\«
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES

 
 THE AUTIIOK AM) HIS WIFE IPOX THE TRAIL.
 
 In To 
 The Yukon 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM SEYMOUR EDWARDS 
 
 WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS 
 AND MAPS 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 cincinnati 
 Press of Jennings & Graham
 
 copyrisht, 1904, by 
 William Seymour Edwards 
 
 PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1004 
 RK PRINTED JUNE ll/Oo 

 
 
 DEDICATION. 
 
 TO THE COMRADE WHOSE CHARMING COMPANIONSHIP 
 
 ADDED SO GREATLY TO THE DELIGHTS OF MY 
 
 TWO MONTHS' OUTING, THIS LITTLE 
 
 VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY 
 
 DEDICATED. 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 iii 
 
 21.214.8
 
 PREFACE 
 TO THE THIRD EDITION 
 
 " In To The Yukon " has been so kindly received 
 by the public that the publisher is encouraged to issue 
 a third edition. The Great Yukon River flows on 
 amidst the stupendous wilderness ; the mountains, the 
 forests, the foaming, swift-running waters remain to- 
 day and to-morrow even as they were on yesterday; 
 man's presence is here a mere passing incident. 
 Even yet the gold, hid in the illimitable sands, lies 
 mostly undiscovered, even as it has lain for ten mil- 
 lion years. The Lure of the Wild still broods over 
 the great valley and the great river and its wondrous 
 lakes, even as when these letters were first written. 
 So I leave them as they are, feeling that the passage 
 of a few brief years can not materially lessen the mys- 
 tery and the fascination of the Arctic North which 
 then fell upon me and stirred my pen. 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 July, 1909. .
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 These letters were not written for publication originally. 
 They were written for the home circle and the few friends 
 who might care to read them. They are the brief narrative 
 of daily journeyings and experiences during a very delight- 
 ful two months of travel into the far north and along the 
 Pacific slope of our continent. Some of the letters were 
 afterwards published in the daily press. They are now put 
 into this little book and a few of the Kodak snapshots taken 
 are given in half-tone prints. 
 
 We were greeted with much friendliness along the 
 way and were the recipients of many courtesies. None 
 showed us greater attention than the able and considerate 
 officials of the Pacific Coast S. S. Co., the Alaska S. S. Co. 
 and the White Pass and Yukon Railway Co., including 
 Mr. Kekewich, managing Director of the London Board, 
 and Mr. Newell, Vice-President of the Company. 
 
 At Atlin and Dawson we met and made many friends, 
 and we would here reiterate to them, one and all, our 
 warm appreciation of their hospitalities. 
 
 William Seymour Edwards. 
 Charleston-Kanawha, West Virginia, 
 August, 1904.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 I. The Great Lakes. Cleveland to Detroit.. 13 
 II. St. Paul, Winnipeg and Banff; the Wheat 
 
 Lands of the Far Northwest 20 
 
 III. Banff to Vancouver Across the Rockies 
 
 and Selkirks 38 
 
 IV. Vancouver and Skagway; Fjords and For- 
 
 ests 52 
 
 V. Skagway, Caribou Crossing and Atlin 75 
 
 VI. The Great Llewellyn or Taku Glacier. 109 
 
 VII. Voyaging Down the Mighty Yukon 112 
 
 VIII. Dawson and the Golden Klondike 132 
 
 IX. Men of the Klondike 170 
 
 X. Dog Lore of the North 180 
 
 XI. How the Government Searches for Gold... 195 
 XII. Seattle, the Future Mistress of the Trade 
 
 and Commerce of the North 206 
 
 XIII. The Valley of the Willamette 224 
 
 XIV. San Francisco 230 
 
 XV. Los Angeles 249 
 
 XVI. San Francisco and Salt Lake City 260 
 
 XVII. A Broncho-busting Match 282 
 
 XVIII. Colorado and Denver 300 
 
 XIX. Across Nebraska 307 
 
 XX. Along Iowa and into Missouri to St. Louis. 314 
 
 Index 333 
 
 vll
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 The Author and His Wife Upon the Trail Frontispiece. 
 
 The Waterside, Cleveland 15 
 
 Entrance St. Clair Canal 15 
 
 White Bear Lake, St. Paul 31 
 
 Down the Silver Bow— Banff 31 
 
 A Reach of the Fraser River 41 
 
 Big Douglas Fir — Vancouver Park , 45 
 
 Victoria, B. C— The Harhor 49 
 
 Leaving Vancouver 53 
 
 Awaiting Cargo — Vancouver, B. C 57 
 
 Totem Poles at Ketchikan 61 
 
 Glaciers on Frederick Sound , 63 
 
 Approaching Fort Wrangel 67 
 
 The Pier — Fort Wrangel 67 
 
 The Pier — Skagway 71 
 
 Lynn Canal from the Summit of White Pass 71 
 
 Looking Down White Pass 73 
 
 The Summit— White Pass 73 
 
 Railway Train — Skagway 77 
 
 The International Boundary 77 
 
 Early September Snow, Caribou Crossing 79 
 
 Caribou Crossing 79 
 
 A Vista on Lake Marsh 83 
 
 Woodland Along Lake Marsh 83 
 
 On the Trail at Caribou 85 
 
 View Near Caribou Crossing 85 
 
 ix
 
 PAGE. 
 
 The Taku River 89 
 
 Lake Atlin 91 
 
 Dogs, Atlin 91 
 
 Atlin Baggage Express 95 
 
 Atlin City Waterworks 95 
 
 Government Mail Crossing Lake Atlin 99 
 
 Miner's Cabin on Spruce Creek, Atlin Gold Diggings. . 99 
 
 Finding "Color," a Good Strike, Otter Creek, B. C... 103 
 
 Sluicing for Gold, Otter Creek, B. C 103 
 
 An Atlin Gold Digger 105 
 
 Bishop and Mrs. Bompas 113 
 
 Great Llewellyn or Taku Glacier 113 
 
 Fishing for Grayling, White Horse Rapids 117 
 
 Moonlight on Lake Le Barge 119 
 
 Lake Bennett, from Our Car 119 
 
 A Yukon Sunset 123 
 
 The Upper Yukon 123 
 
 A Yukon Coal Mine 125 
 
 Five Finger Rapids on the Yukon 125 
 
 Coming Up the Yukon 129 
 
 The "Sarah" Arriving at Dawson, 1,600 Miles up from 
 
 St. Michael's 133 
 
 The Levee, Dawson — Our Steamer 133 
 
 Dawson City, The Yukon — Looking Down 137 
 
 Dawson and Mouth of Klondike River, Looking Up.. 137 
 
 Second Avenue, Dawson 141 
 
 Dawson — View Down the Yukon 141 
 
 The Cecil — The First Hotel in Dawson 143 
 
 A Private Carriage, Dawson 143 
 
 Dog Corral — The Fastest Team in Dawson 147
 
 PAGH. 
 
 A Potato Patch at Dawson . 147 
 
 First Agricultural Fair Held at Dawson, Septem- 
 ber, 1903 151 
 
 Daily Stage on Bonanza 155 
 
 Discovery Claim on Bonanza of the Klondike 155 
 
 Looking Up the Klondike River 159 
 
 The Author at White Horse Rapids 159 
 
 "Mes Enf ants," Malamute Pups 161 
 
 A Klondike Cabin 161 
 
 On the Yukon 175 
 
 Floating Down the Yukon 175 
 
 Approaching Seattle 181 
 
 With and Without 181 
 
 Malamute Team of Government Mail Carrier, Dawson 187 
 
 Breaking of the Yukon— May 17, 1903 187 
 
 Sun Dogs 189 
 
 Winter Landscape 189 
 
 Lake Bennett 197 
 
 The Height of Land, White Pass 197 
 
 Mt. Ranier or Tacoma 217 
 
 Along the Columbia River 221 
 
 A Big Redwood 235 
 
 Italian Fishing Craft at Santa Cruz 239 
 
 Approaching San Francisco 239 
 
 The Franciscan Garden — Santa Barbara 243 
 
 Our Franciscan Guide 243 
 
 The Sea — Santa Barbara (two views) 245 
 
 Marengo Avenue, Pasadena 251 
 
 Street View, Los Angeles 251 
 
 The Sagebrush and Alkali Desert 263
 
 PAGE. 
 
 The Mormon Temple 267 
 
 The Mormon Tithing House 271 
 
 The Mormon "Lion House" 271 
 
 Great Salt Lake 277 
 
 Nuckolds Putting on the Hoodwink 285 
 
 Nuckolds, "The Broncho Busted" 285 
 
 Grimsby and the Judges 289 
 
 Bunn, Making Rope Bridle 289 
 
 Arizona Moore Up 293 
 
 Arizona Moore 293 
 
 The Crowd at the Broncho-Busting Match 298 
 
 The Dun-colored Devil 298 
 
 On the Great Kanawha 325 
 
 Our Kanawha Garden 327 
 
 Map of Route in the United States 329 
 
 Map of Upper Yukon Basin 331 
 
 sii
 
 In To The Yukon 
 
 FIRST LETTER. 
 
 THE GREAT LAKES, CLEVELAND TO DETROIT. 
 
 Steamer Northwest, on Lake Superior, \ 
 August 11, 1903. J 
 
 We reached Cleveland just in time to catch the 
 big liner, which cast off her cables almost as soon as 
 we were aboard. A vessel of 5,000 tons, a regular sea 
 ship. The boat was packed with well-dressed people, 
 out for a vacation trip, most of them. By and by 
 we began to pass islands, and about 2 p.m. turned 
 into a broad channel between sedgy banks — the 
 Detroit River. Many craft we passed and more 
 overtook, for we were the fastest thing on the lakes 
 as well as the biggest. 
 
 Toward 3 p. m., the tall chimneys of the huge 
 salt works and the church spires of the city of Detroit 
 began to come into view. A superb water front, 
 several miles long, and great warehouses and sub- 
 stantial buildings of brick and stone, fit for a vast 
 commerce. 
 
 The sail up the Detroit River, through Lake St. 
 Clair, and then up the St. Clair River to Lake Huron, 
 was as lovely a water trip as any I have made. The 
 
 13
 
 14 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 superb park "Belle Isle," the pride of Detroit; the 
 many, very many, villas and cottages all along the 
 water-side, hundreds of them; everywhere boats, 
 skiffs, launches, naphtha and steam, all filled with 
 Sunday pleasure excursionists, the many great pleas- 
 ure excursion steamers loaded down with passengers, 
 gave a life and liveliness to the water views that 
 astonished and pleased us. 
 
 The Lake St. Clair is about twenty miles across, 
 apparently broader than it is, for the reason that its 
 sedgy margins are so wide that the trees and higher 
 land further back seem the real border of the lake. 
 What is called the "St. Clair Flats" are the wide, 
 low-lying lands on each side of the long reaches of 
 the St. Clair River. Twenty miles of cottages, hotels, 
 club-houses, are strung along the water-side, each with 
 its little pier and its boats. 
 
 Towards dark — eight o'clock — we came to Sarnia 
 and Port Huron, and pointed out into the great lake, 
 second in depth to Superior — larger than any but 
 Superior — a bit of geography I had quite forgotten. 
 
 At dawn on Monday, we were skirting the high- 
 wooded southern shore, and by 11 a. m. sighted the 
 fir-clad heights of Mackinac where Lake Michi- 
 gan comes in. Here is a beautiful protected bay, 
 where is a big hotel, and the good people of Chicago 
 come to forget the summer heats. After half an 
 hour, we turned again and toward the north, in a 
 half circle, and by 4 p. m. were amidst islands and 
 in a narrow channel, the St. Mary's River.
 
 THE WATERSIDE, CLEVELAND. 
 
 ENTRANCE ST. CLAIR CANAL
 
 THE GREAT LAKES. 17 
 
 Huron is a deep blue like Superior, and unlike the 
 green of shallow Erie. The channel toward the Soo 
 ia very tortuous — many windings and sharp turns, 
 marked by buoys and multitudinous beacon lights. 
 All along we had passed great numbers of steamships 
 and barges — ore carriers, but nowhere saw a large 
 sailing craft, only a sail boat here and there. This 
 entire extensive traffic is a steam traffic, and though 
 we see many boats, they are black and sombre, and 
 burdened with coal and ore. 
 
 It was late, nearly seven o'clock, when we steamed 
 slowly into the lock basin at the Soo. High fir-clad 
 hills on either hand ; a multitude of channels among 
 wooded islands. A new and vigorous manufacturing 
 community growing up on either shore where the 
 electric power is being harnessed. Many build- 
 ings, many new residences, some of them large and 
 imposing, covering the sloping hillsides. The rapids 
 are a mile or more in length and half a mile wide. 
 The American canal with its locks is on the south 
 side. One, the old lock, small; the other, large and 
 deep for modern traffic. We were here delayed more 
 than two hours by reason of the pack of boats ahead 
 of us. It was dark when we came out of the lock — 
 a lift of twenty-one feet. But meantime, the hills on 
 either hand had burst out into hundreds of electric 
 lights, betokening a much greater population than 
 I had conceived. As we entered the American lock, 
 a big black ship, almost as large as ours, crept in 
 behind us to the Canadian lock on the river's further
 
 18 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 side — one of the Canadian Pacific line going to Fort 
 William. 
 
 It was a full moon as we came out of the upper 
 river and lost ourselves in the blackness of Lake 
 Superior. A keen, crisp wind, a heavier swell than 
 on the lakes below. We were continually passing 
 innumerable craft with their dancing night lights. 
 The tonnage that now goes through the Soo canals 
 is greater than that of Suez. How little could the 
 world have dreamed of this a few years ago! 
 
 To-day when I came on deck we were just 
 entering the ship canal that makes the short cut by 
 way of Houghton. A cold mist and rain, fir-trees 
 and birches, small and stunted, a cold land. A 
 country smacking strongly of Norway. No wonder 
 the Scandinavians and Finns take to a land so like 
 their own. 
 
 At Houghton we were in the center of the copper 
 region. A vigorous town, many handsome resi- 
 dences. But it has been cold all day. Mercury 56 
 degrees this morning. A sharp wind from the north. 
 The bulk of the passengers are summer tourists in 
 thin gauze and light clothing, and all day they are 
 shivering in the cabin under cover, while we stay 
 warm out on deck. 
 
 The food is excellent, and the famous planked 
 white fish is our stand-by. 
 
 This whole trip is a great surprise to me. The 
 splendid great ship, the conveniences and luxury 
 equalling any trans-Atlantic liner. The variety
 
 THE GREAT LAKES. 19 
 
 and beauty of the scenery, the differences in the 
 lakes, their magnitude, the islands, the tributary 
 rivers with their great flow of clear water, the vast 
 traffic of multitudinous big boats. The life and vigor 
 and stir of this north country ! Many of the passen- 
 gers are going to the Yellowstone. We will reach 
 Duluth about 10 p. m., and leave by the 11 :10 Great 
 Northern train for St. Paul.
 
 20 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 SECOND LETTER. 
 
 ST. PAUL, WINNIPEG AND BANFF; THE WHEAT LANDS 
 OF THE FAR NORTHWEST. 
 
 St. Paul, Minnesota, August 13, 1903. 
 
 We have spent two delightful clays in St. Paul, 
 great city of the Northwest that it is. We came over 
 from West Superior by the "Great Northern" route, 
 very comfortably in a new and fresh-kept sleeper — 
 a night's ride. I was early awake and sat for an 
 hour watching the wide flat farming country of Min- 
 nesota. Not much timber, never a cornfield, much 
 wheat and oats and hay land. A black, rich soil. 
 Still a good deal of roll to the landscape, and, at the 
 same time, a certain premonition of the greater, more 
 boundless flatness of the land yet further west. And 
 a land, as well, of many picturesque little lakes and 
 pools. I now the more perfectly comprehend why 
 the Indian word "Minne," water, comes in so often 
 among the names and titles of Minne-sota. 
 
 The farm houses and farm buildings we pass are 
 large and well built, and here and there I see a build- 
 ing which might be along the Baegna Valley or the 
 Telemarken Fjords of Norway, it is so evidently 
 Norse. There are, as yet, but few people at the way-
 
 NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 21 
 
 stations. We are a through flyer, and the earlier 
 commuters are not yet astir. 
 
 About the houses and barns, also, I notice a cer- 
 tain snugness, indicative of winters that are cold. 
 
 Now, we are nearing the city, there are more men 
 at the way-stations. It is evident that the early 
 morning local will follow us close behind. 
 
 We came into the big Union Depot on time. The 
 air was crisp and dry. There was much bustle and 
 ado. These people move with an alert vigor, their 
 cheeks are rosy, their eyes are snappy, and I like the 
 swing of their shoulders as they step briskly along 
 the streets. Mankind migrates along earth's paral- 
 lels of latitude, so 'tis said — and Minnesota and the 
 great Northwest is but another New England and 
 New York. Vermont and New Hampshire, Massa- 
 chusetts and New York have sent her their ablest 
 sons and daughters, while Ontario and Quebec and 
 the Maritime Provinces have contributed to her pop- 
 ulation of their force and power. Upon and among 
 this matrix of superior American and Canadian stock, 
 has also been superimposed many thousands of the 
 more energetic and vigorous men, women and chil- 
 dren of Europe's ancient warlike breeds — the viking 
 Northmen of Norway and Sweden and of Denmark, 
 of all Scandinavia. A still great race in their father- 
 lands, a splendid reinforcement to the virtues of 
 Puritan and Knickerbocker; while there have also 
 come cross currents from Virginia and the South.
 
 22 ITS" TO THE YUKON. 
 
 The type you see upon the streets is American, but 
 among it, and with it, is prominently evident the 
 Norse blue eyes and yellow 7 hair of Scandinavia. 
 
 St. Paul is surely a great city, great in her pres- 
 ent, great in her future. St. Paul is builded on sev- 
 eral hills, out along which are avenues and boulevards 
 and rows of sumptuous private residences, while 
 down in the valleys are gathered the more part of 
 the big, modern business blocks and store houses and 
 manufacturing establishments, where are centered 
 the energies which direct her industries and com- 
 merce. St. Paul is a rich city, a solid city. The wild 
 boom days of fifteen and tw T enty years ago are quite 
 gone by, the bubble period has been safely weath- 
 ered, she is now settled down to conservative al- 
 though keen and active business and trade. She sup- 
 plies all of that immense region lying w T est and north 
 of her, even into the now unfolding Canadian Far 
 Nortlnvest. The continent is hers, even to the Pacific 
 and the Arctic Seas. Minnesota and the Dakotas and 
 Montana have already poured their wealth of grains 
 and of ores, of wheat and of oats, of rye and of 
 barley, of iron and of copper, of silver and of gold, 
 into her capacious lap, and now Manitoba and 
 Alberta and Assiniboia and Saskatchewan and 
 Athabaska, and all the unfolding regions between 
 the Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains, the fer- 
 tile valleys of the Saskatchewan and Peace Rivers, 
 are to contribute even yet more lavishly to her fu-
 
 NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 23 
 
 tore commercial predominance as unrivalled mistress 
 of the North. She and Minneapolis will have this 
 trade. She and her twin sister city are entitled to 
 it. And if I mistake not the spirit of the men I 
 have talked with upon her streets, in her shops and 
 banks and clubs, she and Minneapolis will secure of 
 it their full and certain share. 
 
 Here in the splendid stores of St. Paul we have 
 made the last few purchases of the things we shall 
 need for our going into the distant Yukon. H. has 
 bought a perfectly fitting sweater — a garment that 
 we searched for and ransacked through the town of 
 Antwerp, in Belgium, two years ago, and could not 
 find, while I have laid in some woolen garments, so 
 fit and warm that they make one hanker for an 
 Arctic blizzard just for the joy of trying them on. 
 
 And we have been feted and wined and dined as 
 only mortals may be, who have fallen among long- 
 time and well-tried friends. A sumptuous lunch has 
 been given us at the Merchants' Club, where old 
 chums and classmates of my Cornell College days 
 did make me almost believe that it was but yester- 
 day that we went forth from our Alma Mater's 
 Halls. 
 
 Later in the day we have taken one of the many 
 suburban trains and journeyed down ten miles to the 
 summer country home of another old-time friend, 
 along the shores of White Bear Lake, and all the 
 afternoon have enjoyed a sail in the crack yacht of
 
 24 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 the fleet that parades these waters. A new design of 
 boat. Conceived and perfected in St. Paul, and 
 which has this summer carried havoc and defeat to 
 every competing yacht club of all the wide country 
 of the western and northern lakes, and even caused 
 perturbation among the proud salt-water skippers of 
 the east. I send you a snap-shot of the prize yacht 
 as she lies floating at her little pier. 
 
 And when we came back and landed from our 
 voyage, we found assembled an even greater com- 
 pany than we had yet met, to again give us welcome 
 without stint. We gathered in the commodious din- 
 ing-hall of our host, a delightful company, these men 
 who once with me were boys, and their cultivated 
 wives! Long and late we sat, and old college songs 
 we sang, until the eastern sky was already lighten- 
 ing with the approach of dawn. Many of us had not 
 met for nigh twenty years, when we had parted to 
 go forth to fight life's battles and to win or lose. 
 
 Then, in the second afternoon, yet other friends, 
 of yet later knowing, have taken us in hand and have 
 trollied and driven us to see St. Paul's twin sister, 
 Minneapolis. With her monstrous flouring mills 
 along the Mississippi, she is become the wheat milling 
 center of the world, but she has never succeeded in 
 rivalling St. Paul in the reach and volume of her 
 jobbing trade. Once bitter enemies, rivals for the 
 supremacy of the trade and commerce of the North- 
 west, their borders have now met, their streets have
 
 NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 25 
 
 coalesced, and it will not be many years before the 
 two will have fused and melted into one, even as 
 Canada will one day inevitably become knitted and 
 commingled with the great Republic, for there is 
 room for but one nationality, one English-speaking 
 nationality upon the northern continent of the west- 
 ern world. 
 
 In the long gloaming of the waning eventide we 
 were driven in an easy victoria behind a pair of 
 spanking bays and threaded our way among and 
 along the lawns and lakes and avenues of the twin 
 cities' splendid parks. The deciduous trees do not 
 here grow as large as with us further to the south. 
 The conifers, the pines and firs, are here necessarily 
 more frequently employed by the landscape artist to 
 perfect his plans, but the flowers seemed just as big, 
 just as fine in coloring and in wealth of leaf. 
 
 The day was ended with another elaborately served 
 dinner, with other intelligent and cultivated friends, 
 and then, before the night quite fully fell, we were 
 driven to the big station which first we had entered, 
 and were bidden a hearty farewell. We have boarded 
 the sleeper for Winnipeg. A white porter now makes 
 up our berths, and tells us we shall travel in his com- 
 pany some sixteen hours, so long is now the journey 
 to Canada's nearest city in the north,
 
 26 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 Winnipeg, August 14, 1908. 
 
 We left St. Paul in the Winnipeg sleeper on the 
 Great Northern Railroad at 8:06 p. m. When we 
 awoke this morning we were flying through the 
 wheatfields of North Dakota, passing Grand Forks 
 at about 9 a. m., and reaching Neche, on the 
 Canadian border, at eleven, and arriving at Win- 
 nipeg at 1 :40 p. m., a longer journey to the north — 
 440 miles — than I had realized. It was my first sight 
 of a prairie — that vast stretch of wheat country 
 reaching 1,000 miles west of St. Paul, and as far 
 to the north of it. In the States it was wheat as far 
 as the eye could reach in all directions — ripening 
 wheat, waving in the keen wind like a golden sea, 
 or cut and stacked wheat in innumerable piles, in 
 countless shocks. A few miles north of the boundary 
 the wheat land gradually changed to meadow and 
 grass land, with many red cattle. Huge hay stacks 
 here and there — the country flat. 
 
 Winnipeg holds about 60,000 people, they tell me. 
 Wooden houses mostly, but some fine modern ones 
 of stone and brick. Hundreds of new houses built 
 and houses a-building. Fine electric tramway system, 
 on which we have been riding all the afternoon. Many 
 paved streets, some wood-paved, but mostly the native 
 black earth of all this northland. A vigorous, hust- 
 ling town, with now a big boom on, owing to the 
 rapid development of the far north wheat lands — 
 "the Chicago of the far Northwest," they call it.
 
 NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 27 
 
 We go on to-night by 6 p. m. train, and should reach 
 Banff in two nights and a day. There we rest a day. 
 
 Banff Springs Hotel, Banff, Canada, \ 
 August 18, 1903. / 
 
 We had intended leaving Winnipeg by the through 
 train called the "Imperial Limited," which crosses 
 the continent three times a week each way, but to 
 do so we should have had to lie over in Winnipeg 
 a full day and a half longer, and we had already 
 seen the shell of the town in our first afternoon, so 
 we mended our plans, paid our modest dinner bill 
 of fifty cents each at the Clarendon Hotel, and took 
 the ordinary daily through Pacific express which, 
 leaving Winnipeg at 6 p. m.. would yet bring us to 
 Banff, even though it would take a half day longer in 
 doing it, earlier than the Imperial Limited train. A 
 good many people seemed to be of our mind, and so 
 the railway people attached an extra sleeper to the al- 
 ready crowded train. We were fixed in this. A 
 sumptuous car, finished in curled maple and brass, 
 longer, wider, higher than even the large cars run 
 on the N. Y. C. & H. R. K., that traverse no tunnels. 
 These Canadian Pacific Railway cars are built by the 
 railway company, owned and run by it. No "Pull- 
 man conductor;" the porter, be he white or black, 
 runs the car and handles the tickets and the cash. 
 
 The company were mostly Canadians, going out 
 to Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, etc., large towns 
 toward which Winnipeg bears the same relation as
 
 28 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 does Cincinnati to our country (West Virginia), and 
 many Australians en route to take ship at Vancouver. 
 
 For a long distance the track seemed to be per- 
 fectly straight, and miles and miles west of Win- 
 nipeg, the city still peeped far distant between 
 the rails. We rose a little, too, just a little, but 
 steadily, constantly. And on either hand and before 
 and behind spread out the wonderful flatness of the 
 earth. The real prairie now. Not even a tree, not a 
 bush, not a hill, just as smooth as a floor, like an 
 even sea, as far as the eye could reach and out beyond. 
 
 A good deal of wheat grows west of Winnipeg, 
 as well as south and north and east of it. We were 
 still in wheat land when we awoke yesterday morn- 
 ing, though the now intervening patches of green 
 grass grew larger and larger until the grass covered 
 and dominated everything. And then we had miles 
 and miles of a more rolling country. Here and there 
 began to appear pools of water, ponds, even small 
 lakes and deep sunk streams bordered with rushes 
 and scrub willow and stunted alders. 
 
 Every bit of water was alive with wild fowl. Each 
 pool we hurried by was seemingly packed with geese, 
 brant and ducks. All the myriads of the north land 
 water birds seemed to be here gathering and resting 
 preparatory to their long flight to the distant south. 
 Many plover, snipe and some herons and even cranes 
 I noted along the margins of the pools and streams. 
 And this prolific bird life cared but little for the 
 presence of man. Our rushing train did not frighten
 
 NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 29 
 
 thein, none ever took to wing, too much engrossed 
 were they in their own pursuits. 
 
 Through the flat wheat land the farmsteads were 
 few and far between, and the towns only at long 
 intervals. Nor is there here the population seen 
 among the many and thrifty towns and villages of 
 Minnesota and Dakota. 
 
 In the grass lands we saw no towns at all, nor 
 made many stops, while herds of cattle began to in- 
 crease in number; of horses, also, as we drew further 
 and further west and north. 
 
 Toward evening, through the long twilight, we 
 entered a hill country, where were a great many 
 cattle and horses, and some Mexican cowboys round- 
 ing up the stock ere nightfall. 
 
 Here, also, the wilder life of the hills came close 
 upon us. Just as we drew beyond the prairie a large 
 grey wolf had crossed our way. He had no fear of 
 the iron horse ; he stood and watched us with evident 
 curiosity, lifting one forepaw r as he gazed upon the 
 flying train, not fifty feet away. When we were gone 
 by, he turned and trotted leisurely into the bush. 
 
 New buildings with added frequency met our 
 view. Sometimes whole new towns. All this I after- 
 ward learned is largely owing to the present Amer- 
 ican immigration. 
 
 At dusk we stopped at. the bustling town of 
 Dunmore, just where the railway crosses the broad 
 Assiniboia River on a long bridge. Here many of 
 our fellow sleepers left us, and several new passengers
 
 30 IX TO THE YUKON. 
 
 got into our car to ride through to Calgary, the larg- 
 est town in the Northwest Territory — seven or eight 
 thousand inhabitants — and where the Edmonton 
 branch goes off two hundred miles into the north, and 
 will soon go three or four hundred miles further 
 through the opening wheat country which the world 
 is now pouring into. 
 
 This morning we were following the Silver Bow 
 River, past a long lake which it widens into in the 
 journey of its waters toward Hudson's Bay; then 
 we were among fir-clad foot-hills, and then, quite 
 suddenly, as the enveloping mist lifted, there were 
 revealed upon either side of us the gigantic, bare, 
 rocky, snow-capped masses of the real Rocky Moun- 
 tain chain. I have never yet seen as immense and 
 gigantic masses of bare rock, unless it be the Cordil- 
 lera of Michoacan, in Mexico. 
 
 Here we are at a fine modern hotel kept by the 
 Canadian Pacific Railroad. It is cool, even cold, 
 almost. As cold as on Lake Superior, 54 and 
 56 degrees, and as in St. Paul the days we were 
 there, but here the air is so much drier that one sits 
 by the open window and does not feel the cold. 
 
 Among the passengers on our train I fell in with 
 several of those who now make their homes in this 
 booming land — from Winnipeg west and north, all 
 this vast country is now on what is called a boom — 
 a wheat-land boom, a cattle boom, a town boom ! 
 One, a vigorous six-footer from Wisconsin, a drummer 
 for an American harvesting machine, has put and is
 
 WHITE BEAR LAKE — ST. PAUL. 
 
 DOWN THE SILVER BO 3AXI F.
 
 NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 33 
 
 now putting all the money he can raise into the buy- 
 ing of these northern wheat lands. And there is no 
 finer wheat land in all the world, he said, than the 
 rich, warm Peace River valley, four hundred or five 
 hundred miles north of Edmonton. A Canadian 
 drummer, who had won a medal fighting in South 
 Africa, also told me much of the awakening up 
 here. The Hudson Bay Company had for years kept 
 secret the fatness of this north land, although 
 they and their agents had (for more than a century) 
 raised great wheat harvests on their own hidden- 
 away farms along the distant Peace River, where 
 their mills made it into flour for their own use, and 
 to feed the fur-trapping Indians. But never a word 
 had they or their close-mouthed Scotch servants said 
 about all the richness of which they so well knew. 
 But little by little had the news of these wheat crops 
 leaked out into the world beyond, and little by little, 
 after the opening of the Canadian Pacific Railway, 
 and cession to Canada of their exclusive rights, had 
 the pioneer settlers quietly crept into the hidden 
 country. Now there were many farmers snugly liv- 
 ing on their own lands along the Peace River valley 
 and in that neighboring region. Every year there are 
 more of them. They haul their supplies three hun- 
 dred miles north from Edmonton, or buy direct of 
 the nearest Hudson Bay Post, Soon the railways will 
 be up among them, soon the greatest export of Ca- 
 nadian wheat will come from that now far-away 
 country. And here is where the hustling American
 
 34 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 comes in. The Canadian has been slow to "catch 
 on." The dull farmer of Ontario has scoffed at 
 the notion of good wheat land so far north. He 
 preferred to stay at home and raise peas and barley. 
 The French habitan, too, did not take stock in the 
 tales of a land so far from church and kindred. 
 Nor did the Englishman do more than look blandly 
 incredulous at whatever secret tales he might hear. 
 He would just inquire of the office of the Hudson's 
 Bay Company, where he always learned that the 
 tale was a joke out of the whole cloth. Not even 
 the bankers of now booming Winnipeg would invest 
 a dollar in buying Government land beyond the 
 already well-defined wheat limits of Manitoba. It 
 was the keen-scented Yankee who caught on. A group 
 of bright men in St. Paul and Minneapolis heard 
 in! some way of the possibilities of the far north. 
 They quietly sent their own experienced Minnesota 
 and Dakota farm land experts and practical wheat 
 judges up into Saskatchewan and Assiniboia to look, 
 examine and report. This they did, and then the 
 Americans began to buy direct of the Canadian Gov- 
 ernment at Ottawa. Their expert investigators also 
 had friends and neighbors who had money, who had 
 made money in farming, and some of them went up. 
 All who went up staid, and sent back word of having 
 got hold of a good thing. The first the world knew, 
 fifty thousand American farmers went in last year, 
 more than two hundred thousand have gone in this 
 year, and the Canadian world and the English world
 
 NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 35 
 
 have awakened to the fact that the bulk of the rich 
 wheat lands of the far north are already owned by 
 the American land companies, American banks and 
 American farmers. In St. Paul to-day you can learn 
 more about all this rich far north, and buy its best 
 lands, rather than in Toronto or even in Winnipeg. 
 Now the railroads are also beginning to stir them- 
 selves. The Canadian Pacific Railway is to build 
 more north branch lines. The Grand Trunk Pacific 
 is to be built right through the Peace River country 
 to Port Simpson, and everybody is astir to get a 
 chance at the golden future. But the Americans have 
 the cinch. And what is more, they do better and 
 succeed when the Canadians, from Quebec or Ontario, 
 and, above all, the Englishmen, make rank failures. 
 The Americans have been farming on the same sort 
 of land in Minnesota, in Iowa and in the Dakotas. 
 They go into this new land with the same machinery 
 and same methods. They all do well. Many of the 
 Canadians fail, most of the English likewise, and the 
 prospering American buys them out. Now, also, the 
 Americans are beginning to find out that there is 
 much good cattle range in this north land. The 
 American cattle men are coming up with their herds, 
 even with their Mexican cowboys. 
 
 No blizzards here, such as freeze and destroy 
 in Montana. No lack of water here the year round. 
 No drouths like those of Texas. Nor is the still, quiet, 
 steady cold of these plains more fatal, not as much
 
 36 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 go, as the more variable temperatures of the States. 
 Not much snow over these northern plains, rarely 
 more than a foot. The buffalo grass may be always 
 reached through it. The mercury rarely more than 
 fifty below zero, and so dry is the air and so still that 
 no one minds that temperature. 
 
 So we have it, that this entire rich wheat-yielding 
 land of the far, far north, that the bulk of these 
 grazing lands, tempered as the winter is by the warm 
 Pacific climate, which here climbs over the rather 
 low barrier of the Kockies, are falling into alert 
 American hands. Even the storekeepers, they tell me, 
 would rather trade with the American— he buys more 
 freely, buys higher-priced machinery and goods; he 
 is tietter pay in the end. "The Englishman brings 
 out money, but after the first year or two it is gone. ' ' 
 "The American brings some and then keeps making 
 more." So my Canadian drummer friend tells me, 
 and he gathers his information from the storekeepers 
 in all these northwest towns with whom he deals. 
 "Some even tell me," he said, "that if it wouldn't 
 make any disturbance, why they would do better if 
 all this country was part of the States." So the 
 American is popular here, and he is growing rich, 
 richer than the Canadian and Englishman, and in 
 course of time, I take it, he will even yet the more 
 completely dominate the land. It is strange how the 
 American spirit seems to have an energy and force 
 that tells everywhere, in Canada as well as in Mex- 
 ico. The information I give you here comes to me
 
 NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 37 
 
 from the intelligent fellow-travelers I have chanced 
 to meet, and, I take it, is probably a fair statement. 
 We are some 4,500 feet above the sea, and the 
 highest summits near us rise to about 10,000 or 11,000 
 feet. There is none of the somber blackness of the 
 Norwegian rocks, nor the greenness of the Swiss 
 slopes, while the contour of the summits and ridges 
 is much like that of the volcanic, serrated summits 
 of the mountains I saw in Mexico. 
 
 212148
 
 38 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 THIRD LETTER, 
 
 BANFF TO VANCOUVER ACROSS THE ROCKIES AND 
 SELKIRKS. 
 
 Hotel Vancouver, Vancouver, B. C, \ 
 August 19, 1903. / 
 
 Our day crossing the Rockies was delightful. We 
 left Banff about 2 p. m., following up the valley of 
 the Silver Bow River to its very head. A deep valley, 
 shut in on either hand by gigantic granite mountains, 
 rising to 10,000 and 12,000 feet, their lower slopes 
 covered with small fir, aspen, birch, then a sparse 
 grass, and lichens, and then rising up into the clouds 
 and eternal snows. Snow fields everywhere, and 
 many glaciers quite unexplored and unnamed. The 
 rise was so easy, however, that we were sur- 
 prised when we actually attained the summit of the 
 divide, where a mountain stream forks and sends its 
 waters, part to Hudson's Bay, part to the Pacific. 
 But the descent toward the west was precipitous. 
 Since leaving Winnipeg, two days and nights across 
 plains and prairie, and a night and day up the 
 valley of the Silver Bow River, we had steadily risen, 
 but so gradually that we were almost unconscious of 
 the ascending grade, but now we were to come down 
 the 5,000 feet from the height of land and reach the 
 Pacific in little more than a single day. Not so sheer 
 a ride as down the Dal of the Laera River in Nor-
 
 ACROSS THE ROCKIES. 39 
 
 way, 3,000 feet in three hours behind the ponies, 
 but yet so steep that the iron horse crept at a snail's 
 pace, holding back the heavy train almost painfully, 
 and descending into gorges and canons and shadowy 
 valleys until one's hair nearly stood on end. How 
 on earth they ever manage to pull and push the long 
 passenger and short freight trains up these grades 
 for the east-bound traffic, is a matter of amazement; 
 that is, shove them up and make the business pay. 
 At once, so soon as the divide was crossed, the 
 influence of the warm, moist air of the Pacific was 
 apparent. No longer the bare, bleak, naked masses 
 of granite, no longer the puny firs and dwarf aspen 
 and birches, but instead, the entire vast slopes of 
 these gigantic mountain masses were covered with a 
 dense forest. The tall Douglas firs stood almost 
 trunk to trunk, so close together that the distant 
 slopes looked as though covered with gigantic cover- 
 lets of green fur. The trees seemed all about of one 
 height and size. And the slopes were green right up 
 to the snow field's very edge. Our way wound down 
 the profound canon of the Kicking Horse River, some- 
 times sheer precipices below and also above us, the 
 road blasted out of the granite sides, then we swept 
 out into the beautiful "Wapta Valley, green as emer- 
 ald, the white snow waters of the river— not white 
 foam, but a muddy white like the snow-fed waters 
 of the streams of Switzerland— roaring and plunging, 
 and spreading out into placid pools. At last we 
 emerged through a gorge and came into the great
 
 40 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 wide, verdant valley of the British Columbia, from 
 which the province takes its name. A river, even 
 there on its upper reaches, as wide as the Ohio, but 
 wild and turbulent, and muddy white from the melt- 
 ing snows. Behind us the towering granite masses 
 of the Rocky Mountains — a name whose meaning I 
 never comprehended before — their peaks lost in 
 clouds, their flanks and summits buried in verdure. 
 The valley of the Columbia is wide and fertile. Many 
 villages and farms and saw-mills already prospering 
 along it. Here and there were indications of a devel- 
 oping mine upon the mountain slopes. We followed 
 the great river until we passed through a narrow 
 gorge where the Selkirk Mountain range jams its 
 rock masses hard against the western flanks of the 
 Rockies and the river thrusts itself between, to begin 
 its long journey southward through Washington and 
 Oregon to the Pacific; and then turning up a wild 
 creek called Six Mile, we began again to climb the 
 second and last mountain chain before we should reach 
 the sea. These grades are very heavy. Too heavy, I 
 should say, for a railroad built for business and traffic 
 and not subsidized by a government, as in practical 
 effect the Canadian Pacific is. The pass at the divide 
 is almost as high as that at the source of the Silver 
 Bow, and much more impeded in winter with snow- 
 falls and avalanches, which require many miles of 
 snow-sheds to save the road. 
 
 We dined about 8 p. m., in a fine large hotel owned 
 by the railroad company at a station called "Gla-
 
 A REACH OF THE FRASER RIVER.
 
 ACROSS THE ROCKIES. 43 
 
 cier, " for it is right at the foot of one of the most 
 gigantic glaciers of the Selkirks, and many tourists 
 tarry here to see it and climb upon it; Swiss guides 
 being provided by the railway company for these 
 adventures. And then we came down again, all night 
 and half the next day, following the valley of the 
 Fraser River until it debouched into level tidal 
 reaches a few miles from Puget Sound. 
 
 The Fraser River is a magnificent stream ; as great 
 as the Columbia, as wild as New River of West Vir- 
 ginia. We stood upon the platform of the rear car 
 and snapped the kodak at the flying gorges, tem- 
 pestuous rapids and cascades. All along, wherever 
 the water grew angry and spume spun, were Indians 
 fishing for salmon, sometimes standing alert, intent, 
 spear in hand poised and ready, or, more often, 
 watching their nets or drawing them in. And every 
 rocky point held its poles for drying the fish, belong- 
 ing to some individual Indian or tribe, safe from tres- 
 pass or molestation by immemorial usage. The sands 
 of the river are said to also have been recently dis- 
 covered to hide many grains of gold, and we saw in 
 several places Chinamen industriously panning by 
 the water-side. Near Vancouver we passed several 
 extensive salmon canneries, and their catch this year 
 is said to be unusually large. 
 
 As we came nearer to the sea the air grew warmer, 
 the vegetation more luxuriant, the flowers more pro- 
 lific, and the Douglas fir more lofty and imposing. 
 A single shaft, with sparse, ill-feathered limbs, down-
 
 44 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 bent and twisted, these marvelous trees lift their un- 
 gainly trunks above every other living thing about. 
 The flowers, too, would have delighted you. Zinnias 
 as tall as dahlias, dahlias as tall as hollyhocks, nas- 
 turtiums growing like grape vines, roses as big as 
 peonies, geraniums and heliotropes small trees. 
 Great was the delight of our trainload of Australians. 
 They had never seen such luxuriance of foliage, such 
 wealth of flowers, except under the care of a gar- 
 dener and incessant laying on of water. We came 
 across with a car full of these our antipodean kin. 
 Most have been "home," to England, and had come 
 across to Canada to avoid the frightful heats of the 
 voyage by Suez and the Red Sea. And they mar- 
 veled at the vigor and the activity of both Canada 
 and the States. Some had lingered at the fine hotels 
 up in the mountains now maintained by the Canadian 
 Pacific Railroad. All were sorry to go back to the 
 heats of the Australian continent. 
 
 The building and maintaining of this railway has 
 been accomplished by the giving of millions of dollars 
 in hard cash, and millions of acres in land grants, to 
 the railway company by the government of the Do- 
 minion. Fortunes were made and pocketed by the 
 promoters and builders, and the Canadian people 
 now hold the bag— but although as a mere investment 
 it can never pay, yet as a national enterprise it has 
 made a Canadian Dominion possible. It owns its 
 terminals on the Atlantic and on the Pacific. It 
 owns its own telegraph i*v?s, its own cars, sleeping-
 
 BIG DOUGLAS FIR — VANCOUVER PARK.
 
 ACROSS THE ROCKIES. 47 
 
 cars, and rolling stock; it owns and runs ten, a 
 dozen, a score of fine hotels; it is a vast land-owner. 
 Its stock can never be bought up and owned out of 
 Canadian hands. A Morgan or a Gould can never 
 seize it, manipulate it, or wreck it. It is a good thing 
 for Canada to have it so. It is a good thing for the 
 people of the United States that it is so. 
 
 The Canadian Rockies are the most beautiful and 
 picturesque of any section of the mountain chain 
 from Mexico north. The air is cooler in the far 
 northern latitude, keener, more bracing, and the 
 hustling American has begun to find this out. The 
 great hotels of the Canadian Pacific are already best 
 patronized by the American visitor, and this year the 
 sun-baked Californians have come up in swarms and 
 promise another year even greater numbers. And the 
 Canadian Pacific Railroad welcomes them all— all 
 who can pay. At Banff, too, were the advance guard 
 of the English Colony from China, brought over from 
 Shanghai by the sumptuous steamships of the Ca- 
 nadian Pacific Railway, taken to and kept at their 
 great hotels, and carried home again, at so low a 
 round-trip rate that these Rocky Mountain resorts 
 promise to become the summering-place of the Orien- 
 tal Englishmen as well as Australian and Californian ! 
 How these things bring the world together! 
 
 Our journey from Kanawha, across Ohio, from 
 Cleveland through the Great Lakes, across the wheat- 
 fields of Minnesota and Dakota and Manitoba, and 
 over the wonderful prairies and plains of the opening
 
 48 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 far Northwest, has had a fit ending in the last few 
 days climbing and plunging over and down the wild- 
 est, most picturesque, most stupendous valleys and 
 passes of the Rocky Mountain and Selkirk Mountain 
 ranges. How vast and varied and splendid is the 
 continent we live on, and which one of these days 
 the people of the United States will inevitably wholly 
 possess ! 
 
 And now the wonders of these Pacific slopes and 
 waters! All the afternoon we have been wandering 
 through Vancouver's superb Natural Park, among its 
 gigantic trees, and gazing westward over and across 
 the waters of Puget Sound, the most mighty fjord of 
 the Pacific seas, the most capacious land-locked har- 
 bor of the world. I must not say more about this 
 now. I have not yet seen enough. I am only begin- 
 ning dimly to comprehend what is the future power 
 of our race and people in the development of this 
 side of the earth. 
 
 VICTORIA A SLEEPY ENGLISH TOWN. 
 
 The Driard Hotel, Victoria, B. C.,\ 
 August 21, 1903. J 
 
 We came over here yesterday, leaving Vancouver 
 by a fine new 1,800-ton steamer "Princess Victoria," 
 and making the voyage in four hours, — all the way 
 in and out among the islands and straits and inlets. 
 The shores of the mainland high, lofty; — the moun- 
 tain summits rising right up till snow-capped, six or 
 seven thousand feet in 'the air, their flanks green with
 
 VICTORIA, B. C. — THE HARBOR.
 
 ACROSS THE ROCKIES. 51 
 
 the dense forests of fir that here everywhere abound. 
 The islands all fir-clad, the trees often leaning out 
 over the deep blue waters. Many fishing-boats were 
 hovering about the points and shoals below the mouth 
 of the Fraser River, awaiting the autumnal rush of 
 salmon into the death-traps of that stream. I hope 
 to see one of these salmon stampedes — they often 
 pushing each other high and dry on the shores in 
 their mad eagerness to go on. 
 
 Tuesday we reached Vancouver. Wednesday we 
 consumed seeing the lusty little city. 
 
 Yesterday we spent the morning in picking up the 
 few extra things needed for the Yukon — among 
 others a bottle of tar and carbolic — a mixture to rub 
 on to offend the yet active mosquito. 
 
 Vancouver is a city of some 30,000 people, full of 
 solid buildings, asphalted streets, electric car lines, 
 bustle and activity. Much of the outfitting for the 
 Canadian Yukon is done there, though Seattle gets 
 the bulk of even this trade. 
 
 To-day we are in Victoria, a town of twelve or 
 fifteen thousand, a fine harbor, and near it the British 
 naval and military station of Esquimault, the seat of 
 its North Pacific war power. The town is sleepy, the 
 buildings low and solid, the air of the whole place 
 very English. The capitol building is an imposing 
 structure of granite, surmounted by a successful 
 dome.
 
 52 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 FOURTH LETTER. 
 
 VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY ; FJORDS AND FORESTS. 
 
 First and Second Day Out, \ 
 August 23, 1903. / 
 
 We arrived in Vancouver by the steamer 
 "Charmer" from Victoria about ten o'clock a. m. — 
 two hours late— a small boat, packed with passengers. 
 We could not get a state-room to ourselves, so were 
 glad of berths, while many people lay on mattresses 
 in the cabin and many sat up. Tourist travel sur- 
 prises the slow-going Canadian, and he does not catch 
 up with it. 
 
 We went to the Hotel Vancouver, where we had 
 been staying, and there breakfasted. 
 
 Our boat, "City of Seattle," is roomy and com- 
 fortable. We have a large upper state-room on the 
 starboard side, plenty of fresh air and sunlight. It 
 is loaded down with an immense cargo of miscel- 
 laneous freight, from piles of boxes of Iowa butter 
 and fresh eggs, to sheep and live stock, chickens and 
 pigs, vegetables and canned goods, most of it billed 
 to Dawson and even to points below. The Yukon 
 has been so low this year — less snow than usual fall- 
 ing last winter — that the bulk of the freight "going 
 in" has had to be shipped via these Skagway boats 
 and the White Pass Railway, despite the exorbitant 
 freight rates they are charging for everything.
 
 LEAVING VANCOUVER.
 
 VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY. 55 
 
 The travellers are of two sorts. A good many mak- 
 ing the round trip from Seattle to Skagway, and the 
 Yukoner ' ' going in ' ' for the winter. The former are 
 not of much concern to us, but among the latter I 
 have found a number of interesting acquaintances. 
 One, a man who hunts for a business, and is full of 
 forest lore and hunting tales. He is also something 
 of a naturalist and taxidermist, and I have been 
 showing him our volumes of the report of the Harri- 
 man Expedition, to his delight. He has also explored 
 along the Kamtschatka coasts of Siberia, and de- 
 scribes it as a land stocked with salmon and fur ani- 
 mals. He says, too, that I have done right to bring 
 along my gun, for there are lots of ptarmigan as well 
 as mountain sheep and goats in the Yukon Valley, 
 and caribou and moose are also plentiful. 
 
 Another man has spent a year or more on the 
 Yukon — our chief engineer — and thinks we will have 
 no difficulty in getting a boat down from Dawson, and 
 the scenery he says is grand. Another is a lumber- 
 man of Wrangel— from Pennsylvania— and tells 
 me they have some fine timber there, though most of 
 that of these far northern latitudes is too small to now 
 profitably compete with the big logs of Washington. 
 
 Our vis-a-vis at table is going up to the Porcupine 
 Placer district to try his luck with finding gold, 
 and several men are going into Atlin— whither we are 
 bound— to find work at big pay. 
 
 The atmosphere of the company is buoyant and
 
 56 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 hopeful, even the women have a dash of prosperity 
 about them— gold chains and diamonds— of which 
 there are not a few. 
 
 From all I can pick up, an immense trade is al- 
 ready developed with Alaska and is still growing with 
 bounds. The United States Government statisticians 
 give thirty-seven millions as the figure for the trade 
 of the past year. Already three or four lines of steam- 
 ers ply between Skagway alone and Puget Sound 
 ports, and several more run to St. Michaels and Nome. 
 
 The sail from Vancouver is most delightful. You 
 come out of a narrow channel through which the 
 tides foam and churn, and then turn north through 
 the "Gulf of Georgia," twenty or thirty miles wide. 
 Vancouver Island stretches for three hundred miles 
 along the west, fir-clad, backboned by a chain of 
 mountains rising up into the snows. On the east a 
 coast indented with multitudinous bays and deep 
 channels, sharp promontories and islands; the for- 
 est coming to the water's edge, the mountains rising 
 sharply six and seven thousand feet into the snows 
 and clouds, as lofty as the fjelde of Norway, but not 
 so bare and naked, the dense, deep green fir forests 
 growing from water to snow line. 
 
 We were crossing Queen Charlotte Sound when we 
 awoke this morning, and all day long have been 
 threading our way among islands, through narrow 
 channels, across seemingly shut-in lakes, ten and 
 twelve miles wide, and then no wider than the Ka- 
 nawha River or evon narrower. As we come north the
 
 AWAITING CARGO — VANCOUVER, B. C.
 
 VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY. 59 
 
 mountains grow higher and come closer to the water 
 we sail upon, and there is more snow on their sum- 
 mits. 
 
 You might imagine yourself with Henrik Hudson 
 on his first voyage, when the Hudson valley was cov- 
 ered with primeval forests. 
 
 Last evening we saw a number of humpbacked 
 whales, and to-day more. This morning saw my first 
 sea lions and also fur and hair seals. To-morrow, 
 they say, we shall see yet more. Only gulls, a few 
 terns and ducks to-day. No larger birds as yet. 
 
 Monday, August 24, 1903. 
 
 The greyness of yesterday is vanished. The sky 
 is cloudless, the atmosphere translucent. The moun- 
 tains are more lofty, the snow patches grown into 
 wide fields, and the air has taken on a certain added 
 keenness, telling of distant snow and ice. To-morrow 
 we shall see more snow and even glaciers. All day we 
 have been going from one broad sound or channel 
 through narrow straits into others as broad. We 
 crossed Dixon's Channel at breakfast-time, through 
 which the commerce of the Orient will come to 
 Port Simpson, the Canadians hope, when the Grand 
 Trunk Pacific shall have been built. 
 
 About noon we came around a wooded island and 
 made our first port of Ketchikan, where there are sal- 
 mon canneries, and hard by quartz mines yielding 
 gold, and saloons and stores. Here we had our first 
 view of near-by totem poles, and our first sight of the
 
 60 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 shoals of salmon that make alive these waters. From 
 a foot-bridge crossing a little creek that debouched 
 near our steamer wharf, we looked down into the 
 clear water and saw it fairly swarming with salmon, 
 fish from ten to fifteen pounds, "small ones," they 
 said. But the waters were choked with them. Dip- 
 ping a net down, you might haul up a wagon load as 
 easily as one. Yet no one was catching them. So 
 plentiful are the fish that no one wants to eat salmon 
 except as a last resort— "food fit only for dogs," they 
 say, and the distant tenderfeet whom the canneries 
 supply. And these swarming fish below us shoved 
 each other upon the shallow shore continually, when 
 there would be a great splashing to get back. 
 
 From Ketchikan we have come out into the great 
 Clarence Strait, with Belim and Ernest Sounds 
 stretching away into the snow-covered mountains to- 
 ward the east. The strait is as wide as the Hudson 
 at the Palisades, the shores fir clad, the mountains 
 six to seven thousand feet, up into clouds and snow. 
 The water to-day is like a mirror, and many por- 
 poises are playing about. I have just seen three big 
 blue herons, and awhile ago we passed a loon. Last 
 night just at dusk, we saw several flocks of snipe or 
 plover, small, brown, swift in flight, close above the 
 water. 
 
 We have just looked upon the most superb pano- 
 rama we have yet beheld. The last four hours the 
 mountains both east and west of us have come closer 
 to the shores, and risen higher, the fir mantle envel-
 
 TOTEM POLES AT KETCHIKAN.
 
 r. 
 r 
 > 
 g 
 
 - 
 
 X 
 
 C 
 
 g 
 - 
 
 M 
 ft 
 
 M 
 
 DO 
 
 
 
 G 
 
 O
 
 -VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY. 65 
 
 oping them has grown a darker green, larger timber 
 than for the last few hundred miles, and then we 
 came round a bend in our great strait— about six 
 to ten miles wide — forty or fifty miles long — and there 
 in front of us, bounding the horizon on the north, 
 stretched an immense mass of jagged, serrated moun- 
 tain chain, glittering like silver in the slanting sun 
 rays. Not mere snow patches, not mere fields of snow, 
 but vast "fjellen" of snow, snow hiding all but the 
 most ragged rock peaks, and even sometimes envelop- 
 ing these. Valleys all snow-filled and from which de- 
 scend mighty glaciers. Below the miles of snow lay 
 the deep green forests of the lesser mountain sum- 
 mits and sloping flanks, and then the dark blue waters 
 of the giant fjord, dotted with many fir-clad islands. 
 We agree that we have seen nothing in our lives so 
 sublimely beautiful. Never yet nature on so stu- 
 pendous a scale. 
 
 The quiet waters of the last two days are now alive 
 with gulls and ducks and grebes and divers, many 
 loons. More bird life than we have yet seen. Just 
 as is told by the Harriman naturalist. Only at Wrang- 
 el does the real bird life of the north begin. Curv- 
 ing around another wooded promontory, we beheld 
 the town of Wrangel, at Fort Wrangel, on Wrangel 
 Island, ten miles away, nestling at the mouth of a 
 little valley, below the firs and snow summits behind. 
 We are now tied up to the pier at this port, and shall 
 lie here till 2 a. m., when flood tide will allow us to 
 continue the voyage, and at daylight pass through the
 
 66 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 narrowest and most hazardous strait of the trip. We 
 mean to be waked at four o'clock so as to see the 
 pass. 
 
 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, 1908. 
 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 enter- 
 ing the great Frederick Sound, where many whales 
 were blowing, and we saw our first real icebergs —
 
 APPROACHING FORT WRANGEL. 
 
 THE PIER — FORT WRAXGEL.
 
 VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY. 69 
 
 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-trav- 
 elers. 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. An- 
 other, 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.
 
 70 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 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 Ca- 
 nal — 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 sorrry 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 Ave- 
 nue Hotel."
 
 THE PIER. SKAGWAY. 
 
 LYXX CANAL FROM THE SUMMIT OF 
 WHTTE PASS.
 
 LOOKING DOWN WHITE PASS 
 
 THE SUMMIT — WHITE PASS.
 
 CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 10 
 
 FIFTH LETTER. 
 
 SKAGWAY, CARIBOU CROSSING* AND ATLIN. 
 
 Atlin, British Columbia, August 29, 1903. 
 
 Here we are at the mining camp of Atlin, on At- 
 lin 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 de- 
 tritus 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. 
 
 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 canon 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, dan- 
 gerous trail, over which fifty to one hundred thou- 
 
 * Carilxm Crossing now called Careross.
 
 76' IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 sand 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 mag- 
 nificent 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 Can- 
 adian 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 rail-
 
 RAIT/WAY TRAIN — SKAGWAY. 
 
 THE INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY.
 
 CARIBOU CROSSING. 
 
 EARLY SEPTEMBER SXOW, CARIBOU CROSSING.
 
 CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 81 
 
 way 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 sta- 
 tion 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 be- 
 gin 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 Char- 
 lie," 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 sev- 
 eral hundred thousand dollars, and who lives and en- 
 tertains like a white man. He housed us in a neat, 
 comfortable room, iron bedstead, wire mattress, car- 
 peted 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,
 
 82 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 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 but- 
 terfly net, and I with my gun. He caught his gray- 
 ling, 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 "mush- 
 ers" (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 cus- 
 toms at Winnipeg and had come from Vancouver 
 direct, but who, upon explanation, relented, and after
 
 A VISTA ON LAKE MARSH. 
 
 WOODLAND ALONG LAKE MARSH.
 
 ON THE TRATL AT CARIBOU. 
 
 VIEW XEAR CARIBOU CROSSING.
 
 • ...KM Jjf 
 
 ■ ■■- ' .- '.< : ■: v : . •:: v- '. .; ._:., 
 -- : > ; 
 
 ■
 
 88 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 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 to- 
 ward the "White Horse Rapids, and a third arm, 
 "The Taku Arm," which extends southerly to- 
 ward 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 fer- 
 ried ten miles across to Atlin, a town with a court- 
 house, several churches, a little hospital, a newspa- 
 per, a bank, a dozen hotels, a multitude of restau- 
 rants, 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 TAKU RIVER.
 
 LAKE ATLIN. 
 
 DOGS — ATLIN.
 
 CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 93 
 
 the size of hickory nuts in their shirts, drinks air 
 twenty-five cents each and cigars the same. The ho- 
 tels 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 wolf- 
 ish Esquimaux. 
 
 "The Camp," or city, is now in the midst of a 
 boom, and this morning we were shown several buck- 
 ets 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 opin- 
 ion 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 hy- 
 draulic 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
 
 94 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 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 carry- 
 ing 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 Sut- 
 ton 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 opera- 
 tion 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 orig- 
 inal 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 be- 
 tween high gravel banks. A black top soil of a foot 
 or two, eight or ten feet of grey gravel, then as
 
 ATLIX BAGGAGE EXPRESS. 
 
 ATLIX CITY WATER WORKS.
 
 CARTBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 97 
 
 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, free- 
 ing 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 in leisurely luxury in
 
 98 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 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 disappoint- 
 ment, poverty and privation. Every train passing 
 out over the White Pass Railway carries its comple- 
 ment 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 deli- 
 cate woman, once the wife of the mayor of an Illi- 
 nois 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.
 
 GOYEHXMEXT MAIL CROSSIXG LAKE ATLIX. 
 
 MIXER'S CABIX OX SPRUCE CREEK — ATLIX 
 GOLD DIGGIXGS.
 
 CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 101 
 
 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 ex- 
 panse 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 moun- 
 tains. 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
 
 102 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 gradually descending to the valleys as the fresh fall- 
 ing autumnal snows little by little push them down. 
 
 In Atlin, the other day, a young Swedish engi- 
 neer, 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
 
 FINDING "COLOR," A GOOD STRIKE, OTTER 
 CREEK, B. C. 
 
 SLUICING FOR GOLD. OTTER CREEK, B. C.
 
 AX ATLIX GOLD-DIGGER.
 
 CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 107 
 
 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
 
 108 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 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 in- 
 cluded 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 deso- 
 late 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 swal- 
 lowed 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.
 
 GREAT LLEWELLEN GLACIER. 1Q9 
 
 SIXTH LETTER. 
 
 THE GREAT LLEWELLYN OR TAKU GLACIER. 
 
 Oakibou 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 Philadel- 
 phia, 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 for- 
 est, dense and sombre, clothing their bases, then run- 
 ning 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 chan-
 
 110 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 nel, until we were among islands and canons, 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 gla- 
 cier, 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
 
 GREAT LLEWELLEN GLACIER. Ill 
 
 streams issuing from every mountain gorge and val- 
 ley, 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 crack- 
 ing ice cliff, crevasses yawned everywhere. Though 
 the surface was dirty and blackened, yet down in the 
 cracks and crevasses the wonderful blue ice ap- 
 peared. 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.
 
 112 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 SEVENTH LETTER. 
 
 VOYAGING DOWN THE MIGHTY YUKON. 
 
 Dawson, September 5, 1908. 
 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 build- 
 ings. We are in the "Windsor" Hotel, a three- 
 storied wooden structure, iron bedsteads, wire mat- 
 tresses, modern American oak furniture — very com- 
 fortable, 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 read- 
 ing-room supplied with all current American, Cana- 
 dian 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 stam- 
 peded to the new Kluhane gold strike, some one hun- 
 dred 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.
 
 BISHOP AXD MRS. BOMPAS. 
 
 THE GREAT LLFAVELLYN GLACIER.
 
 DOWN THE YUKON. 115 
 
 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 vil- 
 lage, 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 increas- 
 ing 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
 
 116 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 1 went four miles further , and saw also the Miles 
 Omon, where the waters of Lake Taggish and Fifty 
 Mile River begin their wild six miles before reaching 
 here. The canon 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 nar- 
 row 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
 
 FISHING FOR GRAYLING — WHITE 
 HORSE RAPIDS.
 
 MOONLIGHT OX LAKE LE BARGE. 
 
 LAKE BEXXETT FROM OUR CAR.
 
 DOWN THE YUKON. 121 
 
 and lower parts all enclosed. She has powerful ma- 
 chinery 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 vary- 
 ing 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
 
 122 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 Lake Lebarge we entered the swift and dangerous 
 currents of Thirty Mile River. Here the boats usu- 
 ally tie up till daylight, but with the full moon and 
 our immense electric searchlight, the captain ven- 
 tured 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 float- 
 ed 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 pano- 
 rama, an immense and unknown land, not yet taken 
 possession of by man! The soil of many of these
 
 A YUKON SUNSET. 
 
 < 
 
 THE UPPER YUKON.
 
 A YUKON COAL MINE 
 
 FIVE FINGERS RAPIDS ON THE YUKON.
 
 DOWN THE YUKON. 127 
 
 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 North- 
 west 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 pass- 
 age known as Hell's Gates, where on one side a mass 
 of cliff and on the other a shifting sand bar con- 
 fine the waters to a swift and treacherous chute. 
 So close to the rocks have we passed that one might
 
 128 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 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 stand- 
 ing 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 Rap- 
 ids 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. An- 
 other 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 val- 
 ley of the Mackenzie, coming up from Edmonton 
 and the southeast. There is supposed to be yet much
 
 COMIXG UP THE YUKON.
 
 DOWN THE YUKON. 131 
 
 undiscovered gold on both of these streams, and tine 
 grass land and black soil fit for root crops. 
 
 The Yukon, the mighty Yukon, is surely now be- 
 come 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 Beh- 
 ring 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.
 
 132 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 EIGHTH LETTER. 
 
 DAWSON AND THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 
 
 Dawson, Yukon Territory, \ 
 Thursday, September 10, 1903. j 
 
 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 wharf boats. 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 lum- 
 ber — for logs are now too precious and too costly 
 to squander.
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 135 
 
 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 news- 
 papers 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. Chick- 
 ens, $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
 
 136 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 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 tow- 
 boats 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 Daw- 
 son. Probably thirty to thirty-five thousand people 
 are at work in these various diggings, and trade and 
 spend in Dawson. Hence Dawson takes on metropoli- 
 tan 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, wolf- 
 like-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 vol-
 
 DAWSON CITY, THE YUKON — LOOKING DOWN. 
 
 DAWSON AND MOUTH OF KLONDIKE RIVEK, 
 LOOKING UP.
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 139 
 
 lime. 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 Chil- 
 koot 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
 
 140 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 start. And many of them do this very thing, hit upon 
 new fortunes, and sometimes, steadied by former ad- 
 versity, 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 pos- 
 sessed of a weak, dissipated mouth, on Eldorado Creek 
 yesterday. His claim has been one of the fabu- 
 lously 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.
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 145 
 
 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 Yu- 
 kon — political henchmen of Laurier and the Liberal 
 party, many of them French Canadians. The gov- 
 ernor 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 se-
 
 146 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 cure 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 con- 
 cession grants. One man, Treadgold by name, turns 
 up and discovers himself to be possessed of an exclu- 
 sive blanket grant to all the water rights of the Klon- 
 dike 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 rea- 
 son 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 conces- 
 sions 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 Rus-
 
 DOG CORRAL — THE FASTEST TEAM IN DAWSOX. 
 
 A POTATO PATCH AT DAWSOX.
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 149 
 
 sian 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 hap- 
 pen 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 ex- 
 culpate 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. 
 
 To-day H and I have been across the river to 
 
 visit a characteristic establishment of these far north- 
 ern lands — a summer "dog ranch" — a place where, 
 during the summer months, the teams of "Huskies"
 
 150 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 and "Malamutes" may be boarded «and cared for till 
 the working-time of winter comes again. Here are 
 some seventy-five dogs in large kennels of rough tim- 
 ber, each team of six dogs having its own private 
 kennel, with a large central yard inside the tiers of 
 pens, into which the whole pack are turned once a 
 day for exercise. We hoped to find the proprietor at 
 home and induce him to give his pets a scamper in 
 the central yard, but he was away. The only visitors 
 besides ourselves were two strange dogs which stood 
 outside, running up and down the line and arousing 
 the entire seventy-five to one great chorus of barks 
 and howls. Some of the groups of dogs were superb. 
 And two teams of Huskies — the true Esquimaux — 
 must have been worth their weight in gold— six dogs 
 — $1,000.00 at the very least. We tried to get some 
 kodak shots, but a cloudy sky and pine log bars made 
 the result doubtful. 
 
 We have just returned from an evening at the first 
 annual show of the Dawson or Yukon ' ' Horticultural 
 Society." The name itself is a surprise; the display 
 of vegetables particularly and flowers astonished me. 
 The biggest beets I have ever seen, the meaty sub- 
 stance all clear, solid, firm and juicy. Potatoes, Early 
 Rose and other varieties, some new kinds raised from 
 seed in three years — large, a pound or more in size. 
 And such cabbage, cauliflower and lettuce as you 
 never saw before ! Many kinds, full-headed and 
 able to compete with any produced anywhere. All 
 these raised in the open air on the rich, black bottom
 
 r. 
 f 
 
 ii
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 153 
 
 and bench land of the Yukon. Squashes and also 
 tomatoes, but these latter, some of them, not fully- 
 ripened. Also a display of fine strawberries just now 
 ripe. We bought strawberries in the markets of Cris- 
 tiania and Stockholm upon the 12th and 13th of Sep- 
 tember, last year, and now we find a superior ripe 
 fruit here at just about the same degree of north 
 latitude. The wild currants, blueberries and rasp- 
 berries with which these northern latitudes abound are 
 notorious. And the show of oats, rye, barley, wheat 
 and timothy and native grasses, as well as of red and 
 white clover, was notable, proving beyond a doubt 
 that this Yukon region is capable of raising varied 
 and nutritious crops necessary for man 's food and for 
 the support of stock, horses and cattle. Already a 
 good many thrifty mortals, instead of losing them- 
 selves in the hunt for gold, are quietly going into the 
 raising of vegetables and hay and grain, and get fab- 
 ulous prices for what grows spontaneously almost in 
 a night. And the show of flowers grown in the open 
 air would have delighted you. All of these products 
 of the soil have been grown in sixty or seventy days 
 from the planting of the seed, the almost perpetual 
 sunlight of the summer season forcing plant life to 
 most astonishing growth. 
 
 September 11th. 
 Day before yesterday I took the six-horse stage 
 up Bonanza Creek of the Klondike and rode some 
 thirteen miles over the fine government road to "Dis-
 
 154 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 covery" claim, where a Cleveland (O.) company is 
 using a dredge and paying the Indian "Skookum 
 Jim," whose house we saw at Caribou, a royalty that 
 this year will place $90,000.00 to his credit, I am told. 
 The Klondike is a large stream, about like Elk 
 River of West Virginia, rising two hundred miles 
 eastward in the Rockies, where the summer's melting 
 snow gives it a large flow of water. The valley is broad 
 — a mile or more. The hills are rolling and rounded, 
 black soil, broad flats of small firs and birches. Bo- 
 nanza Creek, on which Skookum Jim and "Dawson 
 Charlie" and the white man, discovered the first gold 
 in 1897, has proved the richest placer mining patch 
 of ground the world has ever known. For a length 
 of some twenty miles it is occupied by the several 
 claim-holders, who are working both in the creek bed 
 and also ancient river beds high up on the rolling 
 hill slopes, a thing never known before. Here the 
 claims are larger than at Atlin, being 1,000 feet wide 
 and 250 feet up and down the creek. The claim where 
 a discovery is made is called "Discovery Claim," and 
 the others are named "No. 1 above" and "No. 1 be- 
 low," "No. 2 above" and "No. 2 below," etc., and 
 so entered of record. I had seen the dredge being 
 built on Gold Run at Atlin. I wished to see one 
 working here. I found a young American named 
 Elmer in charge, and he showed me everything. Then 
 he insisted that I dine with him, and took me up to 
 his snug cottage, where I was cordially greeted by 
 his American wife, and taken to the mess tent, where
 
 DAILY STAGE ON BONANZA. 
 
 DISCOVERY CLAIM ON BONANZA OF 
 THE KLONDIKE.
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 157 
 
 a Japanese cook set a good dinner before us. Then 
 Mrs. Elmer said that if I would like she would be 
 delighted to drive me still further up Bonanza, and 
 up the equally famous Eldorado Fork, and show me 
 the more noted claims. Her horse was a good one, 
 and for nearly three hours we spanked along. At 
 "16 Eldorado below" I saw the yawning gravel pit 
 from which $1,200,000 has already been taken out by 
 the lucky owner. From "28 Eldorado above" I saw 
 where the pay gravel yielded another enormous sum. 
 And all along men were still digging, dumping, 
 sluicing and getting gold. At "18 Bonanza above," 
 yet another particularly rich strike was shown me, 
 and at "28 Bonanza above, " working in the mud and 
 gravel, were men already enormously rich, who in 
 1897 owned nothing but their outfit. And up along 
 the hillsides, too, near the tops, were other gashes in 
 the gravel soil where gold in equally fabulous sums 
 has been taken out and is still being got, for all these 
 rich sands are yet far from being worked out or ex- 
 hausted. The first mad rush is over. Men do not now 
 merely pick out the big nuggets, but are putting in 
 improved machinery and saving the finer dust. Along 
 the roadside we also saw many men digging and 
 "rocking" for gold, who have leased a few square 
 yards or an acre or two on a royalty and who are 
 said to be " working a lay. ' ' After our drive, I caught 
 the returning stage and came home in the long twi- 
 light.
 
 158 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 To-day I have staged again twenty miles on to 
 the famous Hunker Creek, and then been driven fur- 
 ther and home again by Mr. Orr, the owner of the 
 stage line, behind a team of swift bays, over another 
 fine government highway. I have looked at more 
 machinery, steam shovels, hoist and labor-saving ap- 
 paratus, and seen more millions already made and in 
 the making. The present and potential wealth of this 
 country almost stupifies one, and dollars fall into 
 the insignificance of dimes. The traffic on these fine 
 roads is also surprising. Substantial log "road 
 houses," or inns, every mile or so, and frequently at 
 even shorter intervals, very many foot-farers travel: 
 ing from place to place. Young men with strong,, 
 resolute faces; bicycle riders trundling a pack 
 strapped to their handle-bars, and many six and 
 eight span teams of big mules and big horses hauling 
 immense loads — sometimes two great broad-tired wa- 
 gons chained together in a train. Ten or twelve four 
 and six horse stages leave Dawson every day, and as 
 many come in, carrying passengers and mails to and 
 from the many mining camps. In my stage to-day 
 behind me sat two Mormons, a man and a woman, 
 who had never met before, from Utah, and a Avoman 
 from South Africa, the wife of an expatriated Boer; 
 a Swede who was getting rich and a French Canadian. 
 My host at dinner was from Montreal, a black-eyed, 
 bulldog-jawed "habitan," whose heart warmed to me 
 when I told him that my great grandmother, too, was 
 French from Quebec, and who thereupon walked me
 
 LOOKING IP THE KLONDIKE RIVER. 
 
 THE AUTHOR AT WHITE HORSE RAPIDS.
 
 'MES EXFANTS" MALAMUTE PUPS. 
 
 A KLONDIKE CABIN.
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 163 
 
 out to the barn to see his eleven Malamute pups, and 
 afterward insisted that I take a free drink at his bar. 
 I took a kodak of him with "mes enfants," and prom- 
 ised to send him a copy of the same. 
 
 To-night I ventured out to try again the restaurant 
 of our first adventure. Sitting at a little table, I 
 was soon joined by three bright-looking men — one a 
 "barrister," one a mining engineer, one a reporter. 
 Result (1), an interview; (2), a pass to the fair; (3), 
 my dinner paid for, a 50-cent Havana cigar thrust 
 upon me, and (4) myself carried off to the said fair 
 by two of its directors, and again shown its fine dis- 
 play of fruits and grains and flowers and all its 
 special attractions by the management itself. In fact, 
 the Dawsonite can not do too much for the stranger 
 sojourning in his midst. 
 
 Mercury 26 to 28 degrees every morning. 
 
 Before arriving in Dawson a big, rugged, govern- 
 ment official had said to me, ' ' Go to the hotel 
 
 and give my love to Mrs. . She has a red head 
 
 and a rich heart. She has cheered more stricken men 
 than any woman in the Yukon. She mushed through 
 with her husband with the first 'sourdoughs' over 
 the ice passes in '97. She was a streak of sunshine 
 amidst the perils and heartaches of that terrible hu- 
 man treek. She runs the only hotel worth going to 
 in Dawson. You will be lucky to get into it. Give 
 her our love, the love of all of us. Tell her you're 
 our friends, and maybe she will take you in." So
 
 164 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 we were curious about this woman who had dared so 
 much, who had done so much, who was yet mistress 
 of the hearts of the rough, strong men of the Yukon. 
 We went to her hotel. We asked to see her. We 
 were shown into a cosy, well-furnished parlor. We 
 might just as well have been in a home in Kanawha 
 or New York. We heard some orders given in a firm, 
 low-pitched voice, a quick step, Mrs. was be- 
 fore us. An agreeable presence, dignity, reserve, 
 force. Tall, very tall, but so well poised and pro- 
 portioned you didn't notice it. A head broad 
 browed and finely set on neck and shoulders. Yes, 
 the hair was red, Venetian red with a glimmer of 
 sunshine in it. I delivered the message straight. 
 She received it coolly. "The house was full, but she 
 would have place for us before night. A party would 
 leave on the 4 p. m. stage for Dominion Creek. We 
 should have his room. Dinner would be served at 
 seven." The chamber was given us in due time. 
 Plainly furnished, but comfortable. The hotel is an 
 immense log house, chinked with moss and plaster, 
 and paper lined, and all the partitions between the 
 rooms are also paper. But we are learning to talk in 
 low voices, and, between a little French and German 
 and Danish, H. and' I manage to keep our secrets to 
 ourselves, although of the private affairs of all the 
 other guests we shall soon be apprised. 
 
 The dining-room is large, the whole width of the 
 house, in the center a huge furnace stove from which
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 165 
 
 radiate many large, hot pipes, where iu the long win- 
 ter night-time is kept up a furious fire, and a cord 
 of wood is burned each day — and wood at $25 to $50 
 per cord ! The guests sit at many little tables. The 
 linen is spotless. The china good English ware. The 
 fare is delicious. The cook is paid $300 per month, 
 the maids $125, with board thrown in. Delicate ba- 
 con from Chicago. Fresh eggs from Iowa. Chickens 
 from Oregon — no live chickens in Dawson. The first 
 mushers brought in a few, but the hawks and owls, 
 the foxes and minks and other varments devoured 
 many of them, and the surviving ones, after waiting 
 around a week or two for the sun to set, went cack- 
 ling crazy for lack of sleep, and died of shattered 
 nerves. Caribou steak and tenderloin of moose we 
 have at every meal. And to-day wild duck and cur- 
 rant jelly. The ducks abound along the river, the 
 currants grow wild all over the mountain slopes. And 
 such celery and lettuce and radishes and cabbage ! 
 Potatoes, big and mealy, and turnips, and carrots, del- 
 icate and crisp, all grown in the local gardens round 
 about. Cabbage here sells at a dollar a head and let- 
 tuce at almost as much. But you never ate the like. 
 White and hard as celery, so quickly do they grow 
 in the nightless days ! Nowhere in all the world can 
 you live so well as in Dawson, live if only you have 
 the "stuff." Live if you can pay. We follow the 
 habit of the land and pay up in full after each meal. 
 It is dangerous to trust the stranger for his board.
 
 166 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 It is well for us we hold fast to this custom, else we 
 might not be able to leave the town — a regulation of 
 the government of the city — no man may leave with 
 bills unpaid. So long as he owes even a single dollar, 
 he must remain! And the N. W. M. P. watch the 
 boats, the river and the mountain passes and enforce 
 tli is law. 
 
 Our hostess takes good care of her guests. Very 
 many young men working for the larger commercial 
 companies board here; all, who are allowed, come for 
 transient meals. And those who are homesick and 
 down in spirit come just for the sake of neighborship 
 to the tall, well-gowned woman whose invariable tact 
 and sympathy, and often motherly tenderness, has 
 given new heart to many a lonely "chechaqua" (ten- 
 derfoot), so far away from home ! 
 
 In this dining-room, too, one sees a type not so 
 often now met in our own great country, but inherent 
 to English methods. The permanent Chief Clerk. 
 The man whose career is to be forever a book-keeper 
 or a clerk, whose highest ambition is to be a book- 
 keeper or a clerk just all his life, and who will be 
 trusted with the highest subordinate positions, but 
 will never be made a partner, however much he may 
 merit it. London is filled with such. The offices of 
 the great British Commercial companies are full of 
 such the world round. Men who know their business 
 and attend to it faithfully, and whose lives are a 
 round of precise routine. Such men sit at tables
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 107 
 
 all about us. In London every morning the Times or 
 Daily Telegraph is laid at their plates. Here the 
 Yukon Sun or Dawson Times is laid before them just 
 the same, and they gravely read the news of the 
 world, while they sip their tea and munch their cold 
 toast, just as though they were "at home." And 
 they walk in and out with the same stoop-shouldered 
 shuffle gait one sees along the Strand or Bishopsgate 
 Street within, or Mansionhouse Square. 
 
 Our hostess greets each guest as he enters, and 
 walks about among them and says a cheery word to 
 every one One, on her left, has just now been read- 
 ing to her from a letter which tells of his mother in 
 England, and, I surmise, hints of a waiting sweet- 
 heart; and another, an Australian, who is just going 
 away on a prospecting trip far up the Stuart River, 
 is telling her what to write home for him in case he 
 shall never come back. 
 
 The two other chief objects of interest in this 
 
 dining-room, besides Mrs. , are— her small 
 
 boy of six, who is being greatly praised this morning 
 by all the company — he has just licked the big boy 
 across the street, who for a week or two has tried 
 to bully him, on account of which feat his mother is 
 immensely proud — and a wonderful grey and white 
 cat that sits up and begs just like a prairie dog or a 
 gopher. When a kitten, pussy must have gone out 
 and played with some of the millions of gophers that 
 inhabit every hillside, and learned from them how
 
 168 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 to properly sit up. She visits each guest every morn- 
 ing and sits up and folds her paws across her breast 
 and mews so plaintively that no hand can forbear 
 giving her a tidbit. 
 
 "We were among the first. We came up from San 
 Francisco in a waterlogged schooner through the 
 wash of ice and winter gales to Dyea, and then 
 mushed over Chilkoot Pass on snowshoes with the 
 dogs. I shouldered my pack like the men. And 
 John — John would have backed out or died of weari- 
 ness, if I hadn't told him that if he quit, I should 
 come on in just all the same. Yes! I carried my 
 gun — I didn't have to use it but once or twice. Yes! 
 We've done very w T ell in Dawson, very well in the 
 Klondike, very well!" And a big diamond glinted 
 as though to reenforce the remark. She spoke rap- 
 idly, though easily, in crisp, curt sentences, and you 
 felt she had indeed "mushed" in, that frightful win- 
 ter, over those perilous snow and ice passes, -just sure 
 enough ! As I looked into her wide-open, brown eyes, 
 I felt that I beheld there that spirit which I have 
 everywhere noted in the keen faces of the men and 
 women of the Yukon, the yet living spirit of the 
 great West, of the West of half a century ago; of 
 Virginia and New England two hundred years ago; 
 the spirit which drove Drake and Frobisher and Cap- 
 tain Cook and their daring mariners out from the 
 little islands of our motherland to possess and domi- 
 nate the earth's mysterious and uncharted seas; the
 
 THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 169 
 
 spirit which still makes the name American stand for 
 energy and power and accomplishment in all the 
 world; the spirit, shall I say, which gives the future 
 of the earth to the yet virile Anglo-Saxon race.
 
 170 IN TO THfl YUKON. 
 
 NINTH LETTER. 
 
 MEN OF THE KLONDIKE. 
 
 Yukon Territory, Canada, September 18, 1903. 
 
 We lingered in Dawson a week waiting for the 
 steamers "Sarah" or "Louise" or "Cudahy" to come 
 up from the lower river, and though always "com- 
 ing, ' ' they never came. Meantime the days had begun 
 to visibly shorten, the frosts left thicker rime on roof 
 and road each morning. ' ' Three weeks till the freeze- 
 up," men said, and we concluded that so late was now 
 the season that we had best not chance a winter on a 
 sand-bar in the wide and shallow lower Yukon, and 
 a nasty time with fogs and floe ice in Behring Sea. 
 So on Wednesday, the 16th, we again took the fin<> 
 steamer "White Horse," and are now two days up the 
 river on our way. We will reach White Horse Sun- 
 day morning, stay there till Monday morning, when 
 we will take the little railway to Skagway, then the 
 ocean coaster to Seattle and the land of dimes and 
 nickels. We regret not having been able to go down 
 to St. Michael and Nome, and to see the whole great 
 Yukon. My heart was quite set on it, and the ex- 
 pense was about the same as the route we now take, 
 but to do so we should have had to take too great 
 risks at this late season. 
 
 While lingering in Dawson we were able to se* 1 
 more of the interests of the community. One day we
 
 MEN OP THE KLONDIKE. 171 
 
 called on a quite notable figure, a, or rather the, Dr. 
 Grant of St. Andrews Hospital, M. D., and of St. 
 Andrews great church, D. D. ! A Canadian Scotch- 
 man of, say, thirty-five years, who, although a man of 
 independent fortune, chose the wild life of the border 
 just from the very joy of buffet and conquest. He 
 ''mushed" it in 1897 over the Chilkoot Pass. He 
 built little churches and hospitals all in one, and be- 
 came the helper of thousands whom the perils and 
 stresses of the great trek quite overcame. So now he 
 is a power in Dawson. A large and perfectly equipped 
 hospital, his creation, has been endowed by the gov- 
 ernment ; a fine, modern church holding six hundred ; 
 a pretty manse and big mission school buildings of 
 logs. All these standing in a green turfed enclosure 
 of two or three acres. The church cost $60,000. He 
 preaches Sundays to a packed house. He is chief sur- 
 geon of the hospital during the rest of the time. He 
 gives away his salary, and the men of these min- 
 ing camps, who know a real man when they see him, 
 can 't respond too liberally to the call of the preacher- 
 surgeon who generally saves their bodies and some- 
 times their souls. I found him a most interesting 
 man— a naturalist, a scientific man, a man of the 
 world and who independently expounds a Presbyte- 
 rian cult rather of the Lyman Abbott type. He 
 showed us all through the hospitals; many surgical 
 accident cases; very few fevers or sickness. The 
 church, too, we inspected; all fittings within modern 
 and up to date; a fine organ, the freight on which
 
 172 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 alone was $5,000, 40 per cent, of its cost; a fur- 
 nace that warmed the building even at 80 below 
 zero, and a congregation of 400 to 500 people, better 
 dressed (the night we attended) than would be a simi- 
 lar number in New York. There are no old clothes 
 among the well-to-do; gold buys the latest styles and 
 disdains the cost. There are few old clothes among 
 the poor, for the poor are very few. So as I looked 
 upon the congregation before Dr. Grant, I might as 
 well have been in New York but for a pew full of red 
 coats of "N. W. M. P." (North West Mounted Po- 
 lice). 
 
 The succeeding day Dr. Grant called upon us, and 
 escorted us through the military establishment that 
 polices and also governs the Yukon territory as well 
 as the whole Canadian Northwest. Barracks for 250 
 men, storerooms, armory, horse barn, dog kennel — 150 
 dogs — jail, mad-house and courtrooms. The execu- 
 tive and judicial departments all under one hand and 
 even the civil rule as well. Everywhere evidence of 
 the cold and protection against it. A whole room full 
 of splendid fur coats, parquets, with great fur hoods. 
 Such garments as even an Esquimaux would rejoice in. 
 
 Later, we attended the fine public school, where are 
 over 250 children in attendance ; all equipment the 
 latest and up to date; kindergarten department and 
 grades to the top, the teachers carefully picked from 
 eastern Canada. The positions are much sought for 
 by reason of unusually high salaries paid. The new 
 principal had just come from Toronto. He told us
 
 MEN OF THE KLONDIKE. 173 
 
 that these were the brightest, most alert children he 
 had ever taught. Keen faces, good chins, inheriting 
 the aggressive initiative of the parents who had dared 
 to come so far. In the kindergarten a little colored 
 boy sat among his white mates. In Canada, like Mex- 
 ico, there is no color line. 
 
 It now takes us four days to creep up the river 
 against the strong current and through the many 
 shallows to White Horse. On the boat there are all 
 sorts. I have met a number o*f quaint figures. One 
 a French Canadian trapper, on his way to a winter 
 camp on McMillan Creek of the Pelly River. He will 
 have three or more cabins along a route where he will 
 set his traps. About two hundred he keeps a-going, 
 and sees as many of them as he can each day. Mink 
 and marten and otter and beaver, as well as wolves 
 and foxes, lynx and bears. For meat he prefers 
 caribou to moose. For many years he trapped for 
 the "H. B. C." (Hudson Bay Company) over east of 
 the Rockies. But they paid him almost nothing and 
 there were no other buyers. Now he sells to Dawson 
 merchants and gets $6.00 for a marten skin "all 
 through" — the whole lot. The fur merchant in Vic- 
 toria asked $30.00 for just such, and said we might 
 buy them as low as $10.00 in the Yukon country, so 
 he had heard. Another man to-day has sat on the 
 wood-pile with me and told me of the great North — 
 a man with a well-shaped face, who used language of 
 the educated sort, yet dressed in the roughest canvas, 
 and who is raising hay here along the Yukon which
 
 174 IN TO THE YUKON 
 
 he "sells at. three cents a pound in Dawson, or one 
 cent a pound in the stack," wild, native hay at that. 
 And he had "mushed" and "voyaged" all through 
 the far north. He had set out from Edmonton, he 
 and his "pardner," and driven to "Athabasca land- 
 ing" in their farm wagon, three or four hun- 
 dred miles over the "Government road;" had passed 
 through the beautiful, wide, gently sloping valley of 
 the Peace River, and through the well-timbered re- 
 gions north of the Peace. At Athabasca landing they 
 had sold the wagon and built a stout flatboat, and in 
 this had floated down some three hundred miles to 
 Athabasca Lake, Indian pilots having taken them 
 through the more dangerous rapids. The Athabasca 
 River enters the lake among swamps and low, willowy 
 spits of land, where grows wild hay and ducks abound, 
 and the "Great Slave" River flows out of it into the 
 body of water of that name. These two rivers enter 
 and depart near together, and the voyager escapes 
 the dangers of a journey on the great and shallow 
 Athabasca, where the surf is most dangerous. Three 
 or four hundred miles of a yet greater river, with 
 many rapids through which you are guided by 
 Indian pilots, who live near the dangerous waters, 
 carry you into the Great Slave Lake, the largest 
 body of fresh water in Canada. Steamboats of the 
 Hudson Bay Company run upon it and ply upon 
 the inflowing rivers, and even go up and down 
 the McKenzie to Herschell Island at its mouth, 
 and where the "N. W. M. P." have a post, chiefly
 
 ON THE YUKON. 
 
 FLOATING DOWN THE YUKON.
 
 MEN OF THE KLONDIKE. 177 
 
 lo protect the natives from the whalers who gather 
 there to trade and smuggle in dutiable goods. 
 The McKenzie is greater than the Yukon, is wider 
 and much deeper and carries a much greater volume 
 of water. Great Slave Lake, while shallow and flat 
 toward the eastern end, is deep and bounded by great 
 cliffs and rocks on the west. Storms rage upon it, and 
 at all times the voyagers count it dangerous water. 
 Both it and Athabasca are full of fish, so, too, the 
 adjacent rivers and the McKenzie. Floating down 
 the McKenzie, passing the mouth of the Nelson River, 
 they came at last to the Liard, and up this they canoed 
 to within half a mile of the waters of the Pelly, down 
 which they floated to the Yukon. The French trapper 
 had also "come in" by this route. "Two seasons it 
 takes," he said, "an easy trip," and you can winter 
 quite comfortably in the mountains. East of the 
 mountains there is much big game, "plenta big 
 game;" musk ox are there, and moose and caribou. 
 But the Indians and wolves kill too many of them. 
 The Indians catch the caribou on the ice and kill them 
 for their tongues. ' ' Smoked caribou tongue mighta 
 nice." They leave the carcasses where they fall, and 
 then come the foxes for the feast. ' ' Thousands of fox, 
 red fox, silver fox, black fox, white fox. Mr. Fox he 
 eat caribou, he forget Indian — Indian set the trap and 
 fox he caught. The wolf, too, he creep up upon the 
 caribou, even upon the moose when he alone, when 
 he lying down; the wolf he bites the hamstring. He 
 kill many moose. That a grand country for to trap,
 
 178 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 but the Hudson Bay Company it pay nothing for the 
 fur. A sack of flour I see them give one Indian for a 
 black fox. Now since Hudson Bay lose his exclusive 
 right, no man trade with him or sell him fur except 
 he must for food." 
 
 We have just passed a little log cabin beneath great 
 firs and amidst a cluster of golden aspen. Its door 
 and solitary window are wide open. No one occupies 
 it, or ever will. Wild things may live in it, but not 
 man. Near the cabin, where the Yukon makes a great 
 sweeping bend, and the swift water purls round into 
 bubbling eddies, a narrow trail cut from the river 
 bank leads up among the trees. The dweller in the 
 cabin could see far up the great river; he could espy 
 the raft or skiff or barge descending and mark its 
 occupants; then he used to take his trusty rifle, step 
 across to the opening in the trees at the point, and 
 pick off his victims. Sometimes their bodies fell into 
 the deep, cold, swift-running waters. The wolves and 
 foxes picked their bones on the bars below. Some- 
 times he captured the body as well as the outfit, and 
 sunk and buried them at leisure. The pictures of the 
 three last men he murdered hang in the office of the 
 chief of the Northwest Mounted Police, at Dawson, 
 beside his own. It took three years to gather the com- 
 plete chain of circumstantial evidence, but at last they 
 hanged him, two years ago. In the beginning there 
 were many other crimes quite as atrocious committed 
 in this vast region of the unknown north, but soon 
 the efficiency and systematic vigilance of the North-
 
 MEN OP THE KLONDIKE. 179 
 
 west Mounted Police broke up forever the bandits and 
 thugs who had crowded in here from all the earth, 
 and Uncle Sam's dominion in particular. Many were 
 hanged, many sent up for long terms, many run 
 out. Life sentences were common for robbery. To- 
 day the Yukon country is more free from crime than 
 West Virginia, and Dawson more orderly than 
 Charleston.
 
 180 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 TENTH LETTER. 
 
 DOG LORE OF THE NORTH. 
 White Horse, Sunday, September 20, 1903. 
 We arrived about nine o'clock this morning. The 
 voyage up the Yukon from Dawson has taken us since 
 Wednesday at 2:30, when we cast off and stemmed 
 the swift waters — twenty-four hours longer than going 
 down. During the week of our stay at Dawson the 
 days grew perceptibly shorter and the nights colder. 
 There is no autumn in this land. Two weeks ago the 
 foliage had just begun to turn; a week ago the 
 aspens and birches were showing a golden yellow, but 
 the willows and alders were yet green. Now every 
 leaf is saffron and golden — gamboge — and red. In a 
 week or more they will have mostly fallen. As yet the 
 waters of the Yukon and affluent rivers show no ice. 
 In three weeks they are expected to be frozen stiff, 
 and so remain until the ice goes out next June. The 
 seasons of this land are said to be " Winter and June, 
 July and August. " To me it seems inconceivable that 
 the Arctic frosts should descend so precipitately. But 
 on every hand there is evident preparation for the 
 cold, the profound cold. Double windows and doors 
 are being fastened on. Immense piles of sawed and 
 cut firewood are being stored close at hand. Sleighs 
 and especially sledges are being painted and put in
 
 APPROACHING SEATTLE. 
 
 WITH AND WITHOUT.
 
 DOG LOBE OF THE NORTH. 183 
 
 order; the dogs which have run wild, and mostly for- 
 aged for themselves during the summer, are being dis- 
 covered, captured and led off by strings and straps 
 and wires about their necks. Men are buying new 
 dogs, and the holiday of dogkind is evidently close at 
 an end. Women are already wearing some of their 
 furs. Ice half to a full inch forms every night, and 
 yesterday we passed through our first snow storm, and 
 all the mountains round about, and even the higher 
 hills, are to-day glistening in mantles of new, fresh, 
 soft-looking snow. The steamers of the White Pass 
 and Yukon Railway Company will be laid up in three 
 weeks now, they tell us, and already the sleighs and 
 teams for the overland stage route are being gathered, 
 the stage houses at twenty-four-mile intervals being 
 set in order, and the "Government road" being pre- 
 pared afresh for the transmission of mails and pas- 
 sengers. 
 
 We have just seen some of the magnificent Lab- 
 rador dogs, with their keeper, passing along the street, 
 owned by the Government post here — immense ani- 
 mals, as big as big calves, heifers, yearlings, I might 
 say. They take the mails to outlying posts and even 
 to Dawson when too cold for the horses — horses are 
 not driven when the thermometer is more than 40 
 degrees below! 
 
 As I sat in the forward cabin the other night 
 watching the motley crowd we were taking "out," 
 two bright young fellows, who turned out to be "Gov- 
 ernment dog-drivers" going to the post here to report
 
 184 IN T0 THE YUKON. 
 
 for winter duty, fell into animated discussion of their 
 business, and told me much dog lore. The big, well- 
 furred, long-legged "Labrador Huskies" are the 
 most powerful as well as fiercest. A load of 150 
 pounds per dog is the usual burden, and seven to nine 
 dogs attached each by a separate trace — the Lab- 
 rador harness is used with them, so the dogs spread 
 out fan-shaped from the sledge and do not interfere 
 with each other. The great care of the driver is to 
 maintain discipline, keep the dogs from shirking, 
 from tangling up, and from attacking himself or each 
 other. He carries a club and a seal-hide whip, and 
 uses each unmercifully. If they think you afraid, 
 the dogs will attack you instantly, and would easily 
 kill you. And they incessantly attack each other, and 
 the whole pack will always pounce on the under dog 
 so as to surely be in at a killing, just for the fun of 
 it, ripping up the unfortunate and lapping his blood 
 eagerly, though they rarely eat him. And as these 
 dogs are worth anywhere from $100 up, the driver 
 has much ado to prevent the self-destruction of his 
 team. And to club them till you stun them is the 
 only way to stop their quarrels. Then, too, the dogs 
 are clever and delight to spill the driver and gallop 
 away from him, when he can rarely catch them until 
 they draw up at the next post house, and it may be 
 ten or twelve or thirty miles to that, unless it be that 
 they get tangled among the trees or brush, when the 
 driver will find them fast asleep, curled up in the 
 snow, where each burrows out a cozy bed. The Mala-
 
 DOG LORE OF THE NORTH. 185 
 
 mutes, or native Indian dog, usually half wolf, are 
 driven and harnessed differently — all in a line — and 
 one before the other. They are shorter haired, faster, 
 and infinitely meaner than the long-haired Huskie 
 (of which sort the Labrador dogs are). Their de- 
 light is to get into a fight and become tangled, and 
 the only way out is to club them into insensibility, 
 and cut the leather harness, or they will cut the seal- 
 hide thongs themselves at a single bite if they are 
 quite sure your long plaited whip will not crack them 
 before they can do it. These Malamutes . are the 
 usual dogs driven in this country, for few there are 
 to afford or know how to handle the more powerful 
 Labrador Huskie. And the Malamute is the king of 
 all thieves. He will pull the leather boots off your 
 feet while you sleep and eat them for a midnight 
 supper; he delights to eat up his seal-hide harness; 
 he has learned to open a wooden box and will devour 
 canned food, opening any tin can made, with his 
 sharp fangs, quicker than a steel can-opener. Canned 
 tomatoes, fruit, vegetables, sardines, anything that 
 man may put in, he will deftly take out. Even the 
 tarpaulins and leather coverings of the goods he may 
 be pulling, he will rip to pieces, and he will devour 
 the load unless watched with incessant vigilance night 
 and day. Yet, with all their wolfish greed and man- 
 ners, these dogs perform astonishing feats of endur- 
 ance, and never in all their lives receive a kindly 
 word. "If you treat them kindly, they think you 
 are afraid, and will at once attack you," the driver
 
 186 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 said; "the only way to govern them is through fear." 
 Once a day only are they fed on raw fish, and while 
 the Malamute prefers to pilfer and steal around the 
 camp, the Huskie will go and fish for himself when 
 off duty, if given the chance. Just like the bears and 
 lynx of the salmon-running streams, he will stand 
 along the shore and seize the fish that is shoved too 
 far upon the shallows. Seventy miles a day is the 
 rule with the Indians and their dog teams, and the 
 white man does almost as much. Forty miles is it 
 from here to Caribou Crossing, and the Northwest 
 Mounted Police, with their Labrador teams, take 
 the mails when the trains are snowbound and cover 
 the distance in four to five hours. Great going this 
 must be ! 
 
 And then the conversation turned to the great 
 cold of this far north land, when during the long 
 nights the sun only shows for an hour or two above 
 the horizon. 
 
 When the thermometer falls below fifty degrees 
 (Fahr.), then are the horses put away, what few 
 there may be, and the dogs transport the freight and 
 mails along the Government road between White 
 Horse and Dawson, as well as from Dawson to the 
 mining camps to which the stage lines usually run. 
 Indeed, throughout all of this north land, with the 
 coming of the snow, the dogs are harnessed to the 
 sledges and become the constant traveling compan- 
 ions of man.
 
 MAIiAMUTE TEAM OP GOVERNMENT MAir.- 
 CARRIER — DAWSON. 
 
 BREAKING OF THE YUKON — MAY 17, 19<K
 
 SUN DOGS. 
 
 WINTER LANDSCAPE.
 
 DOG LORE OP THE NORTH. 191 
 
 The air is dry in all this great interior basin of 
 the continent, and, consequently, the great cold is 
 not so keenly felt as in the damper airs nearer to 
 the sea. The dogs can travel in all weathers which 
 man can stand, and even when it becomes so cold 
 that men dare not move. The lowest Government 
 record of the thermometer yet obtained at Dawson 
 City is eighty-three degrees below zero. These great 
 falls of temperature only occasionally occur, but 
 when the thermometer comes down to minus sixty 
 degrees, then men stay fast indoors, and only ven- 
 ture out as the necessity demands; then the usually 
 clear atmosphere becomes filled with a misty fog, 
 often so thick that it is difficult to see a hundred 
 yards away. 
 
 When traveling with a dog team, or, indeed, when 
 "mushing" upon snow-shoes across streams and for- 
 ests, men go rather lightly clad, discarding furs, and 
 ordinarily wearing only thick clothes, with the long 
 canvas parquet as protection against the wind rather 
 than against the temperature; then motion becomes 
 a necessity, and to tarry means to freeze. The dan- 
 ger of the traveler going by himself is that the 
 frost may affect his eyesight, freezing the eyelids 
 together, perhaps dazing his sight, unless snow- 
 glasses are worn. And the ice forms in the nostrils 
 so rapidly, as well as about the mouth, and upon the 
 mustache and beard, that it is a constant effort to 
 keep the face free from accumulating ice. In small 
 parties, however, men travel long distances, watch-
 
 L92 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 iug each other as well as themselves to insure escape 
 from the ravages of the frost. When the journey is 
 long and the toil has become severe, the Arctic drow- 
 siness is another of the enemies which must be pre- 
 vented from overcoming the traveler, and the meth- 
 ods are often cruel which friends must exercise in 
 order to prevent their companions from falling 
 asleep. 
 
 During this long period of Arctic winter and Arc- 
 tic night, there seems to be no great cessation in 
 the struggle for gold; the diggings in the Klondike 
 and remoter regions retain their companies of men 
 toiling to find the gold. The frozen gravels are 
 blasted out and piled up to be thawed the next sum- 
 mer by the heat of the sun and washed with the 
 flowing waters. 
 
 "While the Arctic night prevails for twenty-two or 
 twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, yet so 
 brilliant are the stars and so refulgent are the heav- 
 ens with the lightening of the aurora borealis, that 
 men work and travel and carry on the usual occu- 
 pations, little hindered by the absence of the sun. 
 Sometimes, in the very coldest days, is beheld the 
 curious phenomenon of several suns appearing above 
 the horizon, and these are called the "sun dogs," 
 the sun itself being seemingly surrounded by lesser 
 ones. I was fortunate enough to obtain a fine pho- 
 tograph taken on one of these days, which I am able 
 to send you.
 
 DOG LORE OF THE NORTH. 193 
 
 The freezing of the Yukon comes on very sud- 
 denly, the great river often becoming solid in a night. 
 The curious thing of these northern lakes and rivers 
 is, that the ice forms first upon the bottom, and, ris- 
 ing, fills the water with floating masses and ice par- 
 ticles, which then become congealed almost immedi- 
 ately. 
 
 Early in last October our steamer ' ' White Horse, ' ' 
 on which we are now traveling, became permanently 
 frozen in when within one hundred miles of Dawson 
 City, the apparently clear river freezing so quickly 
 that the boat became fast for the winter, and the 
 passengers were compelled to "mush" their way, as 
 best they might, across the yet snowless country, a 
 terrible and trying experience in the gathering cold. 
 
 You may be in a row-boat or a canoe upon ice- 
 free waters, and, as you paddle, you may notice 
 bubbles and particles of ice coming to the surface. 
 Great, then, is the danger. The bottom has begun to 
 freeze. You may be frozen in before you reach the 
 shore in ice yet too thin to walk upon or permit 
 escape. 
 
 For the greater part of the winter season the 
 frozen streams become the natural highways of the 
 traveler, and the dog teams usually prefer the snow- 
 covered ice rather than attempt to go over the 
 rougher surface of the land. 
 
 Another curious thing, friends tell me, affects 
 them in this winter night-time, and that is the dis- 
 position of men to hibernate. Fifteen and sixteen
 
 194 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 hours of sleep are commonly required, while in the 
 nightless summer-time three and four and five hours 
 satisfy all the demands nature seems to make — thus 
 the long sleeps of winter compensate for the lack of 
 rest taken during the summer-time. 
 
 And yet these hardy men of the north tell me that 
 they enjoy the winter, and that they perform their 
 toils with deliberation and ease, and take full advant- 
 age of the long sleeping periods. 
 
 The Yukon freezes up about the 10th of October, 
 the snow shortly follows, and there is no melting of 
 the ice until early June. This year the ice went out 
 from the river at Dawson upon June 10th; thus, 
 there are seven to eight months of snow and ice- 
 bound winter in this Arctic land.
 
 HOW THE GOVERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD. 195 
 
 ELEVENTH LETTER. 
 
 HOW THE GOVERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD. 
 
 Steamer Dolphin, September 22, 1903. 
 We left White Horse by the little narrow-gauge 
 railway, White Pass & Yukon Railway, at 9 :30 — two 
 passenger cars, one smoker, mail and express and 
 baggage hung on behind a dozen freight cars. Our 
 steamer brought up about one hundred passengers 
 from Dawson and down-river points, and together with 
 what got on board at White Horse, the train was 
 packed. Many red-coated Northwest Mounted Po- 
 lice also boarded the train, and just as it pulled out, 
 a strapping big, strong-chinned, muscular woman 
 came in the rear door and sat down. She was ele- 
 gantly gowned, dark, heavy serge, white shirt waist, 
 embroidered cloth jacket, and much gold jewelry, high 
 plumed hat. Presently a big man called out that all 
 the men must go forward into the next car, and the 
 big woman announced that she would proceed to 
 examine all the ladies for gold dust. The paternal 
 government of the Yukon Territory exacts a tax of 
 2V2 per cent, of all gold found, and examines all 
 persons going out of the territory, and confiscates all 
 dust found on the person. Women are said to be 
 the most inveterate smugglers, and the big woman 
 sroes through them most unmercifully. She bade the 
 lady next her to stand up and then proceeded to feel
 
 1-J6 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 her from stockings to chemise top, and did the 
 same by the others. Those who wore corsets had a 
 tough time, and some had to undo their hair. As 
 the first victim stood up and was unbuttoned and 
 felt over, she was greeted with an audible smile by 
 the other ladies, but silence fell as the next victim 
 was taken in hand. Meanwhile, during this pleasant 
 diversion, a big red-coat stood with his back to each 
 door, and the men were being similarly though not 
 so ruthlessly gone through in the other cars. This 
 trip no dust was found, I believe, but last week one 
 woman was relieved of $1,800 sewed into the margin 
 of her skirts and tucked deep into the recesses of her 
 bosom. Stockings and bosom are the two chief femi- 
 nine caches for gold, and when a culprit is thus dis- 
 covered and relieved, many are the protestations and 
 unavailing the clamors raised. During the past year 
 I am told that the examiners have seized in these 
 searches some $60,000 in dust, so I persume the 
 happy custom will for some time continue. Detec- 
 tives are kept in Dawson, travel on the boats, and 
 so watch and scrutinize every traveler that by the 
 time the final round-up and search takes place, the 
 probable smugglers are all pretty well spotted. As 
 each is examined, his or her name is checked off in a 
 little book. 
 
 We were close to Caribou Crossing when the cere- 
 mony was over, and I with others of my sex was 
 permitted to re-enter the rear car and rejoin the 
 company of the much beflustered ladies.
 
 LAKE BENNETT. 
 
 THE HEIGHT OF LAM), WHITE PASS.
 
 HOW THE GOVERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD. 199 
 
 All along the advance of winter was apparent. 
 The green of a fortnight ago had turned into the 
 universal golden yellow, and the fresh snow lay in 
 more extended covering upon all the mountain sum- 
 mits and even far down their slopes. So it is in 
 this far north, each day the snow creeps down and 
 down until it has caught and covered all the valleys 
 as well as hills. 
 
 At Caribou we met old Bishop Bompas and his 
 good little wife, who, with a big cane, came all the 
 way into the car to see us and say good-by. A charm- 
 ing couple who have given their lives doing a noble 
 work. 
 
 Lake Bennett was like a mirror, and Lake Linde- 
 mann above it, too, seemed all the greener in con- 
 trast to the encroaching shows. We were at the 
 White Pass Summit by 3 p. m., and then for an hour 
 came down the 3,200 feet of four per cent, grade, the 
 twenty miles to Skagway. The increase of snows on 
 all the mountains seemed to bring out more saliently 
 than ever the sharp, jagged granite rock masses. It 
 even seemed to us that we were traversing a wilder, 
 bolder, harsher land than when three weeks ago we 
 entered it. And the views and vistas down into the 
 warmer valleys we were plunging into were at times 
 magnificent. Snow around and above us, increasing 
 greenness of foliage below us, and beyond recurring 
 glimpses of the Lynn fiord, with Skagway nestling 
 at its head. In every affluent valley a glacier and a 
 roaring torrent.
 
 200 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 One of the newest and best boats in the trade, 
 "The Dolphin," was awaiting us. Our stateroom 
 was already wired for and secured. We took our 
 last Alaska meal at the "Pack Train Restaurant," 
 where we snacked sumptuously on roast beef, baked 
 potatoes and coffee for seventy cents (in Dawson it 
 would have been an easy $3.00), and walked 
 down the mile-long pier to the boat. The tides are 
 some twenty feet here, and the sandy bars of Skag- 
 way require long piers to permit the ships to land 
 when the tides are out. 
 
 We cast off about 10 p. m., with the tide almost at 
 its height, and only awoke to-day just as we were 
 steaming out of Juneau. Now we are approaching 
 the beautiful and dangerous Wrangel Narrows, and 
 see everywhere above us the fresh snows of the fort- 
 night's making. 
 
 WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS. 
 
 Wednesday, September 23rd. 
 It is the middle of the afternoon and we are just 
 safely through the — to-day — tempestuous passage 
 of "Dixon's Entrance," the thirty-three-mile break 
 in the coast's protecting chain of islands and the 
 outlet for Port Simpson to the open sea. Yesterday 
 we passed through the dangerous twenty miles of the 
 Wrangel Narrows just before dark, and only the 
 swift swirls of the fighting tides endangered us ; they 
 fall and rise seventeen feet in a few hours, and the 
 waters entering the tortuous channels from each end
 
 WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS. 201 
 
 meet in eddying struggle somewhere near the upper 
 end. The boats try and pass through just before the 
 flood tide or a little after it, or else tie up and wait 
 - for the high water. If w T e had been an hour later, we 
 should have had to lie by for fifteen hours, the cap- 
 tain said. As we turned in from Frederick Sound, 
 between two low-lying islands: all densely wooded 
 with impenetrable forests of fir, the waters were run- 
 ning out against us almost in fury, but in a mile or 
 two they were flowing with us just as swiftly. 
 
 To-day we saw a good many ducks, chiefly mallard 
 and teal, and small divers, and my first cormorant, 
 black, long-necked and circling near us with much 
 swifter flight than the gull. In the narrows we 
 started a great blue heron and one or two smaller 
 bitterns. 
 
 From the narrows we passed into Sumner Strait, 
 and then turning to the right and avoiding Wrangel 
 Bay and Fort Wrangel, where we stopped going up, 
 passed into the great Clarence Strait that leads up 
 direct from the sea. A sound or fiord one hundred 
 miles or more long, ten or fifteen miles wide. 
 
 The day had been clear, but, before passing 
 through the narrows, clouds had gathered, and a sort 
 of fierce Scotch mist had blown our rain-coats wet. 
 On coming out into wider waters, the storm had be- 
 come a gale. The wildest night we have had since 
 twelve months ago in the tempest of the year upon 
 the Gulf of Finland. To-day, until now, the waters 
 have been too boisterous to write. All down Clarence
 
 202 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 Strait, until we turned into Revilla and Gigedo Chan- 
 nels — named for and by the Spanish discoverers — 
 and across the thirty -three miles of Dixon's En- 
 trance, we have shuttlecocked about at the mercy of 
 the gale and in the teeth of the running sea. The 
 guests at table have been few, but now we are snug 
 behind Porcher Island and passing into the smooth 
 waters of Greenville Channel, so I am able to write 
 again. The Swedish captain says the storm is our 
 equinoctial, and that may be, and now that the sun 
 is out and the blue sky appearing, we shall soon forget 
 the stress, although to-night, as we pass from Fitz- 
 hugh Sound into Queen Charlotte Sound, we shall 
 have a taste of the Pacific swell again, and probably 
 yet have some thick weather in the Gulf of Georgia. 
 Considering the lateness of the season, we are, all in 
 all, satisfied that we rightly gave up the St. Michaels 
 trip, though it has sorely disappointed us not to have 
 seen the entire two thousand miles of the mighty 
 Yukon. 
 
 Already we notice the moderation of the tempera- 
 ture and the greater altitude of the sun, for we are 
 quite one thousand miles south of Dawson, while the 
 air has lost its quickening, exhilarating, tonic quality. 
 
 We are becoming right well acquainted with our 
 sundry shipmates, particularly those who have "come 
 out" from the Yukon with us. Among them we have 
 found out another interesting man. Across the table 
 from us on the steamer "White Horse" sat a shock- 
 headed man of about thirty years, tall, very tall, but
 
 WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS. 203 
 
 muscularly built, with a strong, square jaw and firm, 
 blue eyes. A fellow to have his own way ; a bad man 
 in a mix-up. A flannel shirt, no collar, rough clothes. 
 Possibly a gentleman, perhaps a boss tough. We find 
 him a graduate of the University of Michigan. Ho 
 has lived in Mexico, and now for five straight years 
 has been "mushing it," and prospecting in the far 
 north; has tramped almost to the Arctic Sea, into the 
 water-shed of the Mackenzie, and bossed fifty to one 
 hundred men at the Klondike and Dominion diggings. 
 His camera has always been his companion, and for 
 an hour yesterday he sat in our cabin and read to 
 us from the MSS. some of the verse and poems with 
 which his valise is stacked. Some of the things are 
 charming and some will bring the tears. This far 
 north land of gold and frost has as yet sent out no 
 poet to depict its hopes, its perils, its wrecks. It may 
 be that he is the man. His name is Luther F. Camp- 
 bell, and you may watch for the name. And so we 
 meet all sorts. 
 
 Friday, September 26th. 
 Yesterday was a "nasty" day, as was the day 
 before. Early, 2 or 3 a. m., we passed through the 
 ugly waters of Millbank Sound, where the sweeping 
 surge of the foam-capped Pacific smashes full force 
 against the rock-bound coast. We were tossed about 
 greatly in our little 400-ton boat, until at last, pass- 
 ing a projecting headland, we were instantly in dead 
 quiet water and behind islands once more. About
 
 204 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 10 a. m. we came again into the angry Pacific, and 
 for fifty miles — four hours — were tossed upon the 
 heavy sea, Queen Charlotte Sound. The equinoctial 
 gales have had a wild time on the Pacific, and the 
 gigantic swell of that ocean buffeted our little boat 
 about like a toy. But she is a fine "sea boat," and 
 sat trim as a duck, rolling but little, nor taking much 
 water. Toward middle afternoon we were in quiet 
 waters again, and by nightfall at the dangerous Sey- 
 mour Narrows, where Vancouver Island leans up 
 against the continent, or has cracked off from it, and 
 a very narrow channel separates the two. Here the 
 tides — twelve feet — rise, rush and eddy, meet and 
 whirl, and only at flood stage do boats try to pass 
 through. 
 
 In 1875, a U. S. man-of-war tried to pass through 
 when the tides were low, and, caught in the swirling 
 maelstrom, sank in one hundred fathoms of water. 
 In 1883, a coastwise steamer ventured at improper 
 moment to make the passage, was caught in the mad 
 currents, and was engulfed with nearly all on board ; 
 half a dozen men alone were saved. Hence the cap- 
 tains are now very careful in making the passage, 
 and so we lay at anchor — or lay to — from seven to 
 twelve, midnight, waiting for the tide. 
 
 To-day we are spinning down the Gulf of Georgia 
 and Puget Sound, the wind direct astern, and have 
 already left Vancouver and Victoria to the north. 
 The sun is clear and soft, not hard and brilliant as 
 in Dawson. Whales are blowing at play about the
 
 WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS. 
 
 205 
 
 ship, gulls skimming the air in multitudes. All our 
 company are over their seasickness and now mostly 
 on deck. We are repacking our bags and the steamer 
 trunk, taking off heavy winter flannels and outer 
 wear, and preparing to land at Seattle clad again in 
 semi-summer clothes.
 
 206 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 TWELFTH LETTER. 
 
 seattle, the future mistress of the trade and 
 commerce of the north. 
 
 The Portland Hotel, \ 
 Portland, Oregon, October 3, 1903. / 
 
 Just one week ago to-day the steamer "Dolphin" 
 landed us safely at the pier at Seattle. The sail on 
 Puget Sound, a body of deep water open for one 
 hundred miles to the ocean, was delightful. We 
 passed many vessels, one a great four-masted barque 
 nearing its port after six or eight months' voyage 
 round the Horn from Liverpool. 
 
 Seattle lies upon a semi-circle of steep hills, curv- 
 ing round the deep waters of the Sound like a new 
 moon. An ideal site for a city and for a mighty sea- 
 port, which some day it will be. Many big ships by 
 the extensive piers and warehouses. The largest 
 ships may come right alongside the wharves, even 
 those drawing forty feet. The tracks of the Great 
 Northern and Northern Pacific Railways bring the 
 cars along the ship's side, and there load and un- 
 load. All this we noted as our boat warped in to 
 her berth. A great crowd awaited us. Many of our 
 passengers were coming home from the far north 
 after two and three years ' absence. Friends and fam- 
 ilies were there to greet them ; hotel runners and 
 boarding-house hawkers; citizens, too, of the half
 
 SEATTLE. 207 
 
 world who live by pillage of their fellowmen were 
 there, and police and plain clothes men of the detec- 
 tive service were there, all alike ready to greet the re- 
 turning Klondiker with his greater or lesser poke of 
 gold. It was exciting to look down upon them and 
 watch their own excitement and emotion as they espied 
 the home-comers upon the decks. We, as well, had all 
 sorts of people among our passengers. Mostly the 
 fortunate gold-finders who had made enough from 
 the diggings to "come out" for the winter, and some, 
 even to stay "out" for good. A young couple stood 
 near me ; they were on their wedding trip ; they would 
 spend the winter in balmy Los Angeles and then re- 
 turn to the far north in the spring. An old man stood 
 leaning on the rail. Deep lines marked his face, on 
 which was yet stamped contentment. He had been 
 "in" to see his son who had struck it rich on Domin- 
 ion Creek, who had already put "a hundred thousand 
 in the bank," he said. He had with him a magnificent 
 great, black Malamute, "leader of my boy's team and 
 who once saved him. from death. The dog cost us 
 a hundred dollars. I am taking him to Victoria. I 
 couldn't let him go. His life shall be easy now," the 
 old man added. Just then I noted a tall man in quiet 
 gray down on the dock looking intently at two men 
 who stood by one another a little to my left. They 
 seemed to feel his glance, spoke together and moved 
 uneasily away. They were a pair of "bad eggs" who 
 had been warned out of the Yukon by the Mounted 
 Police, and who were evidently expected in Seattle.
 
 208 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 One, who wore a green vest and nugget chain, played 
 the gentleman. The other, who worked with him, did 
 the heavy work and had an ugly record. He was 
 roughly dressed and wore a blue flannel shirt and a 
 cap. A bull neck, face covered with dense-growing, 
 close-cropped red beard, shifty gray eyes. He had 
 been suspected of several murders and many hold- 
 ups. Detectives frequently travel on frhese boats, 
 keeping watch upon the "bad men" who are sent 
 out of the north. We probably had a few on board. 
 In the captain's cabin, close to our own, were piled 
 up more than half a million dollars in gold bars ; the 
 passengers, most of them, carried dust. But the pair, 
 and any pals they may have had along, had kept 
 very quiet. They were spotted at the start. They 
 knew it. Now they were spotted again, and this, too, 
 they discerned. 
 
 Seattle is the first homing port for all that army 
 of thugs and scalawags who seek a new land like the 
 far north, and who, when there discovered, are sum- 
 marily hurried back again. It is said to be the "near- 
 est hell ' ' of any city on the coast. The hungry horde 
 of vampire parasites would make a fat living from 
 the pillage of the returned goldseeker if it were not 
 for the vigilance of the police. A strong effort is 
 now being made by the authorities of Seattle to stamp 
 out this criminal class and drive it from the city. 
 
 Our impression, as we crowded our way through 
 the pressing throngs upon the pier and pushed on 
 up into the city, was that we were in another Chicago.
 
 SEATTLE. 209 
 
 Tall buildings, wide streets, fine shops, great motion 
 of the crowds upon the streets, many electric 
 tram-cars running at brief intervals, and all 
 crowded. 
 
 On our trip up the Yukon we had made the pleas- 
 ant acquaintance of a Mr. S and a Mr. M of 
 
 Columbus, 0. Keen and agreeable men who had been 
 spending a month in Dawson puncturing a gold swin- 
 dle into which an effort had been made to lead them 
 and their friends by unscrupulous alleged bonanza 
 kings. They had cleverly nipped the attempt in the 
 bud, and were now returning, well satisfied with their 
 achievements. We had become fast comrades and 
 resolved to keep together yet another few days. We 
 found our way to the Grand Rainier Hotel, one of 
 Seattle's best, and now kept by the old host of the 
 Gibson House in Cincinnati. 
 
 Our favorable impressions of Seattle were con- 
 firmed that night when our friends introduced us 
 to the chief glory of Puget Sound, the monstrous 
 and delicious crab, a crab as big as a dinner plate 
 and more delicate than the most luscious lobster you 
 ever ate. They boil him, cool him, crack him and 
 serve him with mayonnaise dressing. You eat him, 
 and continue to eat him as long as Providence gives 
 you power, and when you have cracked the last shell 
 and sucked the last claw, and finally desist, you con- 
 tentedly comprehend that your palate has reflected to 
 your brain all the gustatory sensations of a Delmonico 
 banquet, with a Sousa band concert thrown in.
 
 210 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 Saturday, after we had spent the morning in see- 
 ing the shops and wandering along the fine streets 
 of the choicer residence section of the city, we all 
 took the tourist electric car, which, at 2 p. m., sets 
 out and tours the town with a guide who, through a 
 megaphone, explains the sights. 
 
 Seattle now claims one hundred and twenty to one 
 hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and prob- 
 ably has almost that number. A distinctly new city, 
 yet growing marvelously, and already possessing many 
 great buildings of which a much larger town might 
 well boast. 
 
 Toward evening, at 4 :30 p. m., we took the through 
 electric flyer, and sped across a country of many 
 truck gardens and apple orchards, some thirty-five 
 miles to Tacoma, that distance farther up the Sound, 
 and once the rival of Seattle. A city more spread out 
 and less well built, the creation of the promoters of 
 the Northern Pacific Railway Co., in the palmy days 
 of Henry Villard. Tacoma, too, possesses superb 
 docking facilities and a good two miles of huge ware- 
 houses and monstrous wharves, where, also, great 
 ships are constantly loaded and unloaded for the 
 Orient, South Africa and all the world, but whence 
 few or no ships depart for the Northern Continent 
 of Alaska. Tacoma seemed less alive and alert than 
 Seattle, fewer people on the streets, smaller shops 
 and business blocks, and the people moving more lei- 
 surely along the thoroughfares. In Seattle the houses 
 mostly fresh painted; in Tacoma the houses looking
 
 SEATTLE. 211 
 
 dingy and as though not painted now for many a 
 month. Seattle is noted for the public spirit of its 
 citizens ; they work and pull together for the common 
 weal, but Tacoma is so dominated by the railway in- 
 fluence which created it, that the people are lacking 
 in the vigor of the rival town. 
 
 As our electric train came to a standstill, W 
 
 rode up on his bicycle, and he was surely glad to see 
 
 us. Messrs. S and M had come over with us 
 
 for the ride, and we all five set right off to find our 
 dinner. "Cracked Crabs" was again the word, and 
 
 W added, "Puget Sound oysters broiled on 
 
 toast." A delicate little oyster about the size of 
 one's finger nail, and most savory. When our party 
 left the table, we were as contented a group as ever 
 had dined. 
 
 We lodged with W , and were delightfully 
 
 cared for — a large, sunny room overlooking such a 
 garden of roses and green turf as I never before have 
 seen. Roses as big as peonies and grass as green and 
 thick as the velvet turf of the Oxford "quads." Our 
 host gave us each morning a dainty breakfast, and 
 then we foraged for ourselves during the day. 
 
 In the morning of Sunday we attended the Con- 
 gregational Church, and in the afternoon rode on 
 the electric car to the park, a few miles — two or three 
 — out of the city, along the shores of one of the fine 
 bays that indent the Sound. Not so fine a park as 
 Vancouver's, but one that some day will probably rank 
 among the more beautiful ones of our American cities.
 
 212 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 On Monday we wandered about the town, visited 
 its museum, saw the fine public buildings, and spent 
 several hours in going- over and through the most ex- 
 tensive sawmill plant on the coast — "in the world," 
 they say. The big business originally instituted by 
 one of the early pioneers, is now managed by his 
 four sons, all graduates of Yale. We met the elder 
 of them in blue overalls and slouch hat, all mill dust. 
 A keen, intelligent face. He works with his men 
 and keeps the details of the business well in hand. 
 How different, I thought, from the English manner 
 of doing things. These men are rich, millionaires; 
 college bred, they work with their men. In England 
 they tell you that no man who would give his son a 
 business career would think of sending him to col- 
 lege. Oxford or Cambridge would there unfit him 
 for business life. He would come out merely a "gen- 
 tleman," which there means a man who does nothing, 
 who earns no bread, but who lives forever a parasite 
 on the toil of others. 
 
 In these great mills the monstrous fir and pine 
 logs of Washington are sawed up, cut, planed, and 
 loaded directly into ships for all the markets of the 
 earth — Europe, South Africa, Australia, China, South 
 America and New York, wherever -these splendid 
 woods are in demand. The forests of Washington 
 and British Columbia are said to possess the finest 
 timber in the world, and all the world seems to be 
 now seeking to have of it.
 
 SEATTLE. 213 
 
 Many fishing-boats were in the harbor and along 
 the water-side, and many of the big sixty-foot canoes, 
 dug out of a single immense log, paddled by Indians, 
 were passing up and down the bay. Throughout the 
 States of Washington and Oregon the Indians are 
 the chief reliance of the hop growers for the picking 
 of their crops, and every summer 's-end the various 
 tribes along the coast gather to the work. They come 
 from everywhere — from Vancouver's Island, from 
 British Columbia and even from Alaska. They voy- 
 age down the coast in their immense sea canoes, stop 
 at the ports, or ascend the rivers, pushing as far as 
 water will carry them. They bring the children and 
 the old folks with them, they buy or hire horses, and 
 they push hundreds of miles inland to the hop fields, 
 where a merry holiday is made of the gathering of 
 the hops. They were now returning, and many were 
 passing through Tacoma. They were here outfitting, 
 and spending their newly earned wages in buying all 
 those useful and useless things an Indian wants — 
 gay shawls and big ear-rings for the squaws, gaudy 
 blankets, knives and guns for the bucks; even toys 
 for the papooses. On the side the women were also 
 selling baskets made in their seasons of leisure. In 
 the shelter of the long pier one afternoon we came 
 upon a group of several family canoes preparing for 
 the long voyage to the north. A number of pale- 
 face women were bargaining for baskets; one had 
 just bought a toy canoe from an anxious mother, and 
 I was fortunate in buying another. Near by a man
 
 214 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 was carefully cutting out the figures of a Totem pole. 
 They were evidently from Alaska. Alaska and a 
 thousand miles or more of sea lay between them and 
 home. They looked like a group of Japanese and 
 spoke in gutteral throat tones. The Indians we lately 
 met at Yakima were wholly different, being redskins 
 of the interior, not the light yellow of the coast. 
 When in Caribou Crossing, old Bishop Bompas, who 
 has spent more than forty years among the Indians 
 of the north, told me that in his view the coast In- 
 dians had originally come over from North Asia and 
 were allied to the Mongolian races, while he believed 
 that the red-tinged, eagle-nosed Indian of the interior 
 was of Malay origin and of a race altogether dis- 
 tinct. Be this as it may, the coast Indian, according 
 to our preconceived ideas, is no Indian at all, but 
 rather a bastard Jap. He fishes and hunts and works, 
 and his labor is an important factor in solving the 
 agricultural problems of the Pacific Coast. The 
 enormous and profitable hop crops could not be gath- 
 ered without him. 
 
 We had hoped while in Tacoma to have had the 
 chance of visiting some of the primeval forest re- 
 gions of the State, where the largest trees are yet in 
 undisturbed growth, but the opportunity of taking 
 advantage of a railway excursion to Yakima, there 
 to see the State Fair, was too good to be lost, and 
 
 we accordingly made that journey instead. Mr. S 
 
 had joined us in Tacoma, so we four bought excur- 
 sion tickets, and climbed into one of eleven packed
 
 SEATTLE. 215 
 
 passenger coaches of a Northern Pacific special, and 
 made the trip. Eight hours of it, due east and south- 
 east, across the snow-capped Cascade Mountains and 
 down into the dry, arid Yakima River basin to the 
 city — big village — of North Yakima. An arid val- 
 ley, but yet green as an Irish hedge, a curious sight. 
 The hills all round sere and brown, tufted and 
 patched with dry buffalo grass and sage brush; the 
 flat bottom lands mostly an emerald green; all this 
 by irrigation, the first real irrigation I had yet seen. 
 The river is robbed of its abundant waters, which are 
 carried by innumerable ditches, and then again 
 divided and sub-divided, until the whole level ex- 
 panse of wide valley is soaked and drenched and con- 
 verted into a smiling garden. Here and there a piece 
 of land, unwatered, stretched brown and arid between 
 the green. 
 
 North Yakima, named from the Indian tribe that 
 still dwells hard by upon its reservation, is a thriv- 
 ing little place, the greenest lawns of the most vel- 
 vety turf, roses and flowers abounding where the 
 water comes. Trees shading its streets, which are 
 bounded on each side by flowing gutters, and the 
 driest, dustiest, vacant lots on earth. The fair is the 
 annual State show of horses, cattle, sheep and fruits, 
 and these we were glad to see. All fine, very fine, 
 and such apples as I never before set eyes on. Thou- 
 sands of boxes of Washington apples are now shipped 
 to Chicago, and even to New York, so superior is 
 their size and flavor.
 
 216 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 Returning, we had an instance of the insolence of 
 these great land grant fed railway corporations. While 
 the Northern Pacific had advertised an excursion to 
 Yakima and hauled eleven carloads of men, women 
 and children to the fair, it yet made no extra pro- 
 vision to take them back, so that when next day sev- 
 eral hundred were at the station in order to board 
 the train for home, only a few dozen could get in, 
 and the very many saw with dismay the train pull 
 away without them ! We had got into a sleeper on 
 the rear, fortunately, and thus escaped another 
 twelve hours in the overcrowded little town. 
 
 Yesterday we boarded the night express for Port- 
 land. The country between this city and Tacoma is 
 said to be rough and unsettled, and not fit for even 
 lumbering or present cultivation, so we did not regret 
 the travel at night. On the other hand, we saw much 
 fine forest in crossing the Cascade Mountains, al- 
 though the finest timber in the State is, I am told, 
 over in that northwestern peninsula on the slopes of 
 the Olympia Mountains, between Puget Sound and 
 the Pacific. There the trees grow big, very big, and 
 thence come the more gigantic of the logs, fifty and 
 one hundred feet long and ten to twenty-five feet in 
 diameter at the butt. 
 
 The Puget Sound cities are destined to become 
 among the chief marts of commerce and of trade upon 
 the Pacific Coast, and they are filled with an ener- 
 getic, intelligent population of the nation's best. The 
 climate, too, though mild, is cool enough for the
 
 SEATTLE. 219 
 
 preservation of vigor. Roses bloom all the winter 
 through in Tacoma, they tell me. And the summers 
 are never overhot. The humidity of the atmosphere 
 is the strangest thing to one of us from the East. 
 "More like England than any other is the climate," 
 they say, and the exquisite velvet turf is the best 
 evidence of this. But the most wonderful sight of 
 all to my Kanawha eyes was the ever-present snow- 
 massed dome of Mt. Rainier, lifting high into the 
 sky, sixty miles away, but looking distant not more 
 than ten. 
 
 The third great center of the life of this north- 
 west coast is Portland. Solid, slow, rich, conserva- 
 tive. A hundred and twenty miles from the sea, but 
 yet a seaport. Situated on the Willamette River, 
 six miles from its confluence with the mighty Colum- 
 bia. Already Seattle outstrips it in population, so 
 a Portland man admitted to me to-day, yet Portland 
 will always remain one of the great cities of the 
 coast. It possesses many miles of fine docks; the 
 waters about their piles are not quiet and serene, but 
 swift and turbulent, sometimes mad and dangerous. 
 It has a complete and extensive electric tramway 
 system, and this evening we have ridden many miles 
 about the city, and up by a cable road onto the 
 heights, a straight pull four hundred feet in the air. 
 Below us lay the city, level as a floor, the Willamette 
 winding through it, crossed by many steel draw- 
 bridges, while distant, to the north, we could just 
 make out the two-mile-wide Columbia. Portland is a
 
 220 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 wealthy and substantial city — a city for the elderly 
 and well-to-do, while Seattle is the city for the young 
 man and for the future. 
 
 The lesson we have really been learning to-day, 
 however, is not so much of Portland as of the river 
 Columbia, the really "mighty Columbia." 
 
 At 9 :30 we took a train on the Oregon Shortline 
 Railway up along the Columbia — south shore — to the 
 locks at the Cascades, a three hours' run, and then 
 came down again upon a powerful steamboat of the 
 Yukon type, though not so large. It took us about 
 four and one-half hours with only three landings 
 and with the current. The last fifteen or twenty 
 miles of the trip the river was fully two miles wide, 
 although at the Cascades it had narrowed to be no 
 broader than the Kanawha. On either side the val- 
 ley was generally occupied by farms and meadows, 
 grazing cattle, many orchards, substantial farm- 
 steads. A long-time settled country and naturally 
 fertile. And along either shore, at intervals of not 
 more than a quarter of a mile, were the fish-traps, 
 the wheels, the divers handy contrivances of man, to 
 catch the infatuated salmon. Until I saw the swarm- 
 ing waters of that creek of Ketchikan, my mind had 
 failed to comprehend the fatuity of these fish. This 
 year, owing, they say, to the influence of the hatch- 
 eries established by the Government, the catch of 
 salmon here has been enormous; so great, in fact, 
 that "hundreds of tons" of the salmon had to be
 
 ALOXG THE COLUMBIA RIVER.
 
 SEATTLE. 223 
 
 thrown away, owing to the inability of the canneries 
 to handle them before they had spoiled. 
 
 The Portland people whom I have met and talked 
 with all tell me that even though Seattle secures the 
 Alaskan trade, even though Seattle and Tacoma ob- 
 tain the lion 's share of the waxing commerce of China 
 and Japan, yet will Portland be great, because 
 she must ever remain the mistress of the trade of 
 that vast region drained by the Columbia and the 
 Willamette, all of whose products come to her by 
 water, or by a rail haul that is wholly downgrade. 
 And when I realize that the Columbia is plied by 
 steamboats even up in Canada, a thousand miles in- 
 land, where we traversed its valley on the Canadian 
 Pacific Railway, and that when Uncle Sam has built 
 a few more locks, these same boats can then come 
 down to Portland, and Portland boats ascend even 
 to the Canadian towns, as well as traverse Washing- 
 ton and enter Idaho and Montana, then is it that I 
 realize that the future of this fine city is most cer- 
 tainly well assured.
 
 224 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 THIRTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 the valley op the willamette. 
 
 State of Oregon, the Yalley op the Willamette, \ 
 
 October 3, 1903. / 
 
 From Portland to San Francisco. Written wliile moving 
 tliirty miles an hour on the Southern Pacific Railway. 
 
 Here we are flying due south from Portland, cross- 
 ing the entire State of Oregon. We have left Port- 
 land on the 8:30 morning train — "The Southern 
 Limited" — and shall be in "Frisco" at eight o'clock 
 to-morrow night. We are now ascending the beautiful 
 valley of the Willamette, ' ' Will-am-ett ; ' ' with a fierce 
 accent on the am. Flat and level as a table — ten to 
 twenty miles wide and two hundred miles long, ly- 
 ing between the Coast Range on the west and the 
 higher Cascade Mountains on the east. A land of 
 perfect fertility, so gracious a country as I have 
 never yet beheld. In winter, rarely any snow, plenty 
 of rain and very much moist Scotch air. In summer, 
 a sunshine that ripens fields of wheat, a moisture that 
 grows the biggest apples and prunes and small fruits. 
 Everywhere neat, tidy farmhouses, big barns. Great 
 stacks of wheat straw and as big ones of hay, and 
 these generally tented in with brown canvas. We 
 are passing, too, extensive fields of hop vines, an es- 
 pecially lucrative crop at present prices — twenty-five 
 cents a pound, while seven cents is reckoned as the
 
 THE VALLEY OF THE WILLAMETTE. 225 
 
 cost. Everywhere we see flocks of chickens, turkeys 
 and some geese plucking the stubble fields, for the 
 crops are all cut and harvested. And every now and 
 then we espy a superb Mongolian pheasant in gor- 
 geous plumage, for they have become acclimated and 
 multiply in this salubrious climate. Herds of fine 
 cattle and sheep are grazing in the meadows, and the 
 horses are large and look well cared for. A rich, fat 
 land, filled with a well-to-do population. I have just 
 fallen into talk with a young lawyer who lives at the 
 port of Toledo, whore Uncle Sam is dredging the bar 
 at the mouth of the Yaquina River, and to which city 
 new railroads are coming from the interior, and where 
 they expect a second Portland to grow up. He tells 
 me that east of the Cascade Mountains lie other fer- 
 tile valleys west of the Rockies, and where also is the 
 great cattle and stock raising region of the State, 
 and where moisture is precipitated sufficient to save 
 the need of irrigation. 
 
 Now we are just coming to the Umpqua River and 
 the town of Roseburg — a garden full of superb roses 
 blooming by the station — where stages may be taken 
 to the coast at Coos Bay, another growing seaport 
 section, where extensive coal mining and timbering 
 prevail. And as the dusk grows we are passing over 
 the divide to Rogue River and its verdant valley, 
 which we shall traverse in the night. Oregon is green 
 and the verdure much like that of England — the 
 same moist skies, with a hotter summer sun urging 
 all nature to do its best.
 
 226 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 In the night we shall climb over the Siskiyou 
 Mountains, and by dawn will be in sight of Mount 
 Shasta, At Portland we were amidst mists and fogs 
 and drizzling rain, so we caught no glimpses of Mt. 
 Hood and Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helena and Mt. 
 Jefferson, all of whose towering snow-clad cones may 
 be seen on a clear day. We hope that to-morrow Mt. 
 Shasta will be less bashful and not hide her white 
 head. 
 
 Sunday a. m. , October 4th. 
 
 In California! We were called at six o'clock that 
 we might see Mt, Shasta, and also have a drink from 
 the famous waters of Shasta Spring. Mt. Shasta we 
 did not see, so great were the fog masses and mists 
 enshrouding her, but we have had a drink from the 
 elixir fountain. A water much like the springs at 
 Addison, in Wfebster County, W. Va., but icy cold. 
 
 Now we are coming down the lovely valley of the 
 Sacramento. A downgrade all the way to "Frisco." 
 The verdure is growing more tropical. The under- 
 growth of the forests is more and more luxuriant. 
 I see big, red lilies by the swift -water-side. The air 
 is milder. We have descended already 1,600 feet 
 since passing Shasta Spring. We have five hundred 
 feet more to drop to Oakland. We are now in a rug- 
 gedly volcanic mining country, many iron, lead and 
 copper mines and once placer diggings for gold, these 
 latter now pretty much worked out, only a few Chi- 
 nese laboriously washing here and there.
 
 THE VALLEY OP THE WILLAMETTE. 227 
 
 Now we are at Keswick and see our first groves of 
 figs and almonds and some wide-reaching palms and 
 the spreading umbrella-trees, and many prune or- 
 chards. The valley is widening, the air is warmer 
 than we have known it for many days. We are surely 
 in California. 
 
 I have just been talking with the brakeman. He 
 has been in Dawson and on the Klondike. "Mushed" 
 through the White Pass, but, after reaching Dawson, 
 he lost heart and came back again without a stake. 
 The man who failed ! Another, a big man, with a 
 strong jaw and keen eye, has just climbed on the 
 rear platform. He, too, has been in Dawson, stayed 
 one day, bought a claim in the morning for $1,000, 
 and sold it in the evening for $15,000, and then came 
 right back to his almond groves to invest his make 
 and thereafter rest content with California. The 
 man who won. 
 
 Near us sits a black-eyed Russian woman, young 
 and comely, whose husband was one of the discov- 
 erers of gold in Nome, and with her the loveliest 
 blue-eyed Norwegian maiden just arrived from Ham- 
 merfest. "My husband's sister who is come to 
 America to stay," the Russian says in perfect Eng- 
 lish. She is learning to talk American, and wonders 
 at the huge cars, the multitude of people, the dis- 
 tances — "only a few hours from Trondhjem to Kris- 
 tiania, but over four days and nights from New York 
 to Seattle!" she exclaims. And her blue eyes grow
 
 228 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 big with wonder at the half -tropical panorama now 
 unrolling before us. 
 
 I am writing this letter by bits as we travel. We 
 are now on a straight track, as from my improved 
 handwriting you may detect. A stretch of thirty- 
 seven miles straight as the crow flies. We are past 
 the smaller fruit farms of the upper Sacramento 
 Valley; we are out on the interior plain that from 
 here extends all down through California, a thousand 
 miles almost to Mexico. We are in the wonderful 
 garden land of the State. On either side of us 
 stretches away, as far as the eye can see, a flat, level 
 plain. It is one monstrous wheat field, and fences 
 only at rare intervals mark it into separate holdings. 
 On the east, far on the sky line, extend the snow- 
 tipped summits of the Sierra Nevada Mountains; on 
 the west, the Coast Range. We have passed out of 
 the region of mists and clouds, and are now in a 
 clear, warm sunshine, the heavens an arching vault 
 of cloudless blue. As clear as on the Yukon almost, 
 but with many times the warmth. This is the region 
 of the Mammoth Bonanza wheat farms you have so 
 often read about. And one feels that man hereabouts 
 does things in a big way. 
 
 In Oregon, they tell me, the climate is so equable 
 that a single blanket keeps you warm of night the 
 year round. You need it in summer ; you do not need 
 more in winter. Here, 1 fancy, you scarcely need 
 any at all, so much further south have we already 
 come.
 
 THE VALLEY OF THE WILLAMETTE. 220 
 
 Even yet we are passing through the wide stretches 
 of wheat lands, wheat now milled in California and 
 sent in many big ships to the Orient. The Chinaman 
 is just learning the joy of an American tiap-jack or 
 a loaf of wheat bread — and he can't get enough. 
 
 Dusk has come down upon us before we have 
 reached Carquinez Strait, over which our train — a 
 long train — is carried by a monstrous ferry boat, and 
 then, skirting San Francisco Bay, we are soon among 
 the suburban illuminations of Oakland. Across the 
 five miles of water lies San Francisco, its million glit- 
 tering electric lights stretching several miles and cov- 
 ering the hills on which the city is built, while far out 
 on the right flashes the intermittent gleam of the 
 light-houses marking the entrance of the Golden Gate. 
 The ferry-boat taking us across is said to be the larg- 
 est in the world, and the Norwegian lass's big blue 
 eyes grow all the bigger as she looks about her on the 
 multitude of fellow-passengers. And then we are 
 ashore and are whirling through broad, well-lighted 
 streets to our hotel, ' ' The Palace, ' ' where now we are.
 
 230 
 
 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 FOURTEENTH LETTER, 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO. 
 
 Los Angeles, October 12, 1903. 
 We slept in the old, famous, and yet well-patron- 
 ized Palace Hotel, and on which the Fair estate has 
 just renewed a mortgage for another term of years. 
 
 In the morning we essayed to have a look at the 
 city, and so took a long, wide electric car devoted to 
 that purpose. A ride of thirty miles, and all for the 
 price of only "two bits"! We circled around the 
 city, we traversed its streets and avenues, climbed 
 and descended its multitude of hills, went every- 
 where that an electric car might dare to go, and were 
 given the chance to try the cable trams when the 
 declivity was too steep for anything to move that did 
 not cling. 
 
 The sunshine was delicious, the watered lawns and 
 watered flowers superb, the unwatered, blistered sand 
 spaces, vacant lots and dust-laden winds dreadful. 
 
 The city pleased and disappointed me. It is an 
 old city — half a century old — old for the driving 
 West, and mainly built of wood. Miles and miles of 
 small, crowded, two-story, wooden dwellings, sadly 
 needing a coat of paint, and mostly constructed thirty 
 or forty years ago. A town once replete with vigor, 
 that has slumbered for several decades, and is now
 
 SAN FRANCISCO. 231 
 
 reviving into life again. The vast mansions of the 
 bonanza kings, the railway lords on "Nob Hill," are 
 now all out of date and mostly empty of their former 
 occupants. The Fairs, the Mackeys, the O'Briens 
 are dead, their heirs scattered to the winds. The 
 Crokers, the Stanfords, the Huntingtons are rem- 
 iniscences. The street urchins know them no more. 
 Fashionable San Francisco has moved to another 
 hill. The tenement quarter of the town has crept to 
 their very doors. But the business section of the city 
 has not moved as it has in New York. It stands just 
 where it always stood. The Palace Hotel, once the 
 glory and boast of the Pacific Slope, is still the chief 
 hostelry of the town; and yet the city is instinct 
 with a new life. Its lively, hustling thoroughfares 
 are full of a new vigor; a new tide of Asiatic and 
 Oriental commerce has entered the somewhat som- 
 nolent city. All this, the magic result of the battle 
 of Manila Bay, and the new relation of the United 
 States to the far east. Where the Pacific Mail S. 
 S. Co. sent a single monthly ship across the Pacific 
 five years ago, now six lines of great freight and 
 passenger steamships are unable to satisfy the in- 
 creasing demands of trade. Now twenty steamers 
 and a multitude of sailing craft come to deliver 
 and take cargoes, where few or none came six 
 years ago. On the land side, too, there is progress. 
 The A. T. & Santa Fe Railway has broken through 
 the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railway Com- 
 pany, so cleverly and firmly fastened by Huntington
 
 232 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 and his friends; and there are hopes that other 
 lines may yet establish independent relations with 
 the city. Along with this new growth of commerce 
 have come a new throng of energetic men, and new 
 fortunes are being made — and more widely dis- 
 tributed. The city, the commercial center, the ocean 
 port, are all growing at a steadier, healthier gait 
 than in the ancient feverish days of bonanza kings 
 and railroad magnates. For awhile, San Francisco 
 was "in the soup," so to speak. Its rich men were 
 leaving it, did leave it; its sand-lots prole- 
 tariat threatened to gain the upper hand; its mid- 
 dle class, the people making and possessing only 
 moderate incomes, were doubtful of a success that 
 to them had not yet come. To the north, sleepy 
 Portland had wakened up; Seattle and Tacoma 
 had been born; and in the south, Los Angeles had 
 risen, like a phoenix, from the torrid sands. But 
 San Francisco did not stir. Then Dewey sank the 
 fleet of Montejo; the nation quickened with a con- 
 sciousness that she was a world-power ; that the trade 
 and commercial dominance of the Pacific lands 
 and isles and seas were rightly hers, and in a night 
 San Francisco found herself re-endowed with new 
 life. 
 
 After the tramway ride, we spent an afternoon 
 strolling about through the business streets and along 
 the docks and wharves, viewing the many new shops, 
 splendid modern stores, quite equaling, in the sump- 
 tuous display of their wares, the great trading
 
 SAN FRANCISCO. 233 
 
 centers of New York and Chicago, and noting the 
 volume of wholesale traffic on the down-town streets, 
 the jobbing center, and the busy stir along the water- 
 front for several miles. 
 
 No finer sight have we seen than when we stood 
 near the surf-washed rocks, famous as the home of 
 the sea-lions, and, turning our gaze toward the wind- 
 tossed billows of the Pacific Ocean, beheld eight 
 or ten full-rigged ships and four-masted barques con- 
 verging on the narrow entrance of the Golden Gate, 
 coming in out of the west, laden with the teas and 
 silks and commerce of the Orient, their multitudi- 
 nous sails all set before the breeze, like a flock of 
 white-winged sea birds, while slipping among them 
 a steamer from Honolulu and another from Nome 
 came swiftly in. 
 
 Another day we were ferried five miles across the 
 wide bay toward the north, to the pretty suburban 
 residence section of Sausalito, and there taking an 
 electric road were brought to the foot of Mount 
 Tamalpais, and then changing to a climbing car were 
 pushed ten miles up near 4,000 feet into the air, 
 to the top of a volcanic cone that rises out of 
 sea and bay, and dominates the landscape for many 
 miles. Below us, at our feet, lay the great Bay 
 of San Francisco and the city itself, with its green, 
 garden-like suburban villages, the many islands, the 
 ships of war and of commerce, the narrows of the 
 Golden Gate; and, westward, the Pacific Ocean, with 
 the distant Farallon Islands, outposts of the Orient,
 
 234 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 while far to the east, peeping above the clouds, 
 gleamed the snow-capped summits of the Sierra 
 Nevadas. 
 
 Another day, we visited the Presidio, and rejoiced 
 to see the blue uniform of Uncle Sam after the many- 
 weeks of red coats upon the Yukon. Say what you 
 may, it quickens the blood to catch a glimpse of 
 our boys in blue. I well remember how good it 
 seemed when we met them in command of the fortress 
 of El Moro, at Havana, two years ago. 
 
 We also spent a night in Chinatown — or part of 
 the night — for we were bound to see its horrors and 
 its joys. The opium dens — a picture of Hop Sing 
 and his cat, the beast also a victim of the habit — 
 I bring home to you; the theatre, where the audi- 
 ence and the actors were equally interesting; the Joss 
 house or temple; the lady with the tiny feet, one 
 of whose midget shoes I took off and have to show 
 you; the barber shop where they shave the head and 
 scrape out the ears and nose ; the many handsome 
 shops and almost priceless curios; and the swarms 
 of bright-eyed, laughing, friendly, gentle children. 
 
 While the Chinese upon the Pacific Coast, and in 
 San Francisco more particularly, have been greatly 
 lessened in number the last few years, it is interest- 
 ing to note how many of the more progressive Japan- 
 ese are now to be seen in all of the great cities 
 along the Pacific coast. In Vancouver, all of the bell 
 boys and elevator boys in the large Hotel Vancouver 
 were bright-eyed Japs. Keen, intelligent, wide-awake
 
 A BIG REDWOOD.
 
 SAN FRANCISCO. 237 
 
 little fellows, speaking good English, dressed in 
 American style, and seeming to know their business 
 perfectly. We saw them at Seattle and Tacoma and 
 Portland, and now we find them in large numbers 
 in San Francisco. They get along well with the 
 white man. They dress like him, eat like him, walk 
 like him, and try to look as much like him as pos- 
 sible. They seek employment as servants, as day 
 laborers, and are also getting extensively into trade 
 in a small way. They keep prices up like a white 
 man and join labor unions like the white man, and 
 sympathetically act with him to a degree that elim- 
 inates the prejudice that hedges in and drives out 
 the Chinaman. The Japanese seem to supply a genu- 
 ine want in the Pacific slope. I learned, also, that 
 Japanese capital is now coming into California and 
 making substantial investments, the expenditure of 
 their money giving employment to American white 
 labor. 
 
 Coming down the Sacramento Valley the other 
 day, I noticed that all the labor gangs employed by 
 the Southern Pacific Railroad were Greeks, dull-look- 
 ing Greeks who could speak no English. It seemed 
 to me as I looked into their semi-Oriental faces, that 
 they gave less promise of satisfactory American citi- 
 zenship than did the up-to-date, alert, intelligent 
 Japanese. The one represented a semi-Oriental coun- 
 try, whose greatness was destroyed by Rome two 
 thousand years ago; the other expressed the awak- 
 ened intelligence of the new Orient, the new Japan
 
 238 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 whose great modern navy to-day ranks first upon the 
 Pacific. 
 
 That night when we first crossed the bay toward 
 the long line of glittering city, the tall Norwegian 
 said to me : "I have sailed all about this world and 
 visited many cities, but San Francisco suits me the 
 very best of them all. And his black-eyed Tartar 
 wife from Moscow exclaimed: "Ah, I will never leave 
 here till I die." All who visit San Francisco feel 
 this subtle charm. There is a certain something in 
 the air that soothes as well as stirs. Its lawns and 
 flowers where water is applied ; its sunshine, never 
 too hot, for it is tempered by the breezes from the sea ; 
 no winter, rarely a dash of snow; no torrid sun; an 
 atmosphere almost gentle, yet not destroying energy. 
 
 Leaving San Francisco, we took the little narrow- 
 gauge railway that leads out south of the city, skirts 
 the bay and climbs the Coast Range through the fa- 
 mous grove of immense redwood trees that comes 
 down to the sea at Santa Cruz. A pretty village 
 among gardens and orchards of prunes and apricots 
 and almonds, famous for its flowers and its fish. On 
 the long pier we watched the Italian fishermen mend- 
 ing their nets and loading them into their lateen- 
 sailed boats. Here the rainbow-hued Barroda is 
 caught in the deep sea and shipped to the city ; while, 
 sitting all along the pier, were old folks and young 
 catching smelts with hook and line. An old man with 
 long, white beard said to me, as he took off a smelt 
 and put it in his creel, "If a man has nothing to do
 
 ITALIAN FISHING CRAFT AT SANTA CRUZ. 
 
 APPROACHING SAN FRANCISCO.
 
 SAN FRANCISCO. 241 
 
 but just to live, this is the most salubrious spot along 
 this coast. I 've tried them all. ' ' 
 
 From Santa Cruz we went over to the quaint old 
 Spanish town of Monterey, once California's capital, 
 now the barrack sanitarium of Uncle Sam's soldier 
 boys, and upon whose quiet main street still dwells 
 the Mexican-Spanish beauty to whom Tecumseh Sher- 
 man once made love, and in whose garden yet grows 
 the pomegranate he planted in token of their tryst. 
 She has never wed, but treasures yet the memory of 
 her soldier lover. 
 
 Near Monterey is that marvelously lovely park, 
 surrounding the great Del Monte Hotel, built by 
 Crocker and Stanford and Huntington in their days 
 of power, and where, among groves and lawns and 
 gardens, winds the seventeen-mile drive of which the 
 world has heard so much. Imagine the parks of Blen- 
 heim and Chatsworth and Windsor all combined, but 
 filled with palmettos and palms and semi-tropical 
 verdure — giant live oaks and Norfolk pines and 
 splendid redwood, with all the flowers of the earth, 
 with ponds and fountains, and you will have some 
 faint conception of the beauty of Del Monte, an ob- 
 ject-lesson of what the landscape gardener may do in 
 California. We regretted leaving this superb place, 
 but were glad to have had even a glimpse of it. 
 
 All the day we now hastened south on the flying 
 "Coast Limited," bound for Santa Barbara. First 
 ascending the broad valley of Salinas River, the 
 Coast Range close on our right, a higher range of
 
 242 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 mountains on our left, until, converging, we pierced 
 the barrier by a long tunnel and slid down to San 
 Louis Obispo and then to the sea. Many monstrous 
 fields of sugar beet, miles of prune and almond and 
 apricot trees, thriving orchards all of them ; then mile 
 after mile of wheat stubble, stacks of wheat straw, 
 piles of sacked wheat at the by-stations ; then herds 
 of cattle and many horses as we reached the head of 
 the valley. A rich and fecund land, held originally 
 in big estates, now beginning to be cut up into the 
 smaller farms of the fruit growers. 
 
 Toward the end of the afternoon we were skirting 
 along by the breaker-lashed coast of the Pacific. A 
 clear sky, a violent wind and tempestuous, foam- 
 covered sea. We sat with the windows open, not 
 minding the heat of the sun. The tide was at ebb, 
 and upon the sand we saw many sea birds, gulls in 
 myriads, snipe, plover, yellow-legs, sand-pipers in 
 flocks, coots and curlew. We also passed a number of 
 carriages driving close to the receding waters. 
 
 The country grew constantly warmer, the soil re- 
 sponding to cultivation with more and more luxuriant 
 crops ; among these, fields of lima beans, miles of them, 
 which are threshed out and shipped in enormous 
 quantity. It was dark when we drew in at Santa 
 Barbara, and we did not know what hotel to go to, 
 but, tossing up, chose the Potter. Many runners were 
 calling their hostelries; the Potter porter alone was 
 silent. As we drove in his 'bus through the palm- 
 bordered streets, a cozy home showing here and there
 
 OUR FRANCISCAN GUIDE. 
 
 THE FRANCISCAN GARDEN — SANTA BARBARA.
 
 THE SEA — SANTA BARBARA. 
 
 
 
 
 
 THE SEA— SANTA BARBARA.
 
 SAN FRANCISCO. .247 
 
 in the glare of an electric street light, we wondered 
 what our luck would be. Imagine our delight when 
 we drew up at the stately portal of a modern palace, 
 built in the Spanish style and right on the borders of 
 the sea. The moon was almost full, the tide near 
 flood, the sunset breeze had died, the sea air soft and 
 sweet, and the palace ours! A new hotel, two mil- 
 lions its cost, no finer on the Pacific Coast. And in 
 this off season the prices were most moderate. No- 
 where yet have we been so sumptuously housed. In 
 the lovely dining-room we sat at supper by a big 
 window looking out over the moonlit sea. 
 
 In the morning we wandered far down upon the 
 beach, watching the breakers beyond the point, and 
 later went up to the famous old Franciscan Monas- 
 tery, a mile beyond the town. A shrewd yet simple 
 father in brown monk's robe who asked many ques- 
 tions of the outside world, showed us all about, and 
 in the garden stood for his photograph, quite pleased 
 at the attention. No more charming wintering spot 
 have we yet come to than Santa Barbara. 
 
 In the late evening we entrained again and took the 
 local for Los Angeles. For quite an hour and a half 
 we ran close to the ocean, the perpetual breaking of 
 the crested waves upon the shore sounding above the 
 roar of the moving train. A yet greener land we now 
 passed through, everywhere watered by irrigation, 
 everywhere responding with seemingly greater luxu- 
 riance. It was just dusk as we turned inland, and 
 quite dark when we came through the big tunnel into
 
 248 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 the head waters of the Los Angeles Valley. Just then 
 a bright young fellow sat down beside me, and, talk- 
 ing with him, I was pleased to find him from West 
 Virginia. A. Judy, from Pendleton County. A few 
 years ago the family had come to this southern 
 land and all have prospered. He was full of the zest 
 of the life that wins. 
 
 Presently we came to many lights among shade 
 trees, mostly palms, then houses and more lights, wide 
 streets showing themselves. We were in Los Angeles, 
 the metropolis of Southern California, the furthest 
 south that on this journey we shall go.
 
 LOS ANGELES. 249 
 
 FIFTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 LOS ANGELES. 
 
 Los Angeles, October 13, 1903. 
 
 We slept in Los Angeles with our windows wide 
 open and felt no chill in the dry, balmy air, although 
 a gentle breeze from seaward sifted through the lace 
 curtains all night long. The sun was streaming in 
 when at last we awoke to the sound of New England 
 church bells. We breakfasted on plates piled high 
 with big, red, sweet strawberries, dead ripe, evenly 
 ripe, but not one whit over ripe. A ripeness and 
 sweetness we have never before tasted, even in Ox- 
 ford. In Seattle and Tacoma we met the royal crab 
 of the Puget Sound, and found him big and bigger 
 than the crabs of England and of France — big as 
 dinner plates, all of them, and now we find in the 
 great, luscious strawberry of Los Angeles another 
 American product as big as those that grow in the 
 gardens of merrie England. 
 
 Los Angeles ! How can I tell you of it and of the 
 lovely region of the American Riviera all round about 
 it? My ideas of Los Angeles had been indefinite. I 
 had only heard of it. I only knew that up in Dawson 
 and in Alaska the frost-stung digger for gold dreams 
 of Southern California and the country of Los An- 
 geles, and when, during his seven long months of win-
 
 250 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 ter and darkness, he assures himself of his stake and 
 his fortune, he talks of the far south and prepares to 
 go there and to end his days among these orange 
 groves and olive orchards and teeming gardens. And 
 when he dies — so it is said — every good Yukoner and 
 Alaskan has no other prayer than to be translated to 
 Southern California! So I had imagined much for 
 this perhaps most charming of all regions of the semi- 
 tropics, within the immediate borders of the United 
 States. But I had not yet conceived the fine, modern 
 city among all of this delight of climate and of ver- 
 dure. A city with broad, asphalted business streets, 
 built up on either side with new, modern sky-scrapeis 
 far exceeding in bigness those of San Francisco. The 
 edifices bordering Market Street in San Francisco are 
 fine, but old in type — most or all erected thirty or 
 forty years ago — while the many huge blocks of Los 
 Angeles are as up to date as those of New York. It 
 possesses two hundred miles of modern electric tram- 
 ways, and H. E. Huntington has sold out his holdings 
 in the Southern Pacific left him by his uncle, C. P. 
 Huntington, and has put and is now putting his mil- 
 lions into the electric tramway system of Los An- 
 geles. 
 
 During the morning we rode some thirty miles 
 upon the tourist's car, seeing the city, its many fine 
 parks, its public buildings, its business blocks, its ex- 
 traordinary extent of imposing residences. And when 
 we might ride no longer, we strolled on through 
 Adams Street and Chester Place and St. James Place,
 
 MAREXGO AVEXUF — PASADENA. 
 
 STREET VIEW — LOS ANGELES.
 
 LOS ANGELES. 253 
 
 and among those sections of the residence quarter 
 where no tramways are allowed to profane the public 
 way. And here among these modern palaces, perhaps, 
 we learned to comprehend the real inwardness of Los 
 Angeles' astonishing growth, for many of these superb 
 homes are not built and owned by the business men 
 making fortunes out of the commerce of the city, but 
 are built and owned by those who have already ac- 
 quired fortunes in other parts of the United States 
 and of the world, and who by reason of the genial 
 climate of Southern California, have come here to 
 live out the balance of their days. Their incomes are 
 derived from sources elsewhere than in California, 
 and they spend freely of those incomes in the region 
 of their new homes. The exquisite lawns, the flower- 
 ing shrubs, the tropical and semi-tropical palms and 
 palmettos, all kept and cared for by means of the 
 constant use of water and expert gardeners' skill, give 
 to the city a residence section of marvelous charm. 
 Water does it all, and man helps the water. 
 
 Los Angeles possesses many fine churches and 
 schools and two flourishing colleges. One run by the 
 Methodist Church ; the other under the control of the 
 State. From a city of twenty-five thousand in 1890, 
 Los Angeles is now grown to one hundred' and twenty- 
 five thousand, and is still expanding by leaps and 
 bounds. It is the center of the gardens and orchards 
 and citrus fruit trade of Southern California, and is 
 the Mecca toward whose environs comes in perpetual
 
 254 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 procession the unending army of the world's "One 
 Lungers," and their friends. 
 
 Of an afternoon we rode out to Pasadena in the 
 swift, through electric train. Once a separate com- 
 munity, now already become a suburb of the greater 
 growing city. "The finest climate on the earth," they 
 say, and mankind from all parts of the earth are 
 there to prove it. A large town of residences, each 
 standing apart in its own garden; many surrounded 
 by oranges and pomegranates and figs. Lovely homes 
 and occupied by a cultivated society. 
 
 We did not tarry to see the celebrated ostrich farm, 
 which is one of the famous sights of Pasadena, but 
 went on toward the mountain chain beyond and north 
 of Pasadena to the base of towering Mount Low, and 
 climbed right up its face a thousand feet on an in- 
 clined plane steeper than any of Kanawha's, and then 
 another thousand feet by five miles of winding electric 
 railway. A wonderful ride into the blue sky, with a 
 yet more wonderful panorama stretching for many 
 miles beneath our feet. All the valley of the Los 
 Angeles, the innumerable towns and villages and 
 farms and groves and orchards and vineyards stretch- 
 ing far as the eye could see until bounded by the 
 mountains of Mexico to the south, and the shimmering 
 waters of the Pacific to the west, and to the north and 
 east a limitless expanse of scarred and serrated vol- 
 canic mountain ranges, like the gigantic petrified 
 waves of a mighty sea. Below us the perfect verdure 
 of irrigated land, the patches and masses of green-
 
 LOS ANGELES. 255 
 
 ness everywhere threaded and interspersed by the ir- 
 rigating ditches and pools and ponds whereby the 
 precious water is impounded and distributed when 
 used. 
 
 Los Angeles lies very near the center of an im- 
 mense cove, whose sea line marks the great indenture 
 on the southwest of the United States, where the coast 
 bends in from Cape Conception and curves southeast- 
 ward to the borders of Mexico, a total coastal frontage 
 on the Pacific Ocean of near three hundred miles. 
 
 On the north, the mountains of the Coast Range, 
 and the westward jutting spurs of the Sierra Ne- 
 vada come together and form a barrier against the 
 cold northern airs. Eastward their extension forms a 
 high barrier against the colder airs of the Rocky Moun- 
 tain region. Los Angeles lies at about the point where 
 these protecting mountain ranges recede to near sixty 
 miles from the sea, itself some twenty and thirty miles 
 from the twin ports of Santa Monica and San Pedro, 
 and is the commercial center of this rich alluvial and 
 sheltered region, of which Santa Barbara, on a lovely 
 bay, is the chief northern center, and San Diego, one 
 hundred and fifty miles to the south, upon the second 
 finest harbor in California, is the most southern port 
 and trade outlet. A vast "ventura," as the Span- 
 iards called it, upon this fertile plain and rolling 
 upland anything will grow if only it has water. For 
 three or four months in the year, from early Novem- 
 ber to March, the skies pour down an ample rainfall, 
 and the world is a garden. During the other eight
 
 256 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 months, man — the active American — now irrigates 
 the land with water stored during the rainy season, 
 and thus a perpetual and prolific yield is won from 
 the fecund soil. Here the famous seedless orange was 
 discovered, perpetuated, and has become the most 
 coveted citrous fruit. Fortunes have been made from 
 the raising of these oranges alone. The immense and 
 fragrant strawberries ripen every month the year 
 round. Figs and pomegranates abound. Apples, 
 pears, olives and grapes yield enormous and profitable 
 crops. No frosts, no drouths. Last year Los Angeles 
 and its contributing orchards shipped twenty-five 
 thousand carloads of citrous fruit. This year they 
 reckon to do yet more. Their capacity is only lim- 
 ited by the markets' demand, and both seem boundless. 
 The air is dry like that of the Yukon Valley, and 
 similarly, extremes of temperature are easily borne. 
 It is never unpleasantly hot in Southern California, 
 they say, just as the Yukoner vows he never suffers 
 from the cold. "Only give us water to wash our 
 gold;" "water to irrigate our crops," cries each, 
 "and we will become richer than the mind of man 
 can think." But the types of men and women are 
 somewhat different in the two extremes. A sturdier 
 race wins fortune from the soil in the Klondike land; 
 there the children have rosier faces and are more 
 alert. On the crowded streets of the southern city 
 the pale presence of the "one lungers" is at once re- 
 marked. But for this, the people might be the same.
 
 LOS ANGELES. 257 
 
 We left this gracious garden land, with its gentle 
 climate, by the midday train, this time leaving the 
 coast and following the interior San Joaquin Valley 
 route. Just at the outskirts of the city our train 
 halted a moment, and, looking from the window, I 
 saw a most astonishing spectacle — an extensive enclo- 
 sure with a large, wide-roofed building in its midst, 
 and enclosure, roof and air all thick with myriads of 
 pigeons. Here is the greatest pigeon roost of the 
 world, where an enterprising bird lover raises squabs 
 by the thousands, cans them in his own factory, and 
 sends them all over the earth to the delight of the 
 epicure. Just why such myriads of birds should not 
 fly away, I do not know, but there they were covering 
 the ground, the roof, and filling the air in circular 
 flights, and seemed rarely or never to leave the borders 
 of the enclosure. 
 
 For a few hours we retraced our way and then 
 turned eastward across the edge of the great Mojave 
 Desert. Crossing the barrier of the San Fernando 
 Mountains on the north, through a mile-and-a-half- 
 long tunnel, we left the greenness of olive grove and 
 orange orchard behind, and came out into a contin- 
 ually more and more arid country. Cactus and yucca 
 began to appear and to multiply, the dwarf shrunken 
 palmetto of the Mexican plains grew more and more 
 plentiful, and then we came through dry, parched 
 gulches and canons, out onto a dead flat plain stretch- 
 ing away toward the eastern horizon as far as the eye 
 could see — sand and sage brush and stunted cactus;
 
 258 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 a hundred miles or more away a faint blue mountain 
 range showing in the slanting sunlight against the 
 eastern sky. Dry and arid and hopeless to man and 
 beast. A terrible waste to cross, or even to enter, and 
 lifeless and desolate beyond concept. 
 
 During the night we crossed over the high, arid 
 Tehachapi Mountains and descended into the San Joa- 
 quin Valley, traversing that wonderfully fertile gar- 
 den land until in the morning we were at Oakland. 
 We then crossed the five miles of wide harbor and 
 took our last breakfast in the city of the Golden Gate. 
 
 After night had fallen and I sat with my cigar, I 
 chanced to fall in with an interesting young Jap, 
 "R. Onishi," on his first visit to America, correspond- 
 ent of the "Jije Shimpo," Tokio's greatest daily 
 newspaper. He had come over to investigate the grow- 
 ing rice plantations of T&xas, with a view to Japan- 
 ese capital becoming interested in development there. 
 He had been much impressed with the opportunity 
 there offered, and should report favorably on the 
 proposed enterprise. Not to use Japanese labor, but 
 for Japanese capital under Japanese management to 
 use American labor. So does the opportunity and 
 natural wealth of our country begin to attract 
 the investment of the stored wealth of Asia as well 
 as of Europe. Like the rice dealer I met on the 
 "Kaiser Frederich, " crossing the Atlantic two years 
 ago, Mr. Onishi said that American rice brings the 
 highest price of any in the markets of the world, and 
 he looks for a large export trade to Asia of American
 
 SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 259 
 
 rice, as well as wheat. And America, how vast and 
 rich and hopeful a land it seemed to him! 
 
 I have now seen almost the entire Pacific Coast of 
 our Northern American Continent. From Skagway, 
 from Dawson to the sight of Mexico. Its old and its 
 new towns and cities, its ports and trade centers have 
 I visited, and greatly has the journey pleased and 
 profited me. The dim perception of our future Pa- 
 cific power that first dawned upon me at Vancouver 
 has now become a settled conviction. We are just 
 beginning to comprehend the future dominance and 
 potency of our nation in Oriental trade, in commerce, 
 in wealth, in enlightened supremacy. And it fills the 
 imagination with boundless sweep to contemplate 
 what are the possibilities of these great Pacific States. 
 
 Among the cities of the future upon the Pacific 
 Coast, Seattle and Los Angeles are the two that im- 
 press me as affording the wider opportunity and cer- 
 tainty of growth, wealth and controlling influence 
 in trade, in commerce, in politics. If I were a young 
 man just starting out, I should choose one of them, 
 and in and through Seattle I believe there is the larger 
 chance. Or if I were on life's threshold and, say, 
 twenty-five and vigorous, I would pitch my tent 
 within the confines of the continent of Alaska, and by 
 energy, thrift and foresight, become one of its innu- 
 merable future millionaires.
 
 260 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 SIXTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 
 
 Salt Lake City, Utah, October 14, 1903. 
 We left San Francisco on the "Overland Limited" 
 train, taking the ten o'clock boat across the bay to 
 Oakland and there entering our car. It was a lovely 
 morning; the sky, blue, without a cloud; the sun, 
 brilliant, and not so hot as at Los Angeles. The city, 
 as we receded from it, lay spread before us, stretch- 
 ing several miles along the water and quite covering 
 the range of hills upon which it is built. Many 
 great ships were at the quays, many were anchored 
 out in the blue waters awaiting their turn to take 
 on cargo, and among these several battleships and 
 cruisers of our navy and one big monitor. Above 
 the city hung a huge black pall of smoke, for soft 
 coal — very soft — and thick asphaltic oil are the only 
 fuels on this coast. We had come to San Francisco 
 by night, and marveled at the myriad of electric 
 lights that illumined it; we now left it by day, 
 and yet more fully realized its metropolitan and 
 commercial greatness. 
 
 The ride, this time, was not along the northern 
 breadth of the Sacramento Valley, but by the older 
 route through the longer settled country to the south 
 of it. Still many immense wheatfields, hundreds of
 
 SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 261 
 
 sheep browsing among the stubble, and yet more of 
 the orchards of almonds, prunes, apricots, figs and 
 peaches. A monstrous fruit garden, for more than 
 one hundred miles; and everywhere fruit was dry- 
 ing in the sun, spread out in acres of small trays. 
 
 At Sacramento, we crossed the river on a long iron 
 bridge, and noted the many steamboats along the 
 wharves — the river is navigable thus far for steam- 
 boats — boats about the size of our Kanawha packets, 
 and flows with a swift current. 
 
 After leaving San Francisco, we began that long 
 ascent, which at last should carry us over the passes 
 of the Sierra Nevada Mountains some 6,000 feet above 
 the sea. The grades are easy, though persistent, the 
 track sweeping around mountain bases and along 
 deep valleys in wide ascending curves. All the day, 
 till evening, we were creeping up, up, up, following 
 one long ridge and then another, the distant snow 
 summits always before us and seemingly never much 
 nearer than at first. The lower slopes were, like 
 the Sacramento Valley, everywhere covered with well- 
 kept orchards, and everywhere we noted the universal 
 irrigation ditches of running water, constantly pres- 
 ent beside us or traversing our way. 
 
 As we climbed higher we began to see evidences of 
 present and past placer mining, many of the moun- 
 tain-sides being scarred and riven by the monitor- 
 thrown jets of water. 
 
 Just as the shadows began to fall aslant the 
 higher valleys, we commenced that long and irksome
 
 262 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 journeying through the snowsheds that, for so many- 
 miles, are necessary on this road. Coming over the 
 Canadian Pacific, we met few snowsheds through 
 the Rockies, and not more than two or three of 
 them in the Selkirks, but here they buried us early 
 and held on until long after the fall of night. 
 
 This road, you know, was originally the Central 
 Pacific, remaining so until swallowed by its stronger 
 rival of the south, the Southern Pacific, which now 
 owns and operates it. 
 
 As we rode along, I could not help recalling its 
 early history, the daring of its projectors, Hunt- 
 ington, Crocker, Stanford and Hopkins, and how it 
 never could or would have been built at all but 
 for the aid of the thousands of Chinese who, under 
 their Irish bosses, finally constructed it. 
 
 This morning, when we awoke, we had long passed 
 Reno in Nevada, and were flying down the Si- 
 erras' eastern slopes through the alkali deserts of 
 the interior basin, and all day long we have been 
 crossing these plains of sand and sage brush and 
 eternal alkali. We read of things, and think we 
 are informed, but only when we see the world face 
 to face do we begin to comprehend it. Only to-day 
 have I learned to comprehend that Desert and Death 
 are one. 
 
 On the Canadian Pacific Railway we had beheld 
 the great Columbia River plunge between the facing 
 canon cliffs of the Rocky Mountains and the Sel- 
 kirks where they almost touch, the very apex of
 
 THE SAGEBRUSH AND ALKALI DPJSERT.
 
 SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 265 
 
 that vast interior arid basin that stretches thence 
 all across the United States and on into Mexico. 
 At Yakima, in Washington State, we had crossed 
 the Cascade range and found the arid valley made 
 to bloom and blossom into a perpetual garden by 
 means of the melting snows that there fed the Yakima 
 River and adjacent streams. Now we were again 
 descending from the crests of the Sierra Nevadas, 
 down into this same vast basin where no Columbia 
 cuts it through and no Yakima irrigates its limit- 
 less and solitary aridness. For more than three hun- 
 dred miles have we now been traversing this expanse 
 of parched and naked waste. No water, no life, 
 no bird, no beast, no man. Two thousand miles and 
 more it stretches north and south, from Canada 
 into Mexico. Five hundred and forty miles is its 
 narrowest width. We beheld a spur of it the other 
 evening when we crossed the edge of the Mojave 
 desert in Southern California; we should have trav- 
 ersed it two days or more if we had taken the 
 Southern Pacific route through Arizona. As wide 
 in its narrowest part as from Charleston to New 
 York, or to Chicago ! What courage and what temer- 
 ity did those early pioneers possess who first ven- 
 tured to cross it with their lumbering prairie-schoon- 
 ers or on their grass-fed bronchos from the Eastern 
 plains ! And how many there were who perished in 
 the attempt! Yet water will change even these 
 blasted wastes, and, at the one or two stations where
 
 266 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 artesian wells have been successfully sunk, we saw 
 high-grown trees and verdant gardens. 
 
 Late in the afternoon we began to approach high, 
 barren hills and mountain spurs, all brown and sere, 
 save the sage brush. No cactus or even yucca here, 
 and after climbing and crossing a long, dry ridge, we 
 found ourselves descending into flat, sandy reaches, 
 that bore even no shrubs or plants whatsoever, save 
 a dead and somber sedgy grass in sparse, feeble 
 bunches, and while the land looked wet we saw no 
 water. Then far to the southeast glimmered a 
 silver streak, so faint that it seemed no more than 
 mist, and the streak grew and broadened and 
 gleamed until we knew it to be, in fact, Utah's 
 Great Salt Lake. Later, we came yet nearer to it 
 for a few miles, and then lost sight of it again. But 
 the face of the land had changed. We saw cattle 
 among the sage brush; cattle browsing on the sweet, 
 dry grass that grows close under the sage-brush 
 shadow on the better soils. Then we came to an oc- 
 casional mud dugout hut and sometimes a wooden 
 shack, and the country grew greener, grass — buf- 
 falo bunch grass — became triumphant over the sage 
 brush, and then, right in the midst of a waste of 
 sere yellowness, was an emerald meadow of alfalfa 
 and a man driving two stout horses hitched to a 
 mowing-machine cutting it, two women raking it and 
 tossing it. We were in the land of Mormondom, and 
 beheld their works. Now, the whole country became 
 green, irrigating ditches everywhere, substantial
 
 
 THE MORMON TEMPLE.
 
 SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 269 
 
 farmhouses, large, well-built barns and outhouses, 
 and miles of thrifty Lombardy poplars, marking the 
 roadways and the boundaries of the fields. 
 
 At Ogden, where we were three hours late, our 
 sleeper was taken off the through train to Cheyenne 
 and attached to the express for Salt Lake City. 
 We made no further stops, but, for an hour, whirled 
 through a green, fruitful, patiently-tilled landscape, 
 whose fertility and productiveness delighted eye and 
 brain. Many orchards, large, comfortable farm- 
 steads; wide meadows, green and abundant, as in 
 Holland, with cattle and horses feeding upon them; 
 stubble wheatfields, with flocks of sheep; great 
 beet fields and kitchen gardens in full crops; and 
 water — water in a thousand ditches everywhere! 
 Big farm wagons, drawn by large, strong horses, we 
 saw upon the highways; and farmers, in well-found 
 vehicles, returning from the city to their homes. 
 
 Then, far away, towering above all else, loomed 
 a group of gray spires, like the distant view of the 
 dominating pinnacles of the minsters and cathedrals 
 of England and of France, and of Cologne. They 
 were the spires of the great towers of the Mormon 
 temple, that strange, imposing and splendid creation 
 of the brain of Brigham Young. 
 
 It was dusk when we reached the city. Electric 
 lights were twinkling along the wide streets as we 
 drove to our hotel. We have not yet seen the city, 
 except for a short stroll under the glaring lights. 
 But already it has made an indelible impression on
 
 270 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 our minds. Only two cities upon this continent — 
 cities of magnitude — have ever been created and laid 
 out, by systematic forethought, before being entered 
 and occupied by men. One, Washington, laid out 
 according to a comprehensive and well-digested plan ; 
 the other, Salt Lake City, the creation — as all else 
 here — of Brigham Young. 
 
 The streets of Salt Lake City are all as wide as 
 Pennsylvania Avenue. The blocks, of ten acres each, 
 immense. But these streets — the chief ones are 
 perfectly asphalted; running water flows in every 
 side gutter; great trees, long ago planted, shade 
 every wide sidewalk; the electric tram-Gal's run on 
 tracks along the middle of the thoroughf are ; and 
 the two wide roadways, on either side, are quite free 
 from interfering wires and poles. Many great 
 blocks of fine buildings now rise along the business 
 sections, and the stores present as sumptuous dis- 
 plays of goods and fabrics as anything we have seen 
 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York. The 
 town bears the marks of a great city. Great in its 
 plan, great in its development, great in its destiny. 
 Truly, a capital fit for the seat of power of the 
 potent and comprehending Mormon church. 
 
 All the morning we have been viewing concrete, 
 practical Mormondom, and the sight has been most 
 instructive. High above the buildings of the city 
 tower the imposing spires and pinnacles of the Tem- 
 ple, the most immense ecclesiastical structure on the 
 North American continent. Thirty years was it in
 
 THE MORMON TITHING-HOUSE. 
 
 THE MORMON "LION HOUSE.*
 
 SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 273 
 
 building, all of native granite, and costing more than 
 four millions of dollars. It stands in the central 
 square of the city, surrounded by a high adobe wall, 
 and a Gentile may view only the exterior. 
 
 Then we visited the famous Tabernacle beneath 
 whose turtle-shaped roof 10,000 worshipers may sit, 
 and whose acoustic properties are unrivaled in the 
 world. You can hear a whisper and a pin drop two 
 hundred feet away. In it is the immense organ pos- 
 sessing five hundred and twenty stops, which, like 
 the two great structures, was conceived and con- 
 structed by the genius and patience of the Mormon 
 architects. We were shown about the grounds of the 
 ecclesiastical enclosure — though not permitted to 
 enter the Temple — by a courteous-mannered lady 
 whose black eyes fired with religious enthusiasm as 
 she explained the great buildings. "My son is a mis- 
 sionary in Japan, giving his life to the Lord. He 
 preaches in Japanese, and is translating our holy 
 books into the Japanese tongue," she said, turning to 
 an intelligent Japanese tourist who was of our party. 
 
 "We also bought some Mormon literature in the 
 fine, modern sky-scraper buildings of the Deseret 
 News, and the bright young man, selling us the books, 
 showed us with evident pride the stores of elegantly 
 printed and bound volumes, all done here in Salt Lake 
 City. They print their books in every modern tongue, 
 and their missionaries distribute them all over the 
 world.
 
 274 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 Later, we viewed the fine college buildings where 
 higher education is given to the Mormon youth. We 
 also saw the famous "Lion House," over whose por- 
 tal lies a sleeping lion, once the offices of Brigham 
 Young, now occupied by the ecclesiastical managers 
 of the church. And also we viewed the "Beehive 
 House," where once Brigham dwelt; the Tithing 
 House, where is received and stored the ecclesias- 
 tical tithe tax of ten per cent, of all crops raised and 
 moneys earned by the devoted Mormon believers ; and 
 the great bank run in connection with it. 
 
 All these evidences of practical, organized, devoted 
 religious world zeal have we beheld gathered and cen- 
 trally grouped in the great city founded and raised 
 by these curious yet capable religious delusionists. 
 
 I asked about Mormonism of a Gentile stranger 
 from another State, and he replied in deferential 
 tones: "No man in his senses now throws stones at 
 the Mormons; they are among the most industrious, 
 most thrifty and most respected people of the West." 
 
 To wander along and through the residence sec- 
 tion of the city is also a thing to surprise. Street 
 after street of fine private dwellings, each mansion 
 standing in its own garden, upon its own lawn. Many 
 of them very modern, and many of them far exceed- 
 ing in cost and imposing elegance any residence 
 Charleston, West Virginia, can yet boast — equal to 
 the most sumptuous homes of Pittsburg and St. Louis 
 — and most of them owned and lived in by cultivated 
 families of the Mormon cult. And how the zeal and
 
 SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 27o 
 
 faith and religious ardor of this strange sect even now 
 to-day burns in the atmosphere of this their Holy- 
 City! It is the same spirit that we met in Holy 
 Moscow, Russia's sacred capital — but more enlight- 
 ened, more practical. 
 
 And Mormonism is already a political as well as 
 religious power in the West. In Idaho, in Colorado, 
 in Nevada, in Arizona, the Mormon vote is to be con- 
 sidered and even catered to. In Alberta, the Mormon 
 settlement is said to be the most prosperous in the 
 province. In Mexico, the Mormon settlements, their 
 astonishing productivity and fertility, are already 
 teaching the wonder-struck Mexican what irrigated 
 agriculture may do. And as I beheld this and the evi- 
 dent success of a religious sect which mixes fanatical 
 zeal with astute practical management, I asked myself 
 what is the real secret of their accomplishment and 
 their power ! Is it the theory and practice of polyg- 
 amy. Did or does polygamy have anything to do with 
 the unquestioned success and prosperity of the Mor- 
 mon people ? I think not. Polygamy has been merely 
 an incident, and the disappearance of polygamy has 
 in nowise lessened the formidable growth of Mormon 
 power. The secret, I think, is the secret of the amaz- 
 ing growth and spread of early Christianity, the 
 putting into actual practice the Christian doctrine of 
 the brotherhood of man — with them the brotherhood 
 of the Mormon man in particular. Once a Latter- 
 day Saint, and all other Saints are ready to lend 
 you a hand, and the organized and ably administered
 
 276 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 mechanism of the church lends the new Saint a hand 
 as well, and those hands once extended are never with- 
 drawn except for powerful and well-merited cause. 
 The Mormon farmer feels that back of his success is 
 the ever helpful and protecting eye of his church in 
 material as well as spiritual things. The Gentile 
 farmer may succeed or may fail, and who cares; but 
 the Mormon must succeed. If he do not himself 
 possess the innate power and force of character and 
 judgment to get on, then men will guide and aid 
 him who do possess that power, and so he gets on 
 even in spite of himself. In a certain sense, the Mor- 
 mons practice the doctrine of collective socialism, and 
 that collective unity is the secret, I think, of their 
 wonderful accomplishment. 
 
 The creed of the brotherhood of man, and of man 
 within the Christian pale, has been the secret of 
 Christianity wherever it has won success. The failure 
 to heed it and obey it is the cause of failure to every 
 religious movement that has come to naught. And 
 so long as the Mormon Church adheres to this fun- 
 damental principle, just so long will it continue to be 
 a power, and a power of increasing weight. 
 
 And this cardinal principle is also the secret of 
 their missionaries' success. All over the world they 
 are, in every State of the Union, in nigh every land, 
 and they serve without recompense, without pay even, 
 as did the early missionaries of the Christian Church . 
 
 There is and always has been a good deal of clev- 
 erness in the leadership of the Mormon Church. It
 
 GREAT SALT LAKE.
 
 SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 279 
 
 is an old adage that "The blood of her martyrs is 
 the seed of the chureh, ' ' and the Mormon leaders have 
 comprehended this from the start. Not only have 
 they cultivated the Christian socialism of the early 
 church, but they have also never fled from, but the 
 rather have greatly profited by, a real good case of 
 martyrdom. The buffets and kicks of the Gentile 
 world have helped, have been essential in welding 
 the Mormon believers into that political, religious and 
 social solidarity so much sought by the leaders. They 
 were driven from New York, from Ohio, from Mis- 
 souri, then from Nauvoo. They have been shot, 
 stoned, murdered by scores. They have been impris- 
 oned and harried by the federal laws (very justly, 
 perhaps). But the effect of all this has been only to 
 make them stand together all the closer. 
 
 Just now the attack upon Senator Smoot is profit- 
 ing them immensely. He sits by and smiles-, He 
 has only one wife. He is no more oath-bound to his 
 own church than is every Roman or Greek Archbishop 
 vowed to his. A matter of conscience only. The 
 effort to oust him will probably fail, but it's a good 
 thing for the church to have him hammered. The 
 more martyrs, the fewer backsliders. The faithful 
 line up, stand pat, the church grows. 
 
 On the streets of Salt Lake City we have noi-cd 
 the very few vehicles of fashion anywhere to be seen, 
 and, on the other hand, the many substantial farm 
 wagons which generally seem to be driven by a woman 
 accompanied by one or more children, more usually
 
 280 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 a half -grown boy. The men would seem to be work- 
 ing on the farms, while the women come into town 
 with the loads of produce. The faces, too, of these 
 women were generally intelligent and contented. 
 
 In our own country we frequently hear the Mor- 
 mons denounced as polygamists. In Utah and the 
 neighboring States you hear nothing about polygamy, 
 and, upon inquiry, I was told that while once this 
 tenet of the church had been urged and practiced, 
 yet that under modern social conditions, which have 
 come in with the railways, the younger Mormon of 
 to-day finds that one woman is all that he can take 
 care of, and shows no disposition to load himself up 
 with the burden of half a dozen. To my observation, 
 the strength and danger of Mormonism is not in 
 polygamy, but rather in their social and political soli- 
 darity, the Mormon president of the church wielding 
 political influence over his followers similar to, al- 
 though in nowise so vast as, that of the Roman Pope. 
 
 Be these things as they may, it is at any rate worth 
 while for a modern Gentile to visit this center of the 
 Mormon power, and gather from ocular evidence 
 of its vital, living, forceful presence such lessons as 
 he may. 
 
 This afternoon we took a little railway and jour- 
 neyed twelve miles to Saltair, the Atlantic City or 
 Virginia Beach of this metropolis, and there we 
 bathed in the supersaturated brine. I could swim on 
 it, not in it, so buoyant was the water, and my chief 
 difficulty was to keep my head out and my feet in.
 
 SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 281 
 
 The lake is sixty miles wide by ninety miles long, with 
 several islands of high, barren hills. A few boats 
 ply on it. No fish can live in it, and the chief use of 
 it is to evaporate its waters for supply of salt. After 
 dipping in it we came out quite encrusted with a 
 white film of intense salt, 
 
 To-night we go on to Denver, through the canon 
 of the Grand River.
 
 282 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 SEVENTEENTH LETTER, 
 
 A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 
 
 Glenwood Springs, October 16, 190J. 
 
 "We left Salt Lake City by the express last night 
 over the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, starting 
 three hours late. When we awoke, we were coming 
 up the canyon of the Green River, one of the head 
 streams of the Colorado, and had passed through the 
 barren volcanic lava wastes of the Colorado Desert 
 during the night. The Green River flows between 
 sheer, naked volcanic rock masses, not very high, but 
 jagged, no green thing growing upon them. But the 
 scanty bottom lands were often green with alfalfa 
 meadows and well-kept peach and apple orchards, the 
 result of irrigation. 
 
 From the valley of the Green River we crossed, 
 passing through many deep cuts and tunnels, to the 
 Grand River, the eastern fork of the Colorado, and 
 followed up this stream all day. Very much the 
 same sort of country as before. The bare, ragged, 
 verdureless cliffs and rock masses, dry and plantless, 
 only the red and yellow coloring of sandstone re- 
 lieving the monotony, and everywhere upon the scant 
 bottom lands the greenness and agriculture of irri- 
 gation. The aspen and maples, all a bright yellow,
 
 A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 283 
 
 but not so splendid a golden hue as the forests of the 
 valley of the Yukon. 
 
 Just before coming to Glenwood Springs, about 
 noon, I had wandered beyond my sleeper into the 
 smoking-car, thinking to have a view of the sort of 
 men who got in and out at the way stations, and, 
 seating myself in a vacant place, picked up a con- 
 versation with my neighbor. Imagine my surprise 
 when I found him to be a fellow West Virginian, 
 from Clarksburg, taking a little summer trip in the 
 West, himself a Mr. Bassel, nephew of the well-known 
 lawyer, John Bassel, of upper State fame. He was 
 going to stop off at Glenwood Springs to see one of 
 Colorado's most popular sports, a "broncho-busting" 
 match, where were to be gathered some of the most 
 eminent masters of the art in the State. I consulted 
 my time-tables, ascertained that we might spend the 
 afternoon there and yet reach Denver the next morn- 
 ing, and when the train pulled into the station, we 
 were among the expectant throng who there detrained. 
 
 The little town was all astir. A pile of Mexican 
 saddles lay on the platform, and a crowd of big, 
 brawny men in wide felt hats, leathern cowboy leg- 
 gings and clanking spurs, were shouldering these, 
 their belongings, and moving up into the town. 
 
 The streets were full of people come in from the 
 surrounding highlands, where, high up on the 
 "mesas" or plateaus above the valleys, lie some of 
 the finest cattle ranges in the State. Big, raw-boned, 
 strong-chinned men they were, bronzed with the sun
 
 284 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 and marked with a vigor bespeaking life in the open 
 air. The ladies, too, were out in force, well dressed, 
 not much color in their cheeks, but, like the men, 
 possessing clean-cut, clear-eyed faces. And up and 
 down the wide streets were continually galloping 
 brawny riders, evidently arriving from their distant 
 ranches. 
 
 The crowd stuck to the sidewalk and seemed ex- 
 pectant. We did not know just what was going to 
 happen, but stuck to the sidewalk, too, and well for 
 us it was that we did so. There were rumors of a 
 parade. A number of ranch maidens, riding restive 
 bronchos, some sitting gracefully astride, drew their 
 horses to one side. The crowd was silent. We were 
 silent, too. Just then a cloud of dust and a clatter 
 of hoofs came swirling and echoing down the street. 
 A troop of horses! They were running like mad. 
 They were bridleless, riderless ; they were wild horses 
 escaped. They ran like things possessed. No, not 
 all were riderless, for behind them, urged by silent 
 riders, each man with swinging lasso, came as many 
 cowboys hot on the chase. Had the wild horses 
 broken loose? Could they ever be headed off? We 
 wondered. Was the fun for the day all vanished by 
 the accident? Not so, we found. This was part of 
 the game. Every broncho buster, if he would take 
 part in the tests of ridership, must first catch a wild 
 horse, that later an opponent should master. And 
 the way those lassos swung and reached and dropped 
 over the fleeing bronchos was in itself a sight worth
 
 NUCKOLDS, PUTTING ON THE HOODWINK. 
 
 NUCKOLDS, THE BllOXCHO "BUSTED.
 
 A BKONCHO-BUST1NG MATCH. 287 
 
 stopping to see. Then, as each rider came out of the 
 dust and distance leading the wild-eyed, terrified 
 beast by his unerring lasso, great was the acclaim 
 given him by the hitherto silent multitude. Every 
 loose horse was caught before he had run half a 
 mile, and thus haltered — the lariat around the neck — 
 was led to the corral near the big meadow, where the 
 man who should ride most perfectly would win the 
 longed-for prize — a champion's belt and a purse of 
 gold. 
 
 * Many famous men were met there to win the tro- 
 phy — the most coveted honor a Coloradan or any 
 ranchman may possess. 
 
 There was Marshall Nuckolds, of Rifle City, 
 swarthy and black as an Indian, who had won more 
 than one trophy in hard-fought contests — his square 
 jaw meaning mastery of any four-footed thing that 
 bucks. There was Red Grimsby, long, and lank and 
 lithe as a. Comanche, with a blue eye that tames a 
 horse and man alike. There was big, loose-limbed 
 Arizona Moore, a new man in Glenwood, but pre- 
 ceded by his fame. He it was who won that cow- 
 boy race in Cheyenne, not long since, when his horse 
 fell, and he underneath — dead, the shuddering au- 
 dience thought him — and who shook himself loose, 
 re-mounted his horse and won the race amidst the 
 mad cheers of every mortal being on the course. He 
 rode a fiery black mustang, and was dressed in gor- 
 geous white Angora goat's hair leggins, a blue shirt, 
 a handkerchief about his neck. Handy Harry Bunn,
 
 288 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 of Divide Creek, was there too, a dapper little pile 
 of bone and sinew, whom broncho, buck as he might, 
 never yet had thrown. And Freddy Conners, solid 
 and silent, and renowned among the boys on the 
 ranches all 'round about. And the two Thompson 
 brothers, of Aspen, home boys, the youngest, Dick, 
 the pride of Grand River, for hadn't he won the 
 $100 saddle in the big match at Aspen last year, and 
 then carried off the purse of gold at Rifle City on 
 the Fourth of last July! Slim and clean-muscled, 
 and quick as a flash he was, with a piercing black 
 eye. The crowd on the streets were all betting on 
 Dick, and Dick was watching Arizona Moore like 
 a hawk. The honors probably lay between the two. 
 
 The big meadow in the midst of the mile track 
 
 was the place. H sat in the grandstand, my 
 
 field-glasses in hand. I was invited to the judges' 
 stand, and even allowed with my kodak out in the 
 field among the judges who sat on their horses and 
 followed the riders, taking points. 
 
 Swarthy Nuckolds was the first man. He came 
 out into the meadow carrying his own saddle and 
 rope and bridle. To him had fallen a wiry bay, 
 four-year old, never yet touched by man. First the 
 horse was led out with a lasso halter around its 
 neck, then, when it came to a standstill, Nuckolds, 
 with the softness of a cat, slipped up and passed a 
 rope halter over its head, which he made cleverly 
 into a bitless bridle, then he stealthily, and 
 before the horse knew it, hoodwinked it with a
 
 GRIMSBY AND THE JUDGES. 
 
 IH XX. MAKING ROPE BRIDLE.
 
 A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 291 
 
 leather band, and then when the horse could not 
 see his motions, he gently, oh, so gently, laid the 
 big Mexican saddle on its back, and had it double 
 i girt fast before the horse knew what had hap- 
 pened. Then he waved his hand, the hoodwink was 
 pulled off by two assistants, and instantly he was 
 in the saddle astride the astonished beast. For a mo- 
 ment the horse stood wild-eyed, sweating with terror 
 — and then, and then — up it went like a bent hook, 
 its head between its legs, its tail down, its legs all in 
 a bunch, and down it came, stiff-kneed, taut as iron, 
 and then up again, and so by leaps and bounds 
 across the wide field and back again right through 
 the scrambling crowd. All the while Nuckolds ris- 
 ing and falling in perfect unison with the mad mo- 
 tions of the terrified horse—his hat gone, his black 
 hair flying, his great whip and heavy spurs goading 
 the animal into subjection. At last he rode it on a 
 trot, mastered, subjugated, cowed, up to the judges' 
 stand. The horse stood quietly, trembling, sweating, 
 wet as though having swum Grand River. Wild 
 were the yells that greeted Nuckolds. He had but 
 ' added to a reputation already made. 
 
 " Grimsby next," was the command. His horse 
 was a short-backed, spindle-tailed sorrel, with a sort 
 of a vicious gait that boded a bad temper and stub- 
 born mind. Again the halter was deftly put on and 
 made into a bitless bridle, the hoodwink slipped on, 
 the saddle gently placed, and man and horse were 
 furiously rushing, bucking, leaping, rearing across
 
 292 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 the meadow, and right straight at the high board 
 and wire fence. The horse, if it couldn't throw him, 
 would jam and scrape him off if it ever reached that 
 merciless mass of pine and barbed wire. Could 
 Grimsby turn him, and without a bit? Great riding 
 that was, and greater steering, for just before the 
 seeming inevitable crash, the horse swerved, turned 
 and was bucking across and then around the field 
 again. Grimsby never failed to meet every wild 
 movement, and sat in the saddle as though in a rock- 
 ing-chair. The horse, at last conquered, stood quiet 
 as a lamb, and the cheers for the sturdy rider quite 
 equaled the plaudits given his raven-maned prede- 
 cessor. 
 
 Now the crowd had its blood up. Two native cham- 
 pions had proved their grit, what could the Arizonian 
 do against such as these? "He's too big and awk- 
 ward," said one onlooker. "He's not the cut for a 
 King buster," grunted another. "The h — 1 he ain't. 
 Ain't he the man who won that Cheyenne race after 
 his horse fell on him?" exclaimed one who knew, 
 and the scoffers became silent. 
 
 Arizona Moore strode clumsily under the weight 
 of his big saddle, but his black eye shone clear and 
 masterful, and I felt he was sure enough a man. 
 His horse was a dark blood bay, well knit, clean 
 limbed, short-barreled, full mane and tail, a fighter 
 with the grit of a horse that dies before it yields. I 
 stood quite near with my camera. It was difficult 
 to get the rope bridle on, it was more difficult to put
 
 ARIZONA MOORE. UP. 
 
 F&& 
 
 ik^ 
 
 ARIZONA MOORE.
 
 A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 295 
 
 on the hoodwink, it was nigh impossible to set and 
 cinch the saddle. But Moore did it all, easily, deftly, 
 quietly. The hoodwink dropped, and instantly the 
 slouchy, awkward stranger was riding that furious, 
 leaping, cavorting, bucking, lunging creature as 
 though horse and man were one. I have never beheld 
 such riding. He sat to his saddle and every muscle 
 and sinew kept perfect time to the fiery, furious move- 
 ments of the horse. And he plied his whip and used 
 his spurs and laughed with glee, as though he were 
 on the velvet cushions of a Pullman car. The horse 
 was stronger, more active, more violent than the two 
 before. It whirled 'round and 'round until you were 
 dizzy looking. It went up all in a bunch, it came down 
 spread out, it came down with stiff legs, it reared, 
 it plunged, it ran for the fence. Nothing could mar 
 the joy of the rider nor stir that even, easy, tena- 
 cious seat. "You've beat 'em all." "Nor can the 
 others beat you," roared the crowd, as he rode the 
 conquered animal on a gentle trot up to the judges' 
 stand and leisurely dismounted. It was the greatest 
 horsemanship I have ever seen, nor shall I again see 
 the like for many a day. 
 
 Bunn rode next. His horse was in full and fine 
 condition. It leaped, it bucked, it raced for the 
 fence, it reared, it even sat down and started to roll 
 backwards, a terrible thing to happen, and often 
 bringing death to an incautious rider. But Bunn 
 never lost his seat, nor did the horse stay long upon 
 its haunches, for, stung by rawhide and spur, it
 
 296 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 sprang to its feet and tore across the meadow, ac- 
 tually leaping clean and sheer the impounding fence. 
 And Bunn, vanquishing at last, walked his quiet 
 horse peacefully up and dismounted. 
 
 The Thompson boys each covered themselves with 
 glory. Dick's first horse was tamed so quickly — a big, 
 bright bay — that they brought him a second one to 
 ride again — a long, lean, dun-colored, Roman-nosed 
 cayuse, with scant mane and tail. A mean beast, the 
 sort of a horse that other horses in the bunch scorn 
 to keep company with and hate with natural good 
 horse sense. He stood very quiet through bridling, 
 hoodwinking and saddling. He had seen the others 
 in the game. His mind was quite made up. And 
 when Dick vaulted into the saddle, he at first stood 
 stock still, and then, as I set my kodak, I could see 
 nothing but one great cloud of dun-colored dust and 
 Thompson's head floating in the upper levels of the 
 haze. The horse was whirling and bucking all at 
 the same instant, a hump-buck, a flat buck, an iron- 
 legged buck, a touch-ground-with-belly buck, and a 
 swirling-whirl and tail-and-neck twist at one and the 
 same moment. Enough to throw a tender seat a hun- 
 dred feet and crack his bones like pipe stems. And 
 then, like the flight of an arrow from a bow, that 
 dun-colored devil bolted straight for the wickedest 
 edge of the fence. I thought Dick would be killed 
 certain, but there he sat and drew that horse down on 
 its hams three feet from sure death. It was a long 
 battle, vicious, mean, fierce, merciless — the beast was
 
 THE CROWD AT THE BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 
 
 THE DUN-COLORED DEVIL.
 
 A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 299 
 
 bleeding, welts stood out on flanks and shoulders, its 
 dry, spare muscles trembled like leaves shaken by 
 wind. 
 
 The boy hero of Aspen was hero still, and the dun 
 horse walked quietly up to the judges' horses and 
 allowed himself to be unsaddled without as much 
 as a flinch, and he, too, was drenching wet, as well 
 as bloody. 
 
 I did not see the last rider, for my train was 
 soon to leave, and I barely had time to get aboard. 
 But I got some fine kodak photographs, and have 
 promised to send a set to the old, gray-headed rancher 
 who stood near me and who almost cried for joy to 
 see how these men rode. "I've seven boys," he said, 
 "and every one of 'em's a broncho buster; even the 
 gals can bust a broncho, that they can." 
 
 I have not learned who got the coveted prize belt, 
 but I should divide it between Arizona Moore and 
 Dandy Dick.
 
 300 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 EIGHTEENTH LETTER. 
 
 COLORADO AND DENVER. 
 
 Denver, October 19th. 
 After leaving Glenwood Springs we wound up 
 the gorge of the Grand River, the castellated, cren- 
 elated, serrated, scarped and wind-worn cliffs tower- 
 ing many thousand feet into the blue sky. The val- 
 ley narrowed sensibly and the sheer heights im- 
 posed themselves more and more upon us as we 
 approached the tunnel at the height of land 
 10,200 feet above the sea, and where part the waters 
 of the Gulf of Mexico from those of the Pacific. 
 On the Canadian Pacific Railway, the interoceanic 
 divide between the waters of Hudson Bay and the 
 Pacific is only some 5,300 feet above tide level, so 
 now we were nearly a mile higher in the air. Yet the 
 long journey of 2,000 miles from San Francisco, the 
 crossing of the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch ranges, 
 had brought us to this final ascent almost unper- 
 ceived. 
 
 Traversing the divide and coming out from the 
 long tunnel which bows above the continental height 
 of land, we diverged from the main line and crept 
 yet higher right up into Leadville, where the air 
 was thin and keen and as chill as in December. 
 Thence we descended through the wonderful canon 
 of the Platte River that has made this journey on the
 
 COLORADO AND DENVER. 30] 
 
 Denver and Rio Grande Railway famous the world 
 round. 
 
 "We came to Denver early in the morning; the 
 metropolis of the middle West, the chief railroad 
 center west of the Missouri, the mining center of all 
 the Rocky Mountain mineral belt, and now claiming 
 to be equally the center of the great and rapidly 
 growing irrigated agricultural region of the inter 
 and juxta mountain region of the continent. Essen- 
 tially a business place is Denver. Its buildings are 
 as elegant as those of New York City, many of them 
 almost as pretentious as those of Chicago, as solid 
 as those of Pittsburg, and as new as the fine blocks 
 of Los Angeles. She is altogether a more modern 
 city than San Francisco, is Denver. Her residences 
 are also up to date, handsome, substantial. The 
 homes of men who are making money. Her one hun- 
 dred and eighty miles of electric tramways are good, 
 though not quite as good as the two hundred miles 
 of Los Angeles. Her schools are probably unex- 
 celled in the Union. Denver is new, and in the clear, 
 translucent atmosphere looks yet newer; she is neat, 
 she is ambitious, and she is gathering to herself the 
 commerce, the trade, the manufacturing pre-emi- 
 nence, the mining supervision of all that vast section 
 of our continent from Canada to Mexico, from the 
 great plains to the snowy summits of the Cascades 
 and Sierra Nevadas. All this is Denver, while at 
 the same time she is the capital of Colorado, a State 
 four times as big as West Virginia, though with
 
 302 IN TO THK YTKON. 
 
 only half the population. And Denver is so fast 
 seated in the saddle of state prosperity that no sec- 
 tion of Colorado can prosper, no interest can grow 
 nor develop, neither the gold and silver mining with 
 its yield of forty millions a year, nor the iron and 
 coal fields — 30,000 square miles of coal fields — nor 
 the agriculture and grazing interests, worth eighty 
 millions a year (now exceeding the value of the 
 gold and silver produced twice over), none of these 
 can grow and gain, but they immediately and per- 
 manently pay tribute to Denver. 
 
 Yet this very up-to-dateness of Denver robs it of 
 a certain charm. You might just as well be at home 
 a.s be in Denver. The people look the same, they 
 dress the same, they walk the same, they talk the 
 same. Just a few more of them, that's all. 
 
 There are none of the lovely lawns and gardens 
 of Los Angeles and Tacoma in Denver, nor can there 
 ever be. Roses do not bloom all the winter through, 
 nor in Denver does the turf grow thick and velvety 
 green as in Seattle, nor can they ever do so — only a 
 few weakly roses in the summer-time and grass — 
 only grass when you water each blade with a hose 
 three times a day. And then, too, men do not go to 
 Denver to make homes; they go there the rather to 
 make fortunes, and, if successful, then to hurry away 
 and live in a more congenial clime. 
 
 Denver is not laid out with the imposing regal- 
 ness of Salt Lake City, nor can it ever possess the 
 dignity of that place. It is just a big, hustling, com-
 
 COLORADO AND DENVER. 303 
 
 mercial, manufacturing, mine-developing center, 
 where the well man comes to work and toil with fe- 
 verish energy in the thin air; and the sick man — the 
 consumptive — comes to live a little while and die — 
 "One Lungers" do not here hold fast to life as in 
 the more tender climate of southern California — nor 
 can they survive long in Denver's harsh, keen air. 
 
 The loveliest, grandest part of Denver is that 
 which it does not possess. It is the splendid pano- 
 rama of the Rocky Mountain chain that stretches, 
 a monstrous mass of snow-clad summits, along the 
 western horizon, eighteen to thirty miles away. 
 Across a flat and treeless plain you behold the long 
 line of lesser summits, and then lifting behind them, 
 towering skyward, the splendid procession of snow- 
 clad giants, glittering and flashing in the translucent 
 light of the full shining sun. The panorama is 
 sublime, as fine as anything in Switzerland, and of 
 a beauty worthy of a journey — a long journey — to be- 
 hold. In Canada, the Rockies come so slowly upon 
 you that they seem almost insignificant compared 
 with their repute. But here, one realizes in fullest 
 sense the dignity of this stupendous backbone of the 
 continent. And the pellucid atmosphere of the mile- 
 high altitude, gives renewed and re-enforced vision 
 to the eye. The gigantic mountains stand forth with 
 such distinctness that the old tale of the Englishman 
 who set out to walk to them before breakfast — think- 
 ing them three instead of thirty miles away — is likely 
 enough to have more than once occurred.
 
 304 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 The great "Mountain Empire State" of Colorado 
 is vastly rich in deposits of gold and silver and lead 
 and antimony and copper and coal and iron, yet 
 very few there are, or ever can be, who do or may 
 amass fortunes therefrom. Her coal beds exceed in 
 area the entire State of West Virginia nearly twice 
 over, yet thousands of acres lie un worked and are now 
 practically unworkable. Her oil fields are promis- 
 ing, a paraffine oil of high grade, yet no oil pro- 
 ducer has made or can make any great stake out of 
 them. Her agriculture and grazing interests already 
 exceed the enormous values of her gold and silver, yet 
 few farmers or cattle men make more than a living. 
 Colorado is rich, fabulously rich, yet the wealth that 
 is wrung from her rocks and her pastures and her 
 tilled fields passes most of it into hands other than 
 those who produce it. 
 
 The great railroad corporations get the first 
 whack. It has cost enormously to build them; they 
 are expensive to maintain; they are safe from com- 
 petition by reason of the initial cost of their con- 
 struction. They are entitled to consideration, and 
 they demand it and enforce it to the limit. The 
 freight rates are appalling, and so adjusted as to 
 squeeze out of every natural product the cream of 
 profit it may yield — sometimes only very thin skim 
 milk is left. The passenger fares are high, usually 
 four cents to ten cents per mile. The cost of living 
 is onerous in Colorado; all freights brought there 
 pay excessive tribute to the railways. So much for
 
 COLORADO AND DENVER. 305 
 
 the general conditions. With mining it is yet more 
 serious. The Rockefeller-Gugenheim Smelter com- 
 bine now controls mercilessly all the smelting busi- 
 ness of the State, and, as for that, of the mining 
 country. And unless you have an ore that "will 
 yield more than $20 per ton, you might as well not 
 go into the mining business," experienced mining 
 men repeatedly observed to me. 
 
 Colorado boasts enormous agricultural and graz- 
 ing wealth. She claims that the present values of her 
 herds of cattle and horses, and flocks of sheep, of 
 her orchards and irrigated crops already exceed 
 that of her gold and silver and mineral production. 
 This may be so, and yet after the cattle and sheep 
 and horses are transported to distant markets and 
 converted into cash, after her farmers have paid the 
 enormous irrigation charges to the private corpora- 
 tions that control the water springs, the man on the 
 soil makes little more than a bare living, the fat 
 profits, if any there be, having passed into the ca- 
 pacious pockets of the water companies, of the trans- 
 portation companies, of the great meat-packing and 
 horse-buying companies. The farmers and grazers 
 with whom I have talked tell me that if they come 
 out even at the end of the year, with a small and 
 moderate profit, they count themselves fortunate. 
 Here and there, of course, a fortune may be amassed 
 by an unusual piece of good luck by the man 
 who raises cattle or fruit, or crops, but as a. rule the
 
 306 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 undoubted profits of these industries are absorbed by 
 the great corporate interests at whose mercy they lie. 
 
 Just what will be the outcome of these crushing 
 industrial conditions it is difficult to forecast, but we 
 already see the first expressions of popular dissatis- 
 faction in the extensive labor strikes now prevailing 
 in the Cripple Creek region, and threatening to 
 spread to and include all of the mining camps and 
 operations of the State and adjoining States. Cor- 
 porate greed and unscrupulous selfishness arouse op- 
 position, and then ensues corresponding combina- 
 tion, and too often counter aggression quite as un- 
 reasonable and quite as inconsiderate in scope and 
 action. Men are but mortal, and "an eye for an 
 eye ' ' is too ancient an adage to have lost its force in 
 this twentieth century. 
 
 Just how these transportation, mining, agricul- 
 tural and industrial problems will be finally solved 
 I dare not predict, but we will trust that the ulti- 
 mate good sense of American manhood will work out 
 a reasonable solution.
 
 ACROSS NEBRASKA. 307 
 
 NINETEENTH LETTER. 
 
 ACROSS NEBRASKA. 
 
 On Bublington Route Express, "» 
 October 20, 1903. / 
 
 We left Denver upon the night express over the 
 Burlington Railway system, and all day to-day are 
 flying eastward across flat, flat Nebraska. 
 
 At dawn the country looked parched and treeless; 
 expanses of buffalo grass and herds of cattle. Here 
 and there the course of a dried-up stream marked by 
 straggling cottonwood trees and alders, their leaves 
 now turned a dull yellow brown. A drear land, but 
 yet less heart-sickening than the stretches of bleak 
 and barren landscape we have so often gazed upon 
 through Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Despite the 
 dry and parched appearance of this immediate region, 
 it is yet counted a fine grazing country, and the cattle 
 range and thrive all the year round upon the tufted 
 bunches of the sweet, nutritious buffalo-grass that 
 everywhere here naturally abounds. 
 
 By middle morning we are entering the more east- 
 ern farming section of the State, though still in west- 
 ern Nebraska. The land is all fenced, laid out in 
 large farms, the fences and public roads running 
 north and south and east and west. The farm- 
 houses are neat, mostly, and set in tidy yards with
 
 308 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 groves of trees planted about. Large red barns, 
 many hay and wheat stacks, illimitable fields of thick- 
 growing wheat stubble, and miles- of corn, the stalks 
 bearing the large ears yet standing in the hill, while, 
 as a general thing, the roughness has all been gath- 
 ered in — the Southern way of handling the corn 
 crops. No shocks standing like wigwams in the 
 fields. 
 
 Fall plowing is also under way. We have just 
 passed a man sitting on a sulky plow, driving four 
 big horses abreast, his little six-year old daughter 
 on his knee. A pretty sight. There are many wind- 
 mills, one near each house and barn, some out in the 
 wide fields, all pumping water, turned by the prairie 
 winds that forever blow. 
 
 We are passing many small towns. All just alike. 
 The square-fronted stores, the steepled churches, the 
 neat residences, rows of trees planted along either 
 side of the streets. "That dreadful American mon- 
 otony, ' ' as foreign visitors exclaim ! 
 
 The country looks just like the flat prairie sec- 
 tion of Manitoba, Assiniboia and Alberta, in Canada, 
 that we traversed in August, except that this is all 
 occupied and intelligently tilled, while the most part 
 of that is yet open to the roaming coyote, and may 
 be yet purchased from the Canadian Government or 
 from the Railway Company, as is rapidly being done. 
 And this country here looks longer settled than does 
 northern Minnesota and North Dakota through which 
 we passed.
 
 ACROSS NEBRASKA. 309 
 
 The planting of trees in Nebraska seems to have 
 been very general, and along the roadways, the farm 
 division lines, and about the farmsteads and in the 
 towns are now multitudes of large and umbrageous 
 trees. And sometimes large areas have been planted, 
 and are now become veritable woodland. 
 
 At the town of Lincoln, Mr. W. J. Bryan's home 
 city, we have stopped quite awhile, and in the dis- 
 tance can see the tall, white, dome-hooded cupola of 
 the State Capitol through the yellow and brown fo- 
 liage of autumnal tinted cottonwood. 
 
 Sitting in the forward smoker and falling into 
 conversation with a group of Nebraska farmers, I 
 found a number of substantial Democrats among 
 them, admirers but no longer adherents of Mr. 
 Bryan — "Our crops have never been so good and 
 gold never so cheap and so plenty as during the last 
 few years," they said. And they were not surprised 
 when they saw by the quotation of silver in the Den- 
 ver morning paper that silver had never risen to so 
 high a price in the open market as it holds to-day, 
 sixty-eight cents per ounce. And they spoke of 
 Grover Cleveland with profound respect. In Ne- 
 braska, they tell me, all possibility of a recrudes- 
 cence of the Bryan vagaries is now certainly dead, 
 and that this fine agricultural State is as surely Re- 
 publican as is Ohio. The farmers are all doing well, 
 making money and saving money. They are fast 
 paying off such land mortgages as remain. Also, 
 there are now few, very few, unoccupied lands in
 
 310 IN TO THE YUKON.- 
 
 Nebraska. The State is practically filled up, and 
 filled up with a permanent and contented popula- 
 tion. As families grow, and sons and daughters come 
 to manhood and womanhood, the old farms must be 
 cut up and divided among them, or the surplus 
 young folk must seek homes elsewhere. And of this 
 surplus some are among the great American trek 
 into the Canadian far north. 
 
 We reached Omaha, the chief city of Nebraska, 
 late in the afternoon, coming into the fine granite 
 station of the Burlington Railway system. 
 
 While in the city we were delightfully taken care 
 of by our old school and college friends, to whom the 
 vanished years were yet but a passing breath. We 
 were sumptuously entertained at a banquet at the 
 Omaha Club. We were dined and lunched and 
 driven about with a warm-hearted hospitality which 
 may only have its origin in a heart-to-heart friendship, 
 which, beginning among young men at life's thresh- 
 old, comes down the procession of the years un- 
 changed and as affectionately demonstrative as 
 though we were all yet boys again. It carried me 
 back to the days when we sat together and sang that 
 famous German student song: "Denkt Oft Ihr 
 Brueder an Unserer Juenglingsfreudigheit, es Kommt 
 Nicht Wieder, Die Goldene Zeit." 
 
 Omaha, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, forms, to- 
 gether with Kansas City on the south and St. Paul, 
 and Minneapolis on the north, the middle of the three 
 chief population centers between St. Louis, Chicago
 
 ACROSS NEBRASKA. 311 
 
 and Denver. It is the chief commercial center of 
 Nebraska and of South Dakota, southern Montana 
 and Idaho, and controls an immense trade. 
 
 In old times it was the chief town on the Missouri 
 above St. Louis and still maintains the lead it then 
 acquired. I was surprised to find it situated on a 
 number of hills, some quite steep, others once steep- 
 er, now graded down to modern requirements. Its 
 streets are wide and fairly well paved, and its 
 blocks of buildings substantial. The residence streets 
 we drove through contain many handsome houses, 
 light yellow-buff brick being generally used, while 
 Denver is a red brick town. 'The parks, enclosing 
 hill and dale, are of considerable natural beauty, here 
 again having advantage over Denver, where the flat- 
 tened prairie roll presents few opportunities for 
 landscape gardening. 
 
 The extensive stockyards and abattoirs of Armour, 
 Swift and several other companies have made Omaha 
 even a greater center of the meat trade than Kansas 
 City. In company with W I spent the morn- 
 ing in inspecting these extensive establishments. 
 The volume of business here transacted reaches out 
 into all the chief grazing lands of the far West. The 
 stockyards are supposed to be run by companies in- 
 dependent of the packing-houses, and to be merely 
 hotels where the cattle brought in may be lodged and 
 boarded until sold, and the cattle brokers are pre- 
 sumed to be the agents of the cattle owners who have 
 shipped the stock, and to procure for these owners
 
 3112 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 the highest price possible. But, as a matter of fact, 
 the packing-houses control the stockyards, dominate 
 the brokers, who are constantly near to them and far 
 from the cattle owners, and the man on the range 
 who once ships his cattle over the railroads, forth- 
 with places himself at the mercy of the packer — the 
 stock having been shipped must be fed and cared foi 
 either on the cars or in the yards, and this takes 
 money — so the quicker the sale of them is made the 
 better for the owner. Hence, inasmuch as the packer 
 may refuse to buy until the waiting stock shall eat 
 their heads off — the owner, through the broker, is 
 compelled to sell as soon as he can, and is compelled 
 to accept whatsoever price the packer may choose to 
 offer him. So the packing companies grow steadily 
 richer and their business spreads and Omaha in- 
 creases also. 
 
 The other chief industry of Omaha is the great 
 smelter belonging to the trust. Incorporated origi- 
 nally by a group of enterprising Omaha men as a 
 local enterprise, it was later sold out to the Gugen- 
 heim Trust, whose influence with the several rail- 
 roads centering in Omaha has been sufficient to pre- 
 serve the business there, though the smelter is really 
 far away from ores and fluxes. 
 
 These two enterprises, the cattle killing and pack- 
 ing and ore-reducing, together with large railway 
 shops, constitute the chief industrial interests of 
 Omaha, and, for the rest, the city depends upon the 
 extensive farming and grazing country lying for
 
 ACROSS NEBRASKA. 313 
 
 five hundred miles between her and the Rocky Moun- 
 tains. As they prosper, so does Omaha; as they are 
 depressed, so is she. And only one thing, one catas- 
 trophe does Omaha fear, far beyond words to tell — the 
 fierce, hot winds that every few years come blowing 
 across Nebraska from the furnace of the Rocky Moun- 
 tains' alkali deserts. They do not come often, but 
 when they do, the land dies in a night. The green and 
 fertile country shrivels and blackens before their 
 breath, the cattle die, the fowls die, the things that 
 creep and walk and fly die. The people — the people 
 flee from the land or die upon it in pitiful collapse. 
 Then it is that Omaha shrivels and withers too. 
 Twice, twice within the memory of living man have 
 come these devastating winds, and twice has Omaha 
 suffered from their curse, and even now Omaha is 
 but recovering her activity of the days before 
 the plague, forgetful of a future that — well ! men 
 here say that such a universal catastrophe may never 
 again occur. 
 
 And the handsome city is prosperous and full of 
 buoyant life. 
 
 We now go on to St. Louis and thence to Cincin- 
 nati and so home.
 
 314 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 TWENTIETH LETTER. 
 
 ALONG IOWA AND INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 
 Charleston, W. Va., October 23, 1903. 
 
 Our journey from Omaha to St. Louis was down 
 the valley of the Missouri, a night's ride. We crossed 
 the mighty river over an enormously high bridge 
 and then followed the crest of an equally lofty em- 
 bankment across several miles of wide, rich bottoms 
 to Council Bluffs, in the State of Iowa. "Nobody 
 dares fool with the Missouri," a man said to me in 
 Omaha, as he pointed out where the voracious river 
 was boldly eating up a wide, black-soiled meadow 
 in spite of the square rods of willow mats and tons of 
 rocks that had been laid down to prevent it. "When 
 the Missouri decides to swallow up a bottom, or a 
 village, or a town, she just does it, there is no es- 
 cape. ' ' And even the citizens of Omaha do not sleep 
 well of nights when the mighty brown tide fumes too 
 angrily. Hence the extraordinarily high bridge and 
 enormous embankment we traversed when we sought 
 to cross over to dry land in Iowa. The waters of the 
 Missouri are as swift as those of the Yukon, but the 
 river flows for a thousand miles through the soft muds 
 of the Western prairies, instead of through the banks 
 of firm gravel, and it eats its way here and there when 
 and where it chooses, and no man can prevent.
 
 ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 315 
 
 Hence the railways, while they traverse the general 
 course of the great valley of the Missouri, do not 
 dare follow too closely the river banks, but they 
 rather keep far away and have just as little to do 
 with the treacherous stream as they may. So it was 
 we did not see much more of the Missouri, but sped 
 into wide, flat, rich stretches of alluvial country 
 until darkness fell upon us and night shut out all 
 suggestions of the river. 
 
 When morning dawned we were among immense 
 fields of tall corn, corn so high as to quite hide a 
 horseman riding through it. The farm-houses were 
 large and substantial. The farmstead buildings 
 were big and trim. The cattle we saw were big, 
 the hogs were big, the fowls were big. And over all 
 there brooded a certain atmosphere of big contented- 
 ness. We were in the State of Missouri, and passing 
 through some of its richest, most fruitful, fertile 
 farming lands. A rich land of rich masters, once 
 tilled by slave labor, a land still rich, still possessed 
 by owners well-to-do and yielding yet greater crops 
 under the stimulus of labor that is free. 
 
 When we had retired for the night our car was 
 but partially filled. When we awoke in the morn- 
 ing, and I entered the men's toilet-room, I found it 
 full of big, jovial, Roman priests. Our car was 
 packed with them. They had got in at every sta- 
 tion; they continued to get in until we reached St. 
 Louis. The eminent Roman prelate, the Right Rev- 
 erend Archbishop of St. Louis, Kain, once Bishop
 
 316 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 of Wheeling, had surrendered his great office to the 
 Pope, and the churchly fathers of all the middle 
 West were gathering to St. Louis, to participate in 
 the funeral pageant. A couple of young priests 
 were talking about the "old man," while a white- 
 haired father spoke of "His Eminence," and I 
 learned that Cardinal Gibbons, of Baltimore, was 
 expected to also attend the funeral ceremonies. 
 
 We breakfasted on the train, and in the dining- 
 car sat at table with two brother Masons wearing 
 badges, and from them I learned that they were also 
 traveling to St. Louis, there to attend the great meet- 
 ing of the Grand Lodge of the State of Missouri. 
 The city would be full of Masons, and the cere- 
 monies of the Masonic Order and of the Roman 
 Church would absorb the attention of St. Louis for 
 the next few days. And so we found it, when we 
 at last came to a stop within the great Central Rail- 
 way Station — next to that of Boston, the largest in 
 the world — where we observed that the crowd within 
 it was made up chiefly of men wearing the Masonic 
 badges, their friends and families, and the round- 
 collared priests. A strange commingling and only 
 possible in America. In Mexico, a land where the 
 Roman Church dominates, though it no longer rules, 
 the Masons do not wear their badges or show out- 
 ward token of their fraternal bonds. In England, 
 where the king is head of the Masonic Order, there, 
 until the last half century, the Roman Catholic sub- 
 ject might not vote nor hold office. Here in St.
 
 ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. .317 
 
 Louis, in free America, I saw the two mixing and 
 mingling in friendly and neighborly comradeship. 
 
 I do not know whether you have ever been in St. 
 Louis, but if you have, I am sure you have felt the 
 subtle, attractive charm of it. It is an old city. It 
 was founded by the French. The old French-de- 
 scended families of to-day talk among themselves 
 the language of La Belle France. For a century it 
 has been the Mecca of the Southern pioneer, who 
 found in it and about it the highest northern limit 
 of his emigration. Missouri was a slave state. St. 
 Louis was a Southern slave-served city. The Vir- 
 ginians, who crossed through Greenbrier and flat- 
 boated down the Kanawha and Ohio, settled in it or 
 went out further west from it. Alvah, Charles and 
 Morris Hansford, the Lewises, the Ruffners, made 
 their flatboats along the Kanawha and floated all 
 the way to it. St. Louis early acquired the courtly 
 manners of the South. She is a city to-day which 
 has preserved among her people much of that South- 
 ern savor which marks a Southern gentleman wher- 
 ever he may be. St. Louis is conservative ; her French 
 blood makes her so. She is gracious and well-man- 
 nered ; her southern founders taught her to be so. 
 And when the struggle of the Civil War was over, 
 and the Union armies had kept her from the burning 
 and pillaging and havoc and wreck that befell her 
 more southern sisters, St. Louis naturally responded 
 to the good fortune that had so safely guarded her, 
 and took on the renewed energy and wealth-acquir-
 
 318 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 ing powers of the unfolding West. The marvelous 
 developments of the Southwest, and now of Mexico, 
 by American railroad extension, has built up and is 
 building up St. Louis, just as the great Northwest 
 has poured its vitalizing energies, its boundless wheat 
 crops, into Chicago. Corn and cattle and cotton 
 have made St. Louis, and Spanish is taught in her 
 public schools. Chicago may be the chief of the 
 cities upon the great lakes; St. Louis must forever 
 remain the mistress of the commerce and trade and 
 wealth of the great Mississippi basin, with New Or- 
 leans as her seaport upon the south, Baltimore, 
 Newport News, Norfolk on the Chesapeake Bay, her 
 ports upon the east. St. Louis is self-contained. She 
 owns herself. Most of the real estate in and out of 
 St. Louis is owned by her citizens. Her mortgages 
 are held by her own banks and trust companies. 
 Chicago is said to be chiefly owned by the financiers 
 of Boston and New York. The St. Louisian, when 
 he makes his pile and stacks his fortune, builds a 
 home there and invests his hoard. The Chicagoan 
 when he Avins a million in the wheat pit or, like 
 Yerkes, makes it out of street railway deals, hies 
 himself to New York and forgets that he ever lived 
 west of Buffalo. 
 
 Hence, you find a quite different spirit prevailing 
 among the people of St. Louis from Chicago. This 
 difference in mental attitude toward the city the 
 stranger first entering St. Louis apprehends at once, 
 and each time he returns to visit the great city, that
 
 ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 319 
 
 impression deepens. I felt it when first I visited 
 St. Louis just eleven years ago, when attending the 
 first Nicaragua Canal Convention as a delegate from 
 West Virginia. I have felt it more keenly on every 
 occasion when I have returned. 
 
 The Great Union Depot of St. Louis is the pride 
 of the city. It was designed after the model of the 
 superb Central Bahnhof of Frankfort on the Main, 
 in Germany, the largest in Europe, but is bigger and 
 more conveniently .arranged. In the German sta- 
 tion, I noted a certain disorderliness. Travelers did 
 not know just what trains to enter, and often had 
 to climb down out of one car to climb up into an- 
 other, and then try it again. Here, although a much 
 greater number of trains come in and go out in the 
 day, American method directs the traveler to the 
 proper train almost as a matter of course. 
 
 From the station we took our way to the Southern 
 Hotel, for so many years, and yet to-day, the chief 
 hostelry in the city. A building of white marble, 
 covering one entire block, with four entrances con- 
 verging upon the office in the center. Here the 
 Southern planters and Mississippi steamboat cap- 
 tains always tarry, here the corn and cattle kings 
 of Kansas and the great Southwest congregate. The 
 politicians of Missouri, too, have always made the 
 Southern a sort of political exchange. Other and 
 newer hotels, like the Planters, have been built in 
 St. Louis, but none has ever outclassed the South- 
 ern. We were not expecting to tarry long at the
 
 320 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 hotel, nor did we, for after waiting only a short 
 interval in the wide reception-room, a carriage drove 
 up, a gracious-mannered woman in black descended, 
 and we were soon in the keeping of one of the most 
 delightful hostesses of old St. Louis. Her carriage 
 was at our command, her time was ours, her home 
 our own so long as we should remain. And we had 
 never met her until the bowing hotel clerk brought 
 her smiling to us. So much for acquaintance with 
 mutual friends. 
 
 The morning was spent visiting the more no- 
 table of the great retail stores, viewing the miles 
 of massive business blocks, watching the volume of 
 heavy traffic upon the crowded streets. At noon we 
 lunched with our hostess in a home filled with rare 
 books and objects of art, collected during many 
 years of foreign residence and travel, and I was 
 taken to the famous St. Louis Club, shown over its 
 imposing granite club-house, and put up there for a 
 fortnight, should I stay so long. 
 
 In the afternoon we were driven through the 
 sumptuous residence section of the city out toward 
 the extensive park on whose western borders are now 
 erected the aggregation of stupendous buildings of 
 the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. This residence 
 section of St. Louis has always been impressive to 
 me. There is so much of it. The mansions are so 
 diverse in architecture, so splendid in design. "Pal- 
 aces," they would be called in England, in Ger- 
 many, in France. Here the plain St. Louisian saya
 
 ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 321 
 
 "Come up to my house," and walks you into the 
 palace with no ado. Evidences of the material 
 wealth of this great city they are. Not one, not two, 
 but tens and hundreds of palatial homes. Men and 
 women live in them whom you and I have never read 
 about, have never heard about, will never know about, 
 yet there they are, successful, intelligent, influential 
 in the affairs of this Republic quite as much so as 
 you and I. And the larger part of these splendid 
 mansions are lived in by men and women who rep- 
 resent in themselves that distinctively American qual- 
 ity of ' ' getting on. ' ' One granite palace pointed out 
 to me, is inhabited by a man and his wife, neither 
 of whom can more than read and write. Yet both are 
 gifted with great good sense, and he lives there be- 
 cause he saved his wages when a chore hand in a 
 brewery until at last he owned the brewery. An- 
 other beautiful home is possessed by a man who be- 
 gan as a day laborer and then struck it rich digging 
 gold in the Black Hills. Calves and cattle built one 
 French chateau; corn, plain corn, built several more, 
 and cotton and mules a number of others. Steam- 
 boats and railways, and trade and commerce and 
 manufactures have built miles of others, while the 
 great Shaw's Botanical Garden, established and en- 
 dowed and donated to the city, came from a miserly 
 bachelor banker's penchant to stint and save. The 
 incomes of the hustling citizens of St. Louis remain 
 her own ; the incomes of the rent-payers of Chicago, 
 like the interest on her mortgages, go into the pock-
 
 r?22 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 ets of stranger owners who dwell in distant cities 
 in the East. 
 
 The extensive Fair grounds and Exposition Build- 
 ings were driven upon and among. A gigantic en- 
 terprise, an ambitious enterprise. St. Louis means 
 to outdo Chicago, and this time Chicago will surely 
 be outdone. The buildings are bigger and there are 
 more of them than at Chicago. They are painted 
 according to a comprehensive color scheme, not left 
 a blinding white, less gaudy than the French effort 
 of 1900, more harmonious than the Pan-American 
 effects at Buffalo two years ago. The prevailing 
 tints are cream white for the perpendicular walls 
 and statuary, soft blues, greens, reds, for the roofs 
 and pinnacles, and much gilding. More than twenty 
 millions of dollars are now being expended upon 
 this great Exposition show. For one brief summer 
 it is to dazzle the world, forever it is to glorify St. 
 Louis. The complacent St. Louisian now draws a 
 long breath and mutters contentedly, "Thank God, 
 for one time Chicago isn't in it." The Art buildings 
 alone are to be permanent. They are not yet com- 
 plete. I wonder whether it will be possible to have 
 them as splendidly sumptuous as were the marble 
 Art Palaces I beheld in Paris three years ago — the 
 only works of French genius I saw in that Exposition 
 that seemed to me worthy of the greatness of France. 
 The Exposition grounds and buildings are yet in an 
 inchoate condition, and but for the fact that Ameri- 
 cans are doing and pushing the work, one would deem
 
 ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 323 
 
 it impossible for the undertaking to be completed 
 within the limited time. As it is, many a West Vir- 
 ginian and Kanawhan will next summer enjoy to the 
 full these evidences of American power. 
 
 In the late afternoon we were entertained at the 
 Country Club, a delightful bit of field and meadow 
 and woodland, a few miles beyond the city. Here 
 the tired business man may come from the desk and 
 shop and warehouse and office, and play like a boy 
 in the sunshine and among green, living things. Here 
 the young folk of the big city, some of them, gather 
 for evening dance and quiet suppers when the sum- 
 mer heat makes city life too hard. Here golf and 
 polo are played all through the milder seasons of 
 the year. We were asked to remain over for the fol- 
 lowing day, when a polo match would be played. We 
 should have liked to see the ponies chase the ball, but 
 our time of holiday was coming to an end. We might 
 not stay. 
 
 In the evening we were entertained at a most de- 
 lightful banquet. A large table of interesting and 
 cultivated people were gathered to meet ourselves. 
 We had never met them before, we might never meet 
 them again, but for the brief hour we were as though 
 intimates of many years. 
 
 All the night we came speeding across the rolling 
 prairie lands of Illinois and Indiana into Ohio. A 
 country I have seen before, a landscape wide and 
 undulating, filled with immense wheat and corn 
 fields. The home of a well-established and affluent
 
 324 IN TO THE YUKON. 
 
 population. The sons and grandsons of the pioneers 
 who, in the early days of the last century, poured 
 in from all quarters of the East, many Virginians and 
 Kanawhans among the number. A country from 
 which the present younger generations have gone 
 and are now going forth into the land yet fur- 
 ther west, and even up into the as yet untenanted 
 prairies and plains of the Canadian north. 
 
 In the morning we were in Cincinnati and felt 
 almost at home. The city, smoky as usual, marred 
 by the blast of the great fire of the early summer. 
 The throngs upon the streets were just about as nu- 
 merous, just about as hustling as those elsewhere we 
 have seen, yet there was a variation. The men not 
 so tall, more chunky in build, bigger round the girth, 
 stolid, solid. The large infusion of German blood 
 shows itself in Cincinnati, even more than in St. 
 Louis, where the lank Westerner is more in evidence. 
 
 It was dusk when the glimmering lights of Charles- 
 ton showed across the placid Kanawha. We were 
 once more at home. We had been absent some sev- 
 enty days; we had journeyed some eight thousand 
 miles upon sea and lake and land. We had enjoyed 
 perfect health. We had met no mishap. We had 
 traveled from almost the Arctic Circle to the sight 
 of Mexico. We had traversed the entire Pacific coast of 
 the continent from Skagway to Los Angeles. We had 
 twice crossed the continent. We had beheld the great- 
 ness of our country, the vigor and wealth and energy 
 of many cities, the splendor and power of the Republic.
 
 MAP OF ROUTE IN UNITED STATES.
 
 MAP OF UPPER YUKON BASIV.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Agricultural and grazing 
 wealth of Colorado, 305. 
 
 Animal life, 121. 
 
 An outlaw at White Horse 
 Rapids, 178. 
 
 A prospector's story, 203. 
 
 Atlin, 75, 88. 
 
 A wild night, 201. 
 
 Banff, 30. 
 
 Bathing in Salt Lake, 280. 
 
 Bird notes, 28, 65, 131, 201. 
 
 Bishop Bompas, 115. 
 
 Bishop Bompas on the Coast 
 Indians, 214. 
 
 Blanket concessions from 
 Ottawa, 145. 
 
 Boyle, 146. 
 
 British Columbia River, 40. 
 
 Broncho-busting match, 283- 
 299. 
 
 Canadian Pacific Railway, 
 27. 
 
 Canadian Rockies, 47. 
 
 Caribou Station, 81. 
 
 Cascades, 220. 
 
 Chinatown, 234. 
 
 Cincinnati, 325. 
 
 Clarence Straight, 60. 
 
 Climate of Oregon, 228. 
 
 Cold of the north land, 186. 
 
 Colorado and Denver, 300. 
 
 Crossing the Rockies, 38. 
 
 Dangerous navigation, 200. 
 
 Dawson Charlie, 81, 115. 
 
 Dawson City, 112, 132, 136. 
 
 Dawson Horticultural So- 
 ciety, 150. 
 
 Del Monte hotel at Mon- 
 terey, 241. 
 
 Detroit River, 13. 
 
 Dixon Channel and Port 
 Simpson, 59. 
 
 Dogs — iMalamutes and Hus- 
 kies, 136, 180. 
 
 Dog ranch, 149. 
 
 Dr. Grant, of St. Andrews 
 Hospital, 171. 
 
 Edmonton to Dawson, 174. 
 
 Fifty Mile River, 121. 
 
 First glimpse of the Great 
 Salt Lake, 266. 
 
 Fort Selkirk, 128. 
 
 Fort Wrangel, 65. 
 
 Fraser River, 43. 
 
 Frederick Sound, 66. 
 
 Freezing of the Yukon, 193. 
 
 French Canadian trapper, 
 173. 
 
 Glacier Hotel, 43. 
 
 Glenwood Springs, 283. 
 
 Government of Yukon Ter- 
 ritory, 87. 
 
 Grand River, 282. 
 
 Grand Trunk Pacific Rail- 
 way, 35. 
 
 Grayling, 82, 117. 
 
 Green River, 282. 
 
 Gulf of Georgia, 56. 
 
 Hells Gates, 127. 
 
 How the Government 
 searches for gold, 195. 
 
 Icebergs and whales, 66 
 
 Immigrants from the U. S., 
 30. 
 
 Indian" laborers in Wash- 
 ington and Oregon, 213. 
 
 International boundary line, 
 76.
 
 [NDEX. 
 
 Japanese on the coast, 234. 
 
 Japanese rice planter, 258. 
 
 Juneau, 69. 
 
 Ketchikan, 59. 
 
 Kicking Horse River, 39. 
 
 Klondike, 154. 
 
 Lake Atlin, 88. 
 
 Lake Bennett, 76. 
 
 Lake Lebarge, 121. 
 
 Lake Marsh, 88. 
 
 Lake St. Clair, 14. 
 
 Lake Superior, 18. 
 
 Lake Taggish, 93. 
 
 Los Angeles, 249. 
 
 Los Angeles to Salt Lake 
 
 City, 260. 
 Lynn Canal, 70. 
 Luxurious living in Dawson, 
 
 165. 
 Narrow-gauge railway from 
 
 Skagway, 75. 
 Northwest Mounted Police, 
 
 172. 
 Mackinac, 14. 
 Miles Canon, 116. 
 Millbank Sound, 203. 
 Mineral wealth of Colorado, 
 
 304. 
 Mining on Bonanza Creek, 
 
 140, 154. 
 Mining on El Dorado Fork, 
 
 157. 
 Mining on Pine Creek, 94. 
 Mining on Hunker Creek, 
 
 158. 
 Minneapolis, 24. 
 Mode of living at the dig- 
 gings, 108. 
 Mojave Desert, 257. 
 Monterey, 241. 
 Mormon literature, 273. 
 Mormon Temple, 270. 
 Mt. Shasta, 226. 
 Nebraska, 307. 
 Ogden to Salt Lake City, 
 269. 
 
 Omaha, 310. 
 
 Otter Creek, 101. 
 
 Our landlady at Dawson, 
 
 163. 
 Peace River, 33. 
 Pelly River, 128. 
 Placer mining, 94. 
 Portland, 218. 
 Preparations for winter, 
 
 180. 
 Presidio, 234. 
 Ptarmigan, 101. 
 Public school in Dawson. 
 
 172. 
 Puget Sound cities, 218. 
 Puget Sound crabs, 209. 
 Queen Charlotte Sound, 56. 
 Returning travellers from 
 
 the Klondike, 207. 
 Ride along the coast, 242. 
 Ride to Portland, 216. 
 Ride to Yakima, 215. 
 Salmon, 60. 
 
 Salmon at Ketchikan, 59. 
 Salmon in the Columbia 
 
 River, 220. 
 Salt Lake City, 270. 
 Salt Lake City to Glenwood 
 
 Springs, Colorado, 282. 
 San Francisco, 230. 
 Santa Barbara, 242. 
 Santa Cruz, 238. 
 San Joaquin Valley, 257. 
 Sausalito and Mt. Tamal- 
 
 pais, 233. 
 Sault St. Marie, 17. 
 Sawmill at Tacoma, 212. 
 Seattle, 206. 
 Secret of the success of 
 
 Mormonism in Utah, 275. 
 Silver Bow River, 30. 
 Skagway, 70, 75. 
 Spruce Creek, 102. 
 Steamer "City of Seattle," 
 
 52. 
 Steamer White Horse, 116.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Stewart River, 128. 
 St. Louis, 317. 
 St. Paul, 20, 22. 
 Sutton, geologist, 93. 
 Tacoma, 210. 
 The Five Fingers, 127. 
 Thirty Mile River, 122. 
 Treadgold, 146. 
 Treadwell mines, 69. 
 Trip to the Taku Glacier, 109. 
 Upper Yukon, 122. 
 Up the Yukon from Daw- 
 son, 180. 
 U. S. Fish Commission, 82. 
 
 Valley of the Willamette, 224. 
 Vancouver, 48, 51. 
 Victoria, 48, 51, 52. 
 Washington State Fair at 
 
 Yakima, 214. 
 Wheat land, 26, 29, 34, 35. 
 White Pass, 87. 
 Wild sheep and goats, 101. 
 Winnipeg, 26. 
 Work in the diggings in 
 
 winter, 192. 
 Yukon above Dawson, 131. 
 Zodiacal lights in winter. 
 
 192.
 
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