_), as the early foot-farers are called, and had succeeded. When we get to Dawson he will welcome us.

At Caribou we also made acquaintance with the Canadian customs officer, Mr. John Turnure, a fine type of Canadian official, big, bluff, yet courteous, who at first was going to tax all my cartridges and kodak films, notwithstanding I had passed the customs at Winnipeg and had come from Vancouver direct, but who, upon explanation, relented, and afterward called on us and invited H----, Mr. B---- and myself to call on his wife and family at his log cabin mansion near the station, which we did, and were served cake and coffee from dainty china, and sat on a divan covered with priceless furs, near a good piano. His daughters were now at home from school on vacation, and his wife, a cultured woman, was next day going with them on a shopping visit to Dawson, the New York or Cincinnati of this far north.

The Yukon territory is governed from Ottawa by appointees, and policed by the "Northwest Mounted Police," a fine body of men--including many young Englishmen of good family--in cowboy hats and red coats. While here in Atlin, we are just over the line in the Province of British Columbia, a state with its own laws and civil magistrates.

We left Caribou on a little steamer with a big sternwheel--all of which, timber and machinery, had been carried from Skagway over the White Pass on horses' backs, and sledges, dragged by men and dogs, and put together on Lake Bennett, before the railway was even thought of. How in the name of heaven a ten-ton boiler, and the engines and big timbers, were got over that foot-path trail, is even yet a standing marvel--the boat is as big as the steamer "Calvert" on the Kanawha River--but it was done, and to-day I have talked with the man who bossed and directed the job, Captain Irving, now a gold hunter of Atlin and a member of the British Columbia Parliament.

We first came slowly through a well-marked track on a little lake, Lake Marsh, for about ten miles, then through a short river, and then out into Lake Taggish, a sheet of water larger than Lake Bennett, and one arm of which is famous for its desperate winds from the glaciers--the "hurricane" arm--another arm of which heads toward the White Horse Rapids, and a third arm, "The Taku Arm," which extends southerly toward Lake Atlin, a lake more than one hundred miles in length, which empties into it through a short, swift, turbulent river. This southerly portion of the lake is eight or ten miles wide and we were all night steaming on it to Taku, where we landed this morning--a distance of forty or fifty miles--when, taking a little, short, two-mile railway, we were pulled over to Atlin Lake, a yet bigger body of water. There embarking on another steamboat, we were ferried ten miles across to Atlin, a town with a courthouse, several churches, a little hospital, a newspaper, a bank, a dozen hotels, a multitude of restaurants, bicycles, numerous livery stables, and which is the center of a gold-mining region from which already several millions of dollars have been taken since the first pay dirt was found in 1898. We dined at a restaurant where a colored French cook presides, and you may have any delicacy New York could afford. At the bars men preside with diamonds the size of hickory nuts in their shirts, drinks are twenty-five cents each and cigars the same. The hotels are full of keen-faced men; well-gowned and refined women are to be seen on the streets; the baby carriages are pulled by great big dogs, and even the water carts and delivery wagons are hauled by teams of eight and ten dogs--Newfoundland or wolfish Esquimaux.

"The Camp," or city, is now in the midst of a boom, and this morning we were shown several buckets of gold nuggets just brought in last night from a recent "clean up."

When in the midst of Lake Taggish, yesterday afternoon, we were hailed by a naphtha launch of the Mounted Police, and, on our lying to, three gentlemen climbed in. One face seemed in some way familiar to me, and when I presently heard some one call him Mr. Sutton I recognized one of my old Port Hope schoolmates, who had also been at Cornell, and who had been an especial friend. He was as well pleased as I at the meeting, and is now here with me. He was a brilliant scholar, and is now British Columbia's most eminent geologist and mining expert. We have been out together to-day, and to have his expert opinion here on what I see is invaluable. We have also met here a Mr. and Mrs. R----, of Philadelphia, to whom I had a letter, a promoter of the largest hydraulic company here, and H---- has been off with Mrs. R---- to-day and panned her first chunks of real, true, genuine gold, of which performance she is not a little proud. The whole country seems to be more or less full of gold; it is in the gravels and sands everywhere, and a number of very large gold-getting enterprises are under way, mostly hydraulic placer mining, but also some fine quartz veins carrying free gold are being opened up, and I have been off with Sutton all the afternoon looking at one.

September 1, 1903.

We have had three days of outing; at least, I have. Saturday morning I made an early start with Sutton and three other men for a visit to some hydraulic mining operations up on Pine Creek, and to the great dredge now being built. At one of these, an operation called "The Sunrise Gold Co.," I found in charge a Mr. Ruffner, of Cincinnati, a cousin to the Kanawha family, grandson of one of the original Ruffner brothers, who, hating slavery, had freed his slaves and removed to free soil in Ohio. A bright young fellow, managing a large operation. Then we went on further to Gold Run, where an enormous dredge is being built. An experiment in this country, about the final success of which there is yet much question. Here I dined in a tent, which is warmer, they say, than any timber building, even when the temperature is 50 degrees below zero. The valley is a broad, open one, all of glacial formation. It is very level, with Pine Creek cutting deeply between high gravel banks. A black top soil of a foot or two, eight or ten feet of grey gravel, then as much more yellowish sandy gravel, and often a foot or two of black sand at the bottom, lying upon a bed of serpentine rock; and it is in this lowest ten feet of yellow gravel and black sand that the free gold is found, nuggets of a pound or two down to minute gold dust, a red gold of about 22 to 23 carats in combination with copper or silver. Through this gravel are also immense stones and boulders, and these are the gold diggers' particular bete noir. Most of the digging is done by getting out this gravel, freeing it of the boulders and washing it. Pine Creek is the overflow of Surprise Lake, a sheet of water twenty miles long and one-half to one mile wide; and although a considerable stream, yet its waters are so much needed in these gold-washing operations that a constant water-war among the diggers and digging companies goes on. There is much waste also in the present methods, and it is to prevent the wars as well as to save the fine gold that now largely escapes that the dredging method is to be applied. Then, too, there are only four, or at most five, months in the year when men can work, so that great energy must be expended during the open season. There is no night up here for these four months, and men work all the twenty-four hours in eight-hour shifts; thus, really, more work is done than one would at first imagine. The life of the ideally successful gold digger is to toil with unflagging vigor for the four or five months of daylight and open weather, then "come out" and blow it in leisurely luxury in some comfortable city. But not all are so able to make their summer pile. They may not strike rich pay dirt, but may find it lean, or even barren, and such must just live on through ice and snow and mighty frost, hoping for more luck another year. Many are the tales of hardship and suffering and dire wreck one hears. The little graveyard out along the Pine Creek pike has many graves in it. One man died a natural death, they say, but all the rest went to their graves stark mad from disappointment, poverty and privation. Every train passing out over the White Pass Railway carries its complement of the hopelessly insane, gone mad in the hunt for gold.

In this little town or "camp," as it is called, are very many too poor 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some elegant drags and victorias, with fine horses, as well as many superb draft horses, are seen on the streets. It only pays to have the best horses; a scrub costs as much to bring in and to keep as a good one, and hay is $60.00 to $150.00 per ton, and oats are sold by the pound, sometimes $1.00 per pound. Cows' milk is an expensive luxury at the restaurants, and various canned goods form the staple of life.

Many large steamboats ply on the Yukon, and those running down to St. Michael, 1,800 miles below, are of the finest Mississippi type, and are run by Mississippi captains and pilots. We shall go down on one of these, the "Sarah," belonging to the "Northern Commercial Company," one of the two great American trading companies. Also large towboats push huge freight barges up and down the river.

Several six-horse stage lines run many times a day to the various mining camps up and adjacent to the Klondike Valley, which is itself now settled and worked for one hundred and fifty miles from Dawson. Probably thirty to thirty-five thousand people are at work in these various diggings, and trade and spend in Dawson. Hence Dawson takes on metropolitan airs, and considers herself the new metropolis of the far north and Yukon Valley.

Two things strike the eye on first walking about the town. The multitude of big, long-haired, wolflike-looking dogs, loafing about, and the smallness of the neat dwelling-houses. The dogs play in the summer and work untiringly through the long seven months of winter--a "dog's life" then means a volume. Small houses are easier to warm than big ones, when fuel is scarce and wood $16, $20 and $50 per cord, and soft spruce wood at that!

But Dawson has an air of prosperity about it. The men and women are well dressed, and have strong, keen faces. Many of them "mushed" across Chilkoot Pass in 1897, and have made their piles. And they are ready to stampede to any new gold field that may be discovered.

It is said that there are 6,000 people here, stayers, and then there is a fluctuating horde of comers and goers, tenderfeet many of them. This year eleven millions of dust has come into Dawson from the neighboring diggings, and since 1897, they say, near a hundred millions have been found! Many men and even women have made their millions and "gone out." Others have spent as much, and are starting in anew, and the multitude all expect to have their piles within a year or two. A curious aggregation of people are here come together, and from all parts! There are very many whom you must not question as to their past. German officers driven from their Fatherland, busted English bloods, many of these in the Northwest Mounted Police, and titled ne'er-do-wells depending upon the quarterly remittances from London, and Americans who had rather not meet other fellow countrymen;--mortals who have failed to get on in other parts of this earth, and who have come to hide for awhile in these vast, solitary regions, strike it rich if possible and get another start. And many of them do this very thing, hit upon new fortunes, and sometimes, steadied by former adversity, lead new, honorable careers; but most of the black sheep, if luck is kindly to them, only plunge the deeper and more recklessly into vice and dissipation. The town is full of splendid bar-rooms and gilded gambling-hells. Two hundred thousand a night has been lost and won in some of them.

I drove past a large, fine-looking man, but possessed of a weak, dissipated mouth, on Eldorado Creek yesterday. His claim has been one of the fabulously rich, a million or more out of a patch of gravel 1,000 feet by 250, and he has now drunk and gambled most of it away, divorced a nice wife "in the States outside," then married a notorious belle of nether Dawson, and will soon again be back to pick and pan and dogs. Another claim of like size on Bonanza Creek was pointed out to me where two brothers have taken out over a million and a quarter since 1897, and have been ruined by their luck. They have recklessly squandered every nugget of their sudden riches in drunkenness and with cards and wine and women to a degree that would put the ancient Californian days of '49 in the shade. On the other hand, there are such men as Lippy, who have made their millions, saved and invested them wisely, and are regarded as veritable pillars in their communities. Lippy has just given the splendid Y. M. C. A. building to Seattle.

There is now much substantial wealth in Dawson and the Klondike. Most of the large operations are in the hands of Americans, especially of the American companies who have bought up the claims after the individual miner, who just worked it superficially and dug out the cream, has sold the skim milk. And even the major part of the original "stakers" seem to have been Americans. There are many good people in Dawson among these. Then, too, there is the body of Canadian officials who govern the territory of Yukon--political henchmen of Laurier and the Liberal party, many of them French Canadians. The governor himself and the chief of these officials live here, and their families form the inner circle of select society. Very anti-American they are said to be, and they do not mix much with the Americans who, of equal or superior social standing at home, here devote themselves to business and gold getting and let Canadian society and politics altogether alone. But while the alert American has been the first to stake, occupy and extract the wealth of the Klondike, and while by his energy and tireless perseverance he has made the Yukon Territory the greatest placer mining region of the world, yet this acquirement of vast wealth by Americans has not really been pleasing to the Canadians, nor to the government of Ottawa. So these governing gentlemen in Ottawa have put their heads together to discover how they, too, might profit, and especially profit, by the energy of the venturesome American. How themselves secure the chestnuts after he had, at peril of life and fortune, securely pulled the same out of the fire--in this case, frightful frost and ice! And they hit upon this plan: They resolved themselves into little groups, and the government then began granting extensive and exclusive blanket concessions to these groups. Just now a great row is on over some of these private concession grants. One man, Treadgold by name, turns up and discovers himself to be possessed of an exclusive blanket grant to all the water rights of the Klondike Valley and its affluent creeks, as well as the exclusive right to hold and work all gold-bearing land not already occupied, and also to hold and have every claim already staked, or worked, which for any reason may lapse to the crown either for non-payment of taxes or any other reason, thus shutting out the individual miner from ever staking a new claim within this region should he discover the gold, and from taking up any lapsed claim, and from re-titling his own claim, should he be careless and neglect to pay his annual taxes by the appointed day!

Another man, named Boyle, also appears with a similar concession covering the famous Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks, where land is valued by the inch, and millions beyond count have in these few years been dug out. Such flagrant and audacious jobbery as the creation and granting of these blanket concessions in the quiet of Ottawa, presents to the world, has probably never before been witnessed, unless it be among the inner circle of the entourage of the Russian Czar. These steals have been so bold and unabashed that this entire mining region has risen as a unit in angry protest. While the miner has been prospecting, discovering, freezing, digging in these Arctic solitudes, the snug, smug politician of Ottawa has fixed up a job to swipe the whole find should the innocent, ignorant prospector happen to make one. So vigorous has been the protest against these daring abuses of a government clique, that this summer what is called a "Dominion Royal Commission" has been sent here to investigate the situation. The papers are full of the matter. The citizens have met in mass-meeting and unanimously joined in the protest against the concessions, calling for their revocation, and Judge--"Justice"--Britton, the head of the commission, is bitterly denounced as a partisan here simply on a whitewashing trip to exculpate Laurier and his friends. And the result of what has unquestionably been crooked jobbery at Ottawa is said to be that hundreds of prospectors and miners are moving out of the Yukon and into Alaska, where they say "there is fair play," and a man may have what he finds. What I here tell you is the current talk in Dawson--quite unanimous talk--and I should like to have heard the other side, if there is one.