\« 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