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 COPYRIGHTED, 1885, BV 
 
 CHAS. S. FEE, GENERAL PASSENGER AGENT NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD, 
 ST. PAUL. 
 
GREAT FALLS op THE YELLOWSTONE RIVEI; (350 FT.), NATIONAL PARK. 
 
 (2) 
 
1 Ml UAK'DI 
 
 
 >HIS is a world of wonders ! Rigid and 
 inflexible as are the Laws of Nature, their 
 products and manifestations are almost infi- 
 nite in their number and variety. They are also so distributed 
 over the face of the earth, that no land, no continent even, 
 possesses, or, except under seemingly impossible conditions, 
 ever can possess them all. We have, therefore, only to travel far enough 
 from home to encounter what will fill us with wonder and astonishment. 
 In all the grander and sterner aspects of Nature, as in those which are 
 gentler, and, to our thinking, more beneficent, our own great continent is 
 more or less rich ; and the traveler who has journeyed eastward to climb 
 the castled crags of Rhineland and survey the mighty peaks and won- 
 drous glaciers of the Alps, who has wandered among the ruins of venerable 
 abbeys and ghostly halls, listened to the majestic swell of music in the dim 
 aisles of stately cathedrals, gazed upon the marvelous creations of Michael 
 Angelo and Da Vinci, and stood within the shadow of the pyramids, may well 
 turn westward to view the greater wonders of his own land. 
 
 Beyond the Great Lakes, far from the hum of New England factories, far 
 from the busy throng of Broadway, from the smoke and grime of iron cities, 
 and the dull, prosaic life of many another Eastern town, lies a region which 
 may justly be designated the Wonderland of the World. Hitherto it has been 
 closed to all but the most adventurous spirits ; but now, not only has it been 
 made easy of access, but it may be visited as comfortably, yea, as luxuriously, 
 as any of the older resorts of the pleasure seeker. It is through some portions 
 of this hitherto terra incognita that the reader of the following pages will, in 
 imagination, be conducted, in the hope that his interest in it will be so far 
 excited that he may be led to visit it, and look with his own eyes upon its 
 manifold and matchless wonders. 
 

 The Wonders of the World Introductory, 3 
 
 St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minn., ... ... 5 
 
 Lake Minnetonka, Minn., .6 
 
 Lake Park Region of Minnesota, . 8 
 
 Duluth and the City of Superior 8 
 
 Detroit and Detroit Lake, Minn 9 
 
 The Great Territory of Dakota Statistics of its Development, ... 1 1 
 
 Moorhead, Minn., and Fargo, Dakota 12 
 
 Wheat Fields of Dakota, 13 
 
 Sea-Bathing in Northern Dakota, 15 
 
 Bismarck, the Capital of Dakota . 16 
 
 Pyramid Park, or "Bad Lands," Dakota 18 
 
 Glendive and Miles City, Yellowstone Valley, Montana, . 19-21 
 
 Hunter's Hot Springs A Popular Resort 22 
 
 Yellowstone National Park , 24 
 
 The Northern Pacific Railroad: practically the Only Route to the National Park, . . 24 
 
 Location of the National Park, . 25 
 
 The Geysers "Old Faithful," " Giantess," etc., etc., 25-26 
 
 Mount Washburn The " Pisgah " of the Park, 28-29- 
 
 What Distinguished Men have Said about the Wonders of the National Park, . . -29-33 
 
 The Great Falls and Grand Cafion of the Yellowstone 33 
 
 Hotel Accommodations in the National Park, 34 
 
 Westward Still, , 36 
 
 Bozeman, Montana .... 36 
 
 Helena, Montana, and the Great Mullan Tunnel, . . 39 - 40 
 
 Lake Pend d'Oreille, Idaho 42 
 
 Lake Coeur d'Atene and Spokane Falls, 43 
 
 Mount Hood, Oregon, 44, 48 
 
 The Columbia River, 44-50 
 
 Portland, Oregon 50 
 
 Astoria and the Lower Columbia, 51 
 
 Tacoma : Its Hotel Mount Tacoma and its Glaciers, 52-55 
 
 Alaska "The Land of the Midnight Sun," 55-64. 
 
 INDEX 
 
 GUTS. 
 
 Alaska's Thousand Islands, as Seen from Sitka, . 63 
 
 An Alaska House, with Totem Poles, .... 60 
 
 Chancel of Greek Church, Sitka. 56 
 
 Detroit Lake and Hotel Minnesota, Detroit, Minn., 7 
 
 Falls of the Gibbon River National Park, ... 23 
 
 Ferry on the Yellowstone River, 14 
 
 Floating Fish Wheel Columbia River, .... 42 
 
 Great Falls of the Yellowstone National Park, . 2 
 
 Hotel Tacoma, Tacoma, W. T., 49 
 
 Lake Pend d'Oreille, Idaho, 35 
 
 PACK 
 
 Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel National Park, . . 17 
 Mount Hood, from the Head of the Dalles, Colum- 
 bia River, 38 
 
 Multnomah Falls Columbia River, 46 
 
 Plowing on a Dakota Wheat Field, 10 
 
 Pulpit Terrace, Mammoth Hot Springs National 
 
 Park, 32 
 
 Sitka, Alaska, 53 
 
 Views of " Old Faithful " Geyser, 27 
 
 Yellowstone River National Park, 20 
 
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 " To the kingdom of the West-Wind, 
 To the land of the Dacotahs." 
 
 H E cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, four hundred 
 and ten and four hundred and twenty miles, respect- 
 ively, northwest of Chicago, are the twin columns of 
 the eastern gateway to that magnificent country to 
 which the attention of the health and pleasure seeker 
 will be directed in the following pages. Those of the 
 western gateway are Portland and Tacoma, and within 
 the bounds of that imperial domain are to be found 
 the most fertile plains, the most magnificent rivers 
 and the noblest mountains in the world. Here, also, 
 have been discovered, in greater profusion than in any other 
 region of either hemisphere, the grotesque and fantastic prod- 
 ucts of nature's more playful and capricious moods. These constitute in the 
 main the- Wonderland to which we are bound ; and that we may travel over 
 that great railroad, the construction of which has brought them within our 
 reach, and which has come to be known by the well deserved title of the 
 Wonderland Route to the Pacific Coast, we are here, at one or the other of 
 those two great cities which have sprung into existence, side by side, in the 
 rich and rapidly growing State of Minnesota. 
 
 St. Paul and Minneapolis owe their commercial importance entirely to 
 the development of the vast territory lying back of them. Their growth is 
 almost unexampled, not even Chicago presenting a more astonishing picture 
 of rapid expansion. In 1860 the total population of the two cities was but 
 16,222. To-day it exceeds 250,000 ; and the time is not far distant when they 
 will together form one great metropolitan city, the capital of the Northwest, 
 rivaling even Chicago itself. At present their interests are not identical ; but, 
 with the rapid extension of their boundaries, the two cities must soon become 
 
 (5) 
 
6 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE. 
 
 one, and their interests common. St. Paul is slightly the older, and enjoys what- 
 ever prestige attaches to the capital of an important State. Built mainly on a 
 series of terraces rising from the left bank of the river, and forming a natural 
 amphitheatre, it commands extensive and magnificent views of the great Father 
 of Waters, which, though 2,200 miles from its mouth, is here 1,300 feet broad. 
 During the summer months steamboats between St. Paul and St. Louis, 791 miles- 
 distant, arrive and depart almost daily. The magnificent business blocks of the 
 city bear witness to that commercial importance which its position at the head of 
 navigation and as the focus of the railway activity of the Northwest has gained 
 for it. Minneapolis is built on a broad esplanade on the right bank of the river, 
 near the falls of St. Anthony, the immense power of which, variously estimated 
 at from 120,000 to 150,000 horse-power, is utilized in those colossal flouring mills, 
 which, laying the entire Northwest under contribution, have made the name of 
 Minneapolis a household word even in cities of the Old World. Under the 
 shadow of those mills have sprung up wholesale houses, carrying stocks that 
 would astonish many an Eastern merchant; luxurious hotels, elegant theatres, and 
 many other evidences of wealth and enterprise. Who shall venture to foretell 
 the destiny of these great cities ? Within the last three years they have doubled 
 their population no uncommon thing in the infancy of a community, but of 
 exceedingly rare occurrence in cities of larger growth. Not since 1850-53 has 
 Chicago increased its population in anything like that ratio. The year 1884 
 witnessed the erection of 5,027 new buildings in the two cities, at a cost of 
 $17,209,900. While many charming residences were numbered among them, 
 by far the greater proportion are now employed in maintaining and developing 
 the trade and commerce of the great dual metropolis. 
 
 Within a few miles of the twin cities are the charming lakes of White Bear 
 and Minnetonka. The former is one of the most attractive summer resorts in 
 Minnesota, combining beautiful scenery, good hotel accommodations, and excel- 
 lent boating and fishing. Minnetonka, the Saratoga of the Northwest, enjoys a 
 great celebrity for the beauty of its scenery and the luxuriousness of its hotels. 
 During the season its picturesque shores are much frequented by visitors from 
 the Central and Western States, and the Lower Mississippi valley. On one of 
 its outlets the far-famed falls of Minnehaha, immortalized by Longfellow 
 
 " Flash and gleam among the oak-trees, 
 Laugh and leap into the valley." 
 
 The great attractions of the State of Minnesota are undoubtedly its pine for- 
 ests, covering nearly one-half of the State, and its numerous beautiful lakes. 
 The number of the latter has been estimated at as high as 10,000. They vary 
 from a few hundred yards to fifteen miles in diameter, and their waters, cool and 
 transparent, abound with every variety of fresh-water fish. 
 
 Leaving the Union Depot, St. Paul, by the Northern Pacific Railroad, the 
 tourist is soon traveling at a rapid rate and over an excellent road, in a north- 
 westerly direction, toward the 
 
(7) 
 
8 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 Lake Park Region of Minnesota. 
 
 At Little Falls, 105 miles from St. Paul, the Little Falls & Dakota Division 
 leaves the Main Line. A run of sixty miles on this branch brings us to Glen- 
 wood. This charming village is situated on the north shore of Lake Minne- 
 waska, in a most beautiful valley, encompassed by high bluffs. Minnewaska is 
 considered by many visitors the most beautiful lake in the State. It is twelve 
 miles in length, and four miles in width, with a shore line of some forty miles. 
 Its shores are sandy, with a pebbly beach, most of which is lined with a beautiful 
 border of timber. A smooth carriage road runs the entire distance around the 
 lake, close to the water's edge. The water is beautifully clear, and abounds with 
 pickerel, pike, whitefish, bass, and other varieties of the finny tribe. Glenwood 
 has two hotels, two churches, and other public buildings, and is rapidly becoming 
 one of the finest summer resorts in Minnesota. 
 
 Resuming our journey on the Main Line, we soon come to Brainerd, finely 
 situated on the east bank of the Mississippi river, in a forest of pine. The 
 selection of this city for the location of the machine shops of the Northern 
 Pacific Railroad, has made it a place of considerable importance, and it already 
 has a population of 10,000. Lakes, with excellent fishing, abound in the neigh- 
 borhood, and there is the finest deer shooting in the State. From Brainerd, the 
 traveler may advantageously turn eastward ar J visit the city of Duluth, on Lake 
 Superior. This is an important terminal point of the railroad, and the most west- 
 ern of all the cities which lie on the great chain of North American lakes. It 
 has a population of 17,000, an excellent harbor, and, with the extension of the 
 railroad, its business is rapidly assuming great importance. Its principal trade 
 is in grain, for the storage of which it has six mammoth elevators, while it is 
 also the centre of a large lumber industry. The city presents a bold and pictur- 
 esque appearance, whether approached by water or by rail. It enjoys a delight- 
 fully cool temperature in summer; and the advantages it offers to the artist, the 
 geologist, the angler, the sportsman, and the health seeker, make it a most 
 attractive resort, and insure its continued growth in popularity. It has several 
 hotels, with excellent accommodations, and is well supplied with religious and 
 educational advantages. The scenery for some miles west of Duluth is exceed- 
 ingly picturesque, the views from the car windows being a delightful succession 
 of surprises. In the vicinity are the beautiful Dalles of the St. Louis. 
 
 The neighboring city of Superior, in Douglas county, Wis., has terminal 
 facilities quite equal to those of Duluth. Ten miles distant are the famous 
 Black River Falls. The cataract is 210 feet in height, and its waters are of 
 ebony blackness. 
 
 Returning to Brainerd, we soon find ourselves in the heart of the Lake Park 
 region, Otter Tail county, the entire area of which abounds with lovely sheets 
 of water and rich timber, being entered soon after the train leaves the village of 
 Wadena, at which station we change cars for the Fergus Falls & Black Hills 
 Branch. Following this branch for twenty-nine miles, we arrive at a little town 
 situated near three of the finest and largest lakes in this renowned region. 
 
-TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 9 
 
 Clitherall Lake is a beautiful sheet of water, about four miles in length, teeming 
 with innumerable varieties of fish. Its shores are haunted by water-fowl in great 
 numbers. South of Clitherall stretches a fine prairie country, abounding in 
 game. There are numerous beautiful drives in the neighborhood, and, last but 
 by no means least, two good hotels. Four miles distant is the well-known Battle 
 Lake, at the western extremity of which has sprung up the town of the same 
 name. From an elevated standpoint, no fewer than seventeen beautiful lakes 
 can be seen within a radius of five miles. It should be stated that there are two 
 Battle Lakes, distinguished as East and West. Each has its beauties, and what 
 has already been said with reference to the attractions of other Minnesota lakes 
 will apply also to these charming resorts. The dividing line between the terri- 
 tories of the Sioux and Chippewa Indians ran through this neighborhood, and 
 many sanguinary engagements have been fought here. 
 
 Resuming our journey at Wadena, we again travel in a northwesterly direc- 
 tion, and soon enter Becker county, the banner wheat-producing county of the 
 State, the characteristics of which are in the main the same as those of Otter Tail 
 county, the prairie and woodland being finely intermingled, and presenting many 
 charming landscapes. No other part of Minnesota is so beautifully diversified 
 as this district of country, where the woodlands broadly open and mingle with 
 the prairie in groves and clustering groups of forest trees, the diversity being 
 everywhere rendered complete by lakes and lakelets without number. 
 
 The county seat of this beautiful county is Detroit, 227 miles from St. Paul, 
 charmingly situated just on the dividing line of the timber and prairie country, 
 the former lying to the east of the town, the latter stretching away westward. 
 This picturesque spot holds out to the pleasure seeker, invalid and sportsman a 
 rare combination of attractions. Half a mile only from the business portion of 
 the city lies Detroit Lake, one of the most beautiful sheets of water in the State. 
 Its wooded shores and pebbly beach ; the broad expanse of prairie, dotted with 
 innumerable lakelets, like diamonds set in emeralds ; the shady groves of forest 
 trees and the cool grottoes of the neighboring bluffs ; the air laden with the rich 
 perfume of wild flowers and vocal with the melodious songs of birds ; game of 
 every description known in the Northwest, in astonishing abundance ; and, last 
 but not least, first-class hotel accommodations at very moderate rates ; these have 
 combined to make Detroit what it is to-day the most popular and attractive 
 resort in the Northwest, and to double its resident population during the year 
 1884. Twenty-five miles north is the White Earth Reservation of the Chippewa, 
 or Ojibway, Indians, of whom there are 1,500, civilized, and largely Christian- 
 ized. Visitors are always welcome, and Eastern tourists carry back few pleasanter 
 reminiscences than those of their visit to White Earth. Thirteen miles west is 
 Lake Park, a young and prosperous business town, with several large wheat farms 
 in the neighborhood. We are still in the Lake Park region, and the natural 
 features of the country are those with which we have become familiar, if, indeed, 
 we ever can become familiar with scenery so richly diversified. 
 
10 
 
 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 We are now approaching the western boundary of this great and beautiful 
 State ; and, while the train pursues its way down the eastern slope of the Red 
 River valley, we may, although tourists and not emigrants, pleasure seekers 
 rather than land seekers, consider for a moment what the last twenty years have 
 done for the State in which we have so pleasantly spent the last few days. 
 Twenty years ago, within the lifetime of some of our children, Minnesota had ten 
 miles of railroad ; to-day it has between 4,000 and 5,000. In 1860 its population 
 was 172,023, which had grown from 6,077 in a single decade ; to-day it exceeds 
 and the State has, as we have seen, two distinct and self-contained 
 
 1,000,000 
 
 PLOWING ON A DAKOTA WHEAT FIELD. Seepage 13. 
 
 cities, which are rapidly taking their places among the foremost cities on the 
 continent. Little more than twenty years ago, the country was thrilled by tidings 
 that the murderous Sioux had made an incursion into Minnesota, and butchered, 
 with every species of inhumanity, more than 3,000 men, women and children ; 
 to-day the noble red men are confined within certain reservations, many of their 
 children are being educated at Hampton and Carlisle, and they themselves are 
 yielding to the humanizing influences of the advancing tide of civilization. 
 Twenty years ago, the cereal productions of the State were unimportant; to-day, 
 notwithstanding its extensive water surface and pine forests, Minnesota ranks 
 fifth in cereal productions among the States and Territories of the Union, if we 
 exclude the production of corn, which can not be successfully cultivated in this 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 11 
 
 latitude. But we are rapidly approaching a Territory, the development of which 
 within a single decade is more remarkable still. 
 
 The Yellowstone National Park, toward which we are all the while tending, 
 and which will be described if, indeed, the task is not a hopeless one in its 
 proper place, is one of the greatest of all natural wonders, Our Wonderland of 
 the World is not, however, made up only of glaciers, geysers and cascades. On 
 our westward journey we travel for more than 350 miles across the great Terri- 
 tory of Dakota, the recenj; marvelous development of the resources of which 
 will form one of the most interesting and instructive chapters in the history of 
 the nineteenth century. If there is such a thing as the romance of figures, 
 surely it is here that we may look for it; if statistics ever read like a fairy tale, 
 it is in the story of the astonishingly rapid growth of this Territory in wealth 
 and population. 
 
 Not since the memorable days when the discovery of gold in California gave 
 its mighty impulse to Western colonization, has any other State or Territory of 
 the Union been the scene of such an astonishing increase of population and so 
 wonderful a development of its natural resources as we have witnessed in Da- 
 kota within the last five years. When, in 1861, it received a Territorial organi- 
 zation, in which were included the whole of Eastern Montana and a portion of 
 what is now Wyoming, its entire white population numbered less than 3,000. 
 The census of 1870 found it with its territory reduced to its present limits, and 
 with a white population of 12,887, mainly settled in the southeastern part of the 
 Territory, along the Missouri river. The next decade saw the beginning of a 
 marvelous transformation, to be brought about by the inpouring of three distinct 
 streams of immigration : one to the Black Hills, attracted by the discovery of 
 gold; another, composed mainly of old settlers from Iowa and Nebraska, into 
 the southeastern counties; and the third, and most important of all following 
 the Northern Pacific Railroad from Minnesota, through the Red River valley, 
 destined to overspread the whole of the northern part of the Territory. By the 
 summer of 1880 the population had increased to 135,180, of whom 51,793 were 
 of foreign birth. But, rapid as was the increase of the Territory in population 
 and corresponding production from 1877 to 1880, its subsequent progress has 
 been still more remarkable. Since the beginning of the present decade, its growth 
 has far exceeded the largest expectations that its earlier progress, marvelous 
 as it was, would at all have justified. Already the 135,000 inhabitants in 1880, 
 have become at least 450,000 ; the 7,352,589 bushels of cereals have grown 
 to nearly 40,000,000 ; and the six national and eighteen private banks have 
 increased to no fewer than 211. These astonishing facts, however, but faintly 
 foreshadow what coming years will witness. This magnificent Territory has an 
 area of 149,100 square miles, which is considerably larger than that of the 
 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Millions upon millions of acres 
 of land land which needs but to be tickled with a plow to smile a golden har- 
 vest have yet to be settled upon; and, when the relations of the national gov- 
 ernment with the Indians, whose reservations now comprise about one-third of 
 
12 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 the entire area of the Territory, are such as to enable it to adopt the enlightened 
 and indeed only true economic policy of substituting for the prevailing system 
 of tribal reservations that of allotment in severally, settling each family upon its 
 own quarter-section, many thousands of square miles will be made available for 
 colonization. 
 
 But the spires of Moorhead are in view, and we are about to cross the famous 
 Red River of the North. This stream is so named to distinguish it from the 
 Red River of Louisiana. It forms the boundary between Minnesota and Dakota, 
 flowing northward into Lake Winnipeg. From this point to the city of Winni- 
 peg it is navigable; and large quantities of wheat, farm machinery and general 
 merchandise are conveyed by steamers which ply between the several towns 
 along its banks. There is abundant evidence that the Red River formerly ran 
 from north to south. Its contrary course in this age subjects a large part of the 
 country through which it runs to an annual overflow, due to the fact that the 
 winter ice breaks up first in the southern part of the stream, and the river, ice- 
 bound in its northern portion, is unable to carry off the immense volume of 
 water which the genial currents of spring have liberated. On the Minnesota 
 side of the Red River stands the city of Moorhead, a place of steady and sub- 
 stantial growth, and of financial solidity. One of the best hotels west of Chi- 
 cago invites the tourist to make this city a halting place. From its location, 
 Moorhead has secured the name of the "Key City of the Northwest," and there 
 can be no doubt that it is destined to become a place of considerable impor- 
 tance. The adjoining country is well settled, and the gradual development of 
 manufactures in the town insures a continuance of that steady growth which has 
 distinguished it in the past. The religious and educational advantages of the 
 city are very good, and the sociability and hospitality of its citizens make a visit 
 to Moorhead exceedingly pleasant. These qualities, however, are characteristic 
 of the people of the entire Northwest, and there is, moreover, a degree of refine- 
 ment in the homes of the more substantial settlers for' which the visitor is quite 
 unprepared. But we must hasten along. 
 
 Opposite Moorhead, on the Dakota side of the river, stands Fargo, the chief 
 town in North Dakota, an ambitious, enterprising place, believing strongly, and 
 not without reason, that its destiny is to be a great city. Its history dates from 
 1872; but so lately as 1877 it had but a handful of inhabitants, and these have 
 grown to 10,000 or more. Miles upon miles of side-tracks, upon which switch- 
 ing is going on all day long, and all night too; warehouse after warehouse, full 
 of costly agricultural machinery; blocks of stores that would be deemed impos- 
 ing and attractive in any city in the world; elegant and commodious churches 
 and other public buildings all, and much more besides, stamp the city as the 
 metropolis of a rich district and the home and mart of an enterprising people. 
 While Fargo can no longer be said to be a frontier town, there is a novelty, and 
 often an incongruity, about the visitor's experiences which might lead him to 
 suppose that he had reached the very Ultima Thule of civilization. He is 
 rapidly conveyed from one point to another in luxurious street cars; he finds the 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 13 
 
 hotels, stores, warehouses and offices connected by one of the most complete 
 telephonic systems anywhere to be found, and hardly a place of business in the 
 city without the electric light; and then he goes to his hotel to be asked by the 
 waitress whether he will take roast loin of buffalo or roast saddle of black bear ! 
 It would appear as if civilization had brought up all her forces, that her onward 
 march might be the more rapid and irresistible. 
 
 West and southwest of Fargo stretch the famous 
 
 Wheat Fields of Dakota, 
 
 which are of such vast extent that one might almost designate this portion of the 
 Territory the granary of the world. Every station along the line, as we go west- 
 ward, has one or more capacious grain elevators, in which the wealth of Dakota's 
 fertile fields is stored, awaiting transportation. A peculiarity of wheat growing 
 in Dakota is the grand scale upon which it is conducted. Eighteen miles 
 west of Fargo, and 292 miles from St. Paul, are the famous bonanza farms of 
 Mr. Oliver Dalrymple. Here, and at Casselton, two miles west, wheat growing 
 is carried on upon a scale so gigantic as to seem almost incredible to any one 
 familiar only with the methods of the older and more settled States. At Dal- 
 rymple there are 27,000 acres under cultivation ; at Casselton 20,000 acres ; at 
 Grandin 28,000 acres, all forming one great farm, or rather combination of farms, 
 under the same management. The appearance of the broad expanse of prairie, 
 so level that the light on the electric tower at Fargo can be seen at a distance of 
 fifty miles, varies singularly according to the season of the year. In winter there 
 is nothing to be seen but a vast, snow-covered plain, perfectly level, stretching 
 away to the horizon, and undiversified, save here and there by a farm building 
 and the scanty growth of undersized trees fringing the Maple and Sheyenne 
 rivers ; toward the middle of April, the field of snow is changed to one of black 
 loam, often to a large extent under water ; but as harvest approaches, the scene 
 is, as may be imagined, a striking one, as impressive as it is beautiful. Before 
 harvest operations begin, the eye may rest upon an illimitable field of golden 
 grain, and when the long procession of reaping machines moves out, the visitor, 
 be he ever so unimpressionable, can not but be profoundly moved as he sees the 
 ingathering on so prodigious a scale of the food of toiling millions in the great 
 cities of the world. 
 
 Pursuing our way westward, we remark with some surprise the great number 
 of " cities " which have sprung up along the line of the railroad, all with a pros- 
 perous look, and many with substantial business blocks and elegant churches 
 and school houses, giving evidence that their enterprising settlers have confi- 
 dence in their future. Among such is Valley City, on the Sheyenne river, the 
 most beautifully situated town on this division of the road, and the capital of the 
 prosperous Barnes county. Passing several pretty lakelets, the haunt of 
 innumerable wild fowl, we soon find ourselves descending into the valley of the 
 James, or Dakota, river, the longest unnavigable river on the continent. Here 
 has sprung up the city of Jamestown, the county seat of Stutsman county, and, 
 
(14) 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 15 
 
 what is of vastly more moment, the metropolis of an important section of 
 country. It is picturesquely located, and all the resources of civilization are 
 made to contribute to the prosperity and happiness of its inhabitants. Along 
 the shores o the James and Sheyenne rivers, roamed in former years the savage 
 Sioux, and many a bloody conflict has taken place within sight of their wooded 
 slopes. The Indians, however, long ago retreated before the advancing stream 
 of immigration, and the tourist to-day will probably have to journey farther 
 westward before he will see a single "live Injun." The idea of 
 
 Sea Bathing in Northern Dakota 
 
 is a startling one. The construction of the Jamestown & Northern Branch 
 Railroad has, however, brought within easy reach of the tourist the far-famed 
 Devil's Lake, an extensive sheet of salt water, some eighty miles north of the 
 road upon which we are traveling. 
 
 The country through which the Jamestown & Northern Branch passes, is, 
 in its general features, similar to that to which the tourist has become 
 accustomed since he crossed the Sheyenne ; namely, a broad prairie inter- 
 sected by the narrow valleys of several streams, and occasionally relieved in the 
 monotony of its landscape by ranges of low hills. Devil's Lake, Dakota's inland 
 ocean, lies midway between the great valleys of the Red and Missouri rivers, 
 forty-five miles south of the international boundary. Its name is said to have 
 originated in the confounding of two Indian names by the early explorers. The 
 Indians called it Minnewaukan (spirit water), but in speaking of its saline prop- 
 erties with reference to drinking purposes they used a word signifying bad. 
 Hence the early settlers came to call it "Lake of the Evil Spirit," or "Devil's 
 Lake." The length of this irregular sheet of water, following all its windings, 
 is about forty-five miles, and its width varies from a few hundred yards at La 
 Rose's Ferry to seven miles opposite Fort Totten. The water is salt, closely 
 resembling, both in appearance and taste, that of the ocean. Its specific gravity 
 is 1.005. T ne shores of the lake are exceedingly picturesque, extending 280 
 miles with the most fantastic irregularity. They are well wooded, and, sloping 
 gracefully to the water, present at many points scenes of singular beauty. Abut- 
 ting promontories and numerous islands add greatly to the picturesque effect. 
 Analysis shows that the water of Devil's Lake contains sulphates of soda and of 
 magnesia (epsom and glauber salts) and chlorides of soda (common salt) and 
 magnesia. These medicinal properties, in conjunction with a delightful climate, 
 will attract tourists from all parts of the world, and the beautiful Minnewaukan 
 will soon be not less famous as a summer resort than the country around it is 
 for productiveness. The climate is indeed highly salubrious, the air being dry 
 and the temperature equable. 
 
 The climate of North Dakota generally is cold in winter and warm in summer. 
 There is scarcely any spring, and after the melting of the snow, vegetation grows 
 with surprising rapidity. Autumn is the most agreeable season, but the hottest 
 
16 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 days of summer are, throughout the whole of this Northwestern country, followed 
 by cool and refreshing nights. 
 
 Resuming our journey at Jamestown, we cross presently a high pleateau, the 
 Plateau du Coteau de Missouri, a vast tract of country but little cultivated. It 
 has, however, a rich soil, and will soon be brought under the plow. As the day 
 wears on, and we begin to wonder how far we are from Bismarck, we come upon 
 several model farms, known, respectively, as the Steele, Van Deusen and McGill 
 farms, at each of which there are several thousand acres under cultivation. 
 
 On the left bank of the Big Muddy, known to school boys and poets as the 
 mighty Missouri, stands Bismarck, the capital of the Territory, named in honor 
 of the great German statesman. Though this city had long commanded an 
 important river trade with various settlements away to the northwest, its progress 
 was not rapid, nor its permanent importance at all assured, until it was fixed 
 upon as the new capital of the Territory. Its selection as such gave rise to a 
 tremendous boom, real estate advancing enormously in price, and lots far out on 
 the prairie changing hands at astounding figures. Such, however, is the expe- 
 rience at one time or another of nearly all these Northwestern cities. At Bismarck 
 one comes in contact with a new social element. If navigation is open on the 
 Missouri, we find the Sheridan a most excellent hotel, by the way full of river 
 captains, Indian agents, post traders, and so forth, all of the hail-fellow-well-met 
 stamp, courteous and entertaining. It may be noted here, that while hotel ac- 
 commodations of superior excellence have, in these pages, been specially brought 
 under the tourist's notice, there are, at all the more important points along the 
 Northern Pacific Railroad, hotels which are first class in every respect; indeed, 
 the traveler sometimes wishes that his journey had in it a little more of the flavor 
 of romance. To get that, however, he needs but to leave the great transconti- 
 nental highway on which he is journeying the beaten track of travel and he 
 can find all he desires. Should he, on the other hand, be content with a rapid 
 glance at this great country, he need not leave the train at all; for the luxurious 
 sleeping cars, and the excellently appointed dining cars which run on every train, 
 will afford him accommodations unsurpassed by those of any hotel in the coun- 
 try. Bismarck itself has no particular attractions, but from the bluffs imme- 
 diately behind it very extensive and pleasing views of the country are obtained. 
 Across the river is Fort Lincoln, while a few hours' sail in one of the fine steam- 
 boats that ply on the Missouri will bring us to one of those numerous reserva- 
 tions in which the warlike Sioux are held in check. Bismarck is an excellent 
 point for the purchasing of outfits and the securing of guides by those who con- 
 template hunting excursions. 
 
 The railroad crosses the Missouri river by a magnificent bridge, opened for 
 traffic on the first of October, 1882. Prior to that time the cars were conveyed 
 from shore to shore by a large transfer boat, specially constructed for that pur- 
 pose. So uncertain, however, is the channel of the river, owing to the rapid 
 current and the constantly shifting sand bars, that this mode of conveyance was 
 extremely tedious, and it was found impossible to run trains with the regularity 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 17 
 
 expected of so important a railroad. The bridge proper consists of three spans, 
 each of 400 feet, and two approach spans, each 113 feet, with a long stretch of 
 substantial trestle work. The entire cost of the structure was about $1,000,000. 
 The great river, though 3,500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, is at this point 
 2,800 feet in breadth, and, with its tributaries, has 2,000 miles of navigable 
 waters above it to the north and west. 
 
 The country through which the traveler passes after crossing the Missouri is 
 much more diversified than that in the eastern half of the Territory. The Heart, 
 Knife and Sweet Briar valleys have attracted numerous settlers by the fertility of 
 their soil, as evinced by the abundance of their nutritious grasses, and they are 
 rapidly being brought under cultivation. Before, however, proceeding farther 
 on our journey, mention must be made of Mandan, a town on the western bank 
 of the river, and the county seat of Morton county. Of all the towns we have 
 yet reached, this is the one of most recent growth. It is but a few years since 
 
 MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS HOTEL YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK. 
 
 it was in the occupation of the Indians, and was the scene of a bloody engage- 
 ment between two contending tribes. But now it has substantial brick business 
 blocks, several churches, good schools, and a fine railroad depot ; and there are 
 also a round-house and extensive machine shops, Mandan being the eastern and 
 western terminus, respectively, of the Missouri and Dakota divisions of the road. 
 It has a conveniently situated and admirably equipped hotel, capable of accom- 
 modating a large number of guests. Mandan has not yet overtaken Bismarck 
 as a commercial centre, nor in respect to population, but its residents predict for 
 it a great future. That a large town will grow up where this transcontinental 
 highway crosses the Missouri is almost certain, and it is worthy of note in this 
 connection, that most of the great river cities of the continent are on the west 
 bank of the stream to which, in conjunction with the railroads, they owe their 
 importance. Where it is otherwise, the reason is obvious. 
 
 As we approach the western boundary of the Territory, the natural features 
 of the country become entirely changed, and we enter a region of paramount 
 interest to the student of nature, the tourist and the sight-seer. This is the far- 
 
 2 
 
18 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 famed Pyramid Park, better known by its old name of the " Bad Lands," 
 although that appellation is, to a certain extent, a misnomer. It is impossible to 
 convey in words an adequate description of this extraordinary country ; and even 
 the resources of the photographer, be he ever so skillful, fail as utterly as those 
 of the word-painter. The train travels through it at full speed for nearly an 
 hour, but if the traveler desires to make a closer examination of its wonders, he 
 leaves the train at Little Missouri station, where the line crosses the Little 
 Missouri river. He will there find guides, and every facility for a visit to Cedar 
 Canon, and also to the Burning Mine, where he will see still in operation that 
 mighty agency which has wrought out during countless ages the marvelous 
 picture spread out before him. Writing of the scene which presents itself to 
 the eye of the almost bewildered spectator, as he gazes upon the marvelous 
 diversity of outline and the infinite variety and startling contrasts of color, that 
 accomplished writer, Mr. E. V. Smalley, says : 
 
 " The change in the scene is so startling, and the appearance of the landscape 
 so wholly novel and so singularly grotesque, that you rub your eyes to make 
 sure that you are not dreaming of some ancient geologic epoch, when the rude, 
 unfinished earth was the sport of Tkanic forces, or fancying yourself transported 
 to another planet. Enormous masses of conglomerate red, gray, black, brown, 
 and blue, in towers, pyramids, peaks, ridges, domes, castellated heights occupy 
 the face of the country. In the spaces between are grassy, lawn-like expanses, 
 dotted with the petrified stumps of huge trees. The finest effect of color is 
 produced by the dark red rock not rock in fact, but actual terra-cotta, baked 
 by the heat of underlying layers of lignite. At some points the coal is still on 
 fire, and the process of transforming mountains of blue clay into mountains of 
 pottery may be observed from day to day. It has been going on for countless 
 ages, no doubt. To bake one of these colossal masses may have required 10,000 
 years of smoldering heat. I despair of giving any adequate idea of the fantastic 
 forms of the buttes or of the wonderful effects of color they offer. The pen 
 and brush of a skillful artist would alone be competent for the task. The pho- 
 tographer, be he never so deft with his camera and chemicals, only belittles these 
 marvelous views. He catches only bare outlines, without color ? and color is the 
 chief thing in the picture. He can not get the true effect of distance, and his 
 negatives show only staring blacks and whites in place of the infinite variations 
 of light and shadow effects in valleys and gorges and hollows, and upon crags 
 and pinnacles. Look, if you can, by the feeble aid of written words, upon a 
 single butte, and see how impossible it is to photograph it satisfactorily. It rises 
 from a carpet of green grass. Its base has a bluish hue, and appears to be clay 
 solidified by enormous pressure. It is girdled by bands of light gray stone and 
 black lignite coal. Its upper portion is of the rich red color of old Egyptian 
 pottery. Crumbled fragments strew its sides. Its summit, rising 300 feet above 
 the plain, has been carved by the elements into turrets, battlements, sharp spires, 
 grotesque gargoyles, and huge projecting buttresses an amazing jumble of 
 weird architectural' effects, that startle the eye with suggestions of intelligent 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 19 
 
 design. Above, the sky is wonderfully clear and blue, the rays of the setting 
 sun spread a rosy tint over the crest, and just above its highest tower floats a 
 little flame-colored cloud like a banner. When I say there are thousands of these 
 buttes, the reader will perceive that the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri are a 
 region of extraordinary interest to the tourist and artist." 
 
 It should be added that this is a great hunting ground, and that reasonably 
 good hotel accommodations can be found for lovers of the chase making their 
 headquarters at Little Missouri station. The Marquis de Mores, a wealthy 
 young French nobleman, has taken up his residence here, and done much to 
 encourage the grazing industry, for which the country is eminently adapted. He 
 has recently erected extensive abattoirs at Medora, on the east bank of the Little 
 Missouri. 
 
 Once more resuming our seats in the train, we travel onward toward 
 
 " That desolate land and lone 
 Where the Big Horn and Yellowstone 
 Roar down their mountain path." 
 
 Shortly after passing Sentinel Butte, a lofty peak rising precipitously from 
 the plain on the south side of the railroad, we cross the Montana boundary, at 
 the highest point (2,840 feet) above sea level we have so far attained; and a 
 further run of some fifty miles brings us to the Yellowstone valley. The ante- 
 lope, buffalo and elk, which have occasionally been seen since we crossed the 
 Missouri river, bounding away before the thundering locomotive and its train of 
 cars, now appear in greater numbers; and either from the windows or platforms 
 of the moving train we may test the accuracy of our aim and the range of our 
 six-shooters by firing at the retreating herd. This is often done, for there are 
 still travelers who can not disabuse themselves of the altogether mistaken notion 
 that it is necessary for them to go armed. 
 
 The Yellowstone river, the most important of the tributaries of the Missouri, 
 is a stream of considerable magnitude, navigable for 300 miles. Glendive, on its 
 right bank, 690 miles from St. Paul, is the first Montana town we reach, and from 
 this point westward the railroad follows, more or less closely, for 340 miles, the 
 windings of the river. Glendive is an important trading point, both in regard to 
 shipping buffalo hides and whatever other produce the surrounding country 
 yields, and as a distributing point for the necessaries of life. The construction 
 of the railroad for many miles west, or rather southwest, presented great difficul- 
 ties, on account of the constant disintegration of the rocks and the consequent 
 precipitation on to the track of masses of earth and stone. The scenery is more 
 or less picturesque, and not infrequently imposing, for the entire length of the 
 valley. A few hours' ride, in the course of which we cross numerous tributaries 
 of the Yellowstone, the most important of which is Powder river, brings us to 
 Miles City, one of the best points in the valley at which to make a stay. It is 
 beautifully situated at the confluence of the Tongue and Yellowstone rivers, is 
 an important entrepot, shipping and distributing point, and presents various 
 features of interest with which the traveler has not before become acquainted. ' 
 
YELLOWSTONE RIVER NATIONAL PABK. 
 
 (20) 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 21 
 
 A vast area of rich grazing country, extending 200 miles southward into the 
 Territory of Wyoming, as well as northward to the Missouri river, is tributary to 
 this point, and also draws its supplies hence. The last two years have witnessed 
 an enormous development of the grazing interest in the valleys of the Yellowstone 
 and its tributaries, and large shipments of cattle, to Chicago and other Eastern 
 cities, are made almost daily during the season. This is also the centre of the 
 greatest buffalo-hunting country in the world, as many as a quarter of a million 
 hides having been sent East from this city in a single year. In the early summer, 
 when the snow is melting on the Big Horn Mountains, the Yellowstone is navi- 
 gable 150 miles above Miles City, and for a short time an active river trade is 
 carried on; but that trade, like that of the Upper Missouri, is so precarious, 
 owing to the continual shifting of the channel, that, with the opening of the rail- 
 road, it will probably soon die out. An almost every-day occurrence here during 
 the season, is the arrival of freighters, with buffalo hides and tongues, deer skins, 
 and other spoils of the chase. It is no uncommon thing to see long trains of 
 wagons enter the city, each wagon drawn by from five to ten yoke of oxen. In 
 this thriving little community of from 2,000 to 3,000 souls, there is scarcely an 
 important race not represented. The tourist is not likely ever to forget the 
 feelings with which he first walks the streets of Miles City: Indians, Chinamen, 
 negroes; hunters and cow boys, in their deerskin shirts, leather breeches and 
 slouched hats, with six-shooters and bowie-knives glistening in their belts, make 
 up a motley crowd. The doors of the gambling saloons stand open day and 
 night, and the character of their habitues is such as to make them well worthy of 
 a visit. Another interesting feature with which the traveler first meets at this 
 point, is the method of ferrying which obtains in this country of rapid streams, 
 a flat-bottomed boat being run along a cable stretched at an oblique angle from 
 shore to shore, with the current for a motive power. 
 
 Some miles south of Miles City, but apparently only a few minutes' walk- 
 such is the transparency of the atmosphere stands Signal Butte, a lofty 
 peak of great interest, well deserving a visit, not less for the sake of the magnifi- 
 cent prospect that may be obtained from its summit, than for the geological 
 specimens with which its slopes abound. 
 
 Two miles beyond Miles City is Fort Keogh, the largest and one of the most 
 beautifully situated military stations in the United States. It was established 
 eight years ago by Gen. Nelson A. Miles. The country was then full of the war- 
 like Sioux ; but upon the surrender of their great chief, Sitting Bull, they allowed 
 themselves to be transported to reservations on the Missouri river, where they are 
 virtually prisoners of -war. The Indians now located in Eastern Montana belong, 
 with few exceptions, to the Cheyenne tribe. While retaining their picturesque 
 costume, they follow agricultural and industrial pursuits, and are independent of 
 government aid. 
 
 Proceeding up the valley, we cross the turbulent waters of the Big Horn river 
 by a bridge 600 feet in length, and presently enter the Big Horn tunnel, the first 
 tunnel through which we pass on our westward journey. Custer, a few miles 
 
22 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 beyond, is the best point from which to reach the famous Maginnis mines, 100 
 miles to the northwest. Another hour's ride and we come to Pompey's Pillar, 
 a mass of yellow sandstone rising abruptly to a considerable height. About half 
 way up there is carved on the sandstone the name of the veteran pioneer, 
 William Clarke, who visited this spot July 25, 1806, and has left a graphic 
 description of the country as he saw it. 
 
 The Yellowstone river constitutes for a considerable distance the northern 
 boundary of the reservation of the Crow Indians, said to be the richest nation 
 in the world, in proportion to their numbers, their wealth aggregating $3,500 per 
 head. The Crows have long been friendly to the whites, and readily negotiated 
 the sale of the land required for the construction of the railroad. 
 
 The city of Billings, the next important town we reach, is 915 miles from St. 
 Paul, and 225 from Glendive, where the train entered the Yellowstone valley. It 
 is near this city that we first catch sight of snow-clad mountains, the immense, 
 dazzling range of the Big Snow Mountains looming up grandly before us. At 
 the beginning of June, 1882, this town consisted of fifty-one houses and forty- 
 seven tents, and was considered the " hardest " place in the entire Northwest ; 
 to-day it has its hotels, churches, schools, and other public buildings, and an 
 orderly and well-to-do population of something like 3,000. 
 
 Ninety-five miles farther west is Springdale, where we leave the train for 
 Hunter's Hot Springs. These springs, which are of great repute for their medici- 
 nal properties, are situated at the foot of the Crazy Mountains, one and three- 
 fourths miles north of the Yellowstone river. They have been celebrated for 
 their healing virtues from time immemorial, having been resorted to by Indians 
 from far and near. Dr. Hunter, the proprietor, was the first white man to visit 
 them. That was in 1864. For the last fourteen years Dr. Hunter and his family 
 have resided at the springs, which are now identified with his name. The water, 
 the chief chemical ingredient of which is sulphur, is discharged at the rate of 
 2,000 gallons per minute, its temperature being from ^48 to 168 Fahrenheit. 
 The scenery around is very beautiful, and the springs are rapidly becoming a 
 popular resort. The climate is highly salubrious, the cold of winter being mod- 
 erated by the Japan current, known as the Chinook wind, which blows across the 
 Pacific Ocean, and so far modifies the climate of the far Northwest that the 
 isothermal line of 50 Fahr., which passes through Cleveland and Chicago, runs 
 away north into Montana, and even into the British Possessions. 
 
 We are now within twenty miles of Livingston, the gateway to the National 
 Park. A run of an hour brings us to that city. Here we are 1,030 miles from 
 St. Paul ; we have crossed the meridian of 110 W., and are at an altitude of 
 4,450 feet above mean sea level. Livingston is situated on the west bank of the 
 Yellowstone, just at the point where the river gushes forth from the lower canon. 
 It is built on a beautiful plain ; and beyond the river stretches a broad plateau, 
 with magnificent mountains in the background. Its chief interest for the tourist 
 lies, however, in the fact that it is here that he changes cars for the 
 
FALLS OF THE GIBBON RIVER NATIONAL PARK. 
 
 (23) 
 
24 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 Yellowstone National Park, 
 
 that sublimest of natural wonders, toward which he is hastening with eager 
 expectation, impatient of delay. 
 
 This marvelous creation of the Supreme Builder of the Universe, incompar- 
 ably grand and absolutely unique, is the Mecca of our pilgrimage. 
 
 Since it was rendered accessible by the opening of the Northern Pacific Rail- 
 road, and provision was made for the comfortable accommodation of travelers, 
 and for their conveniently visiting the various objects of interest, its fame has 
 traveled far and wide, and the question : " How may the wonders of the Yellow- 
 stone National Park be reached?" is now being asked all over the civilized 
 world. To answer that inquiry, so far as it has not been answered in the pre- 
 ceding pages, is our first duty. Briefly and positively the answer may be given : 
 Practically there is but one route. The Northern Pacific Railroad remains, and 
 probably will remain, the only direct and all-rail route to the Park. Its main line 
 running through Livingston, but fifty-one miles from the Park boundary, it has 
 constructed a standard-gauge branch right to the Park itself, terminating at Cin- 
 nabar, six miles only from the great hotel, which is, and must continue to be, the 
 most advantageous point for the headquarters of visitors. 
 
 The entire trip from Livingston to Cinnabar is made through the upper 
 valley of the Yellowstone river, with ever-varying views of mountain, woodland, 
 and well-cultivated farms. Five minutes after leaving the railroad station a 
 grand scene presents itself to the eye. This is the first canon of the majestic 
 river, and picturesque groups of towering rocks, varied by beautiful areas of 
 forest trees, claim wondering admiration. Soon the grim walls of the canon are 
 passed, and the broad and fertile valley of the Yellowstone unfolds as a pano- 
 rama its charming features of farmstead and of wood-clad islands, the latter 
 reflecting their foliage in the silver flood, whose rushing waters fall upon the ear 
 in deep crescendo tones. To these charms must be dded those afforded by 
 watching the animal life of the country. Eagles and other birds of prey hover 
 in the air; glimpses of startled antelope and elk are caught on the mountain 
 crags, while myriads of wild geese and ducks haunt the feeding grounds on the 
 margin of the river. 
 
 At Cinnabar, the southern terminus of the National Park Branch, a line of 
 Concord coaches and light spring wagons connects with all passenger trains, 
 conveying passengers without delay to Mammoth Hot Springs (Yellowstone 
 National Park Hotel), distant about six miles. The tourist is now on the 
 enchanted ground known throughout the civilized world as the Yellowstone 
 National Park, which the Congress of the United States has " dedicated and 
 set apart as a public park, or pleasure ground, for the benefit and enjoyment of 
 the people." 
 
 A distinguished writer, speaking of the country embraced in the Park, says : 
 " It is a region of wonder, terror and delight. Nature puts forth all her powers, 
 and her moods are ever changing from 'grave to gay, from lively to severe.' 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 25 
 
 Here tremendous geysers shoot up their mighty fountains, causing the earth to 
 groan and tremble by their violence; countless hot springs, indescribable in their 
 strange beauty, show depths as translucent as the ambient air; pools of seething 
 mud, casting up jets of colored paste, bewilder by their curious activity. And, 
 as if these were not sufficient, here, too, is to be seen the most varied and lavish 
 display of picturesque scenery. The Park unfolds a succession of pictures, each 
 more striking than the other. There are serried, snow-mantled mountains, pro- 
 found canons, mighty cataracts, verdant valleys, beautiful woods, sylvan streams, 
 foaming cascades, and mirror-like lakes." 
 
 Location. 
 
 The Yellowstone National Park lies partly in the Territory of Wyoming and 
 partly in that of Montana. It is sixty-five miles north and south, by fifty-five 
 miles east and west; comprises 3,575 square miles, and is, throughout its entire 
 extent, 6,000 feet, or more, above the level of the sea. Yellowstone Lake has an 
 altitude of 7,788 feet, while the mountain ranges that hem in the valleys on every 
 side rise to the height of 10,000 and 12,000 feet, and are covered with perpetual 
 snow. The entire region was, at a comparatively recent geological period, the 
 scene of remarkable volcanic activity, the last stages of which are still visible in 
 the hot springs and geysers. In the number and magnitude of these, the Park 
 surpasses all the rest of the world. There are probably fifty geysers throwing 
 columns of water to the height of from 50 to 200 feet, and from 5,000 to 10,000 
 springs, depositing either lime or silica. There is every variety of beautiful color, 
 and the deposits form around their borders the most elaborate ornamentation. 
 The temperature of the calcareous springs is from 160 to 170, that of 
 the others 200 or more. The principal collections are the Upper and Lower 
 Geyser Basins of the Madison river and the calcareous springs of the Gardiner 
 river. The Park is also one of the most interesting geographical localities in 
 North America, having within its limits or in its vicinity the sources of several 
 of the greatest rivers of the continent. On the north are those of the Yellow- 
 stone; on the west those of the principal forks of the Missouri; on the southwest 
 and south those of Snake river, flowing into the Columbia and through it into the 
 Pacific Ocean, and those of Green river, a branch of the great Colorado, which 
 empties into the Gulf of California. 
 
 Geysers. 
 
 Of the many wonderful things to be seen in the Park, the most wonderful of 
 all are the GEYSERS, of which there is the grandest collection known to exist in 
 the world. They are very active and powerful, each one having regular eruptions 
 of from five to fifteen minutes' duration, when columns of boiling water are 
 thrown from 100 to 300 feet high, and countless rocks of enormous weight hurled 
 like rockets high above the columns of water, accompanied by an earth-trem- 
 bling which is terrific. The largest and principal geysers have been named as 
 follows : 
 
26 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 "Old Faithful," which regularly every hour sends its streams of boiling water 
 200 feet upward, the spectacle continuing from three to five minutes. When the 
 action ceases, the water recedes out of sight, and nothing but the occasional hiss 
 of steam is heard until the time approaches for another eruption. 
 
 On the opposite side of the river is the "Bee Hive" geyser, which once in 
 twenty-four hours throws a column of water, three feet in diameter, to a height 
 of from 100 to 220 feet. 
 
 Next, one comes up to the "Giantess," which, however, only once in four- 
 teen days shows her power. She then shoots up a stream 250 feet into the air r 
 with strong eruption, lasting twenty minutes, and heard at a great distance. 
 From here one visits the "Lion," the "Lioness" and her two cubs, the "Saw 
 Mill," the "Grand," the "Comet," the "Giant," the "Grotto," the "Splendid," 
 and the "Castle" geysers, with others of smaller size. Of the last-named group 
 the "Giant" and the "Grand" are the mightiest, throwing streams to a height 
 of 200 feet, the former playing an hour, and the latter twenty minutes, each with 
 strong ebullitions. The craters of these geysers differ considerably in form. 
 Many are even with the ground, and have either narrower or wider throats. 
 Others have elevated craters, which in numerous instances exhibit the most 
 peculiar shapes; as, for instance, the "Castle," which bears a striking similarity 
 to a ruined stronghold, while that of the "Grotto" resembles a hermit's cell. In 
 addition to these geysers, hot sulphur springs are here in large numbers, exhib- 
 iting their beautiful play of colors, as well as their wonderful work of varied 
 crystallizations. One sees here, indeed, the waters in constant play in every 
 stage, from boiling and seething to eruption in great columns of 250 feet in 
 height, which appear as perfect fountains, while the effect is vastly enhanced by 
 the clouds of hot vapor which float upward far beyond the jets of water. This 
 unique demonstration of nature's power in the Geyser Basin has lent to the 
 National Park the appropriate name of "Wonderland," which it well deserves. 
 For, although similar works of nature may be found elsewhere, yet in no other 
 land does such an assemblage of geysers exist, nor are they likely to be repro- 
 duced. The landscape from this Geyser Park offers a beautiful view of high, 
 wood-clad mountain chains, in which rugged rock-groups are often visible. The 
 Firehole river also presents its novelties in the way of hot and cold water flowing 
 in many places in close proximity. Especially is this instanced at the crossing 
 of the stream where the road leaves the Upper Geyser Basin for the Middle 
 Basin. Here the " Riverside " geyser rears itself directly from the bank, and 
 mingles its boiling water with that of the river. 
 
 The way to the Middle Geyser Basin is through beautiful woods, showing 
 snatches of mountain scenery, and passing numerous hot springs of the same 
 character as those already named. 
 
 Finally, the largest geyser which exists in this land of wonders is reached. 
 This is the celebrated "Excelsior." The eruption of this geyser is at irregular 
 intervals, and it is difficult to know when it will happen. But whoever has the 
 good fortune to witness " Excelsior" in activity will certainly marvel at its terri- 
 
VIEWS OF "OLD FAITHFUL'' GEYSER. See page 26. 
 (27) 
 
28 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 ble power, for its column of water, varying from no less than sixty to seventy- 
 five feet in diameter, is sent 300 feet into the air ! 
 
 One of the wonders of the Park is the Grand Canon, whose perpendicular 
 sides, from 200 to 500 yards apart, rise to the height of 1,500 to 2,000 feet. 
 
 Professor F. V. Hayden, in his report to Congress on the explorations which 
 he conducted, to which we are indebted for nearly all the authentic knowledge 
 we have of the Yellowstone region, says: "No language can do justice to the 
 wonderful grandeur and beauty of the canon below the lower falls, the very 
 nearly vertical walls slightly sloping down to the water's edge on either side, so 
 that from the summit the river appears like a thread of silver foaming over its 
 rocky bottom ; the variegated colors of the sides yellow, red, brown, white all 
 intermixed and shading into each other ; the Gothic columns of every form stand- 
 ing out from the sides of the walls with greater variety and more striking colors 
 than ever adorned a work of human art. The margins of the canon on either 
 side are beautifully fringed with pines. * * * The decomposition and the 
 colors of the rocks must have been due largely to hot water from the springs, 
 which has percolated all through, giving to them their present variegated and 
 unique appearance. Standing near the margin of the lower falls, and looking 
 down the canon, which looks like an immense chasm or cleft in the basalt, with 
 its sides, 1,500 to 1,800 feet high, and decorated with the most brilliant colors 
 that the human eye ever saw, with the rocks weathered into an almost unlimited 
 variety of forms, with here and there a pine sending its roots into the clefts on 
 the sides, as if struggling with a sort of uncertain success to maintain an exist- 
 ence the whole presents a picture that it would be difficult to surpass in nature. 
 Mr. Thomas Moran, a celebrated artist, and noted for his skill as a colorist, 
 exclaimed, with a kind of regretful enthusiasm, that these beautiful tints were 
 beyond the reach of human art. It is not the depth alone that gives such an 
 impression of grandeur to the mind, but it is also the picturesque forms and col- 
 oring. After the waters of the Yellowstone roll over the upper descent, they 
 flow with great rapidity over the apparently flat, rocky bottom, which spreads out 
 to nearly double its width above the falls, and continues thus until near the lower 
 falls, when the channel again contracts, and the waters seem, as it were, to gather 
 themselves into one compact mass, and plunge over the descent of 350 feet in 
 detached drops of foam as white as snow, some of the larger globules of water 
 shooting down like the contents of an exploded rocket. It is a sight far more 
 beautiful than, though not so grand or impressive as, that of Niagara Falls. A 
 heavy mist always rises from the water at the foot of the falls, so dense that one 
 can not approach within 200 or 300 feet, and even then the clothes will be drenched 
 in a few moments. Upon the yellow, nearly vertical wall of the west side, the 
 mist mostly falls ; and for 300 feet from the bottom the wall is covered with a 
 thick matting of mosses, sedges, grasses, and other vegetation of the most vivid 
 green, which have sent their small roots into the softened rocks, and are nourished 
 by the ever-ascending spray." 
 
 Now, glance at the map of the National Park : find Mount Washburn the 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 29 
 
 " Pisgah " of that land situated midway between the northern boundary of the 
 Yellowstone Lake and the northern boundary of the Park. No tourist should 
 fail in securing this enchanting view ; while to the scientist, the artist or the poet, 
 and to the worn and weary pilgrims of health and pleasure from our own and 
 other lands, ardent to secure the acme of mountain-climbing enjoyment, and to 
 view the lovely parks and yawning canons, the crests of glistening ice, and veils 
 of blistering brimstone the records of fire and flood, the evidences of marvel- 
 ous eruptions and erosions of the present and past we would say, leisurely 
 ascend the terraced slopes of Mount Washburn, and from its oval summit, with 
 throbbing heart but fearless eye, and soul expanding, look around you. One 
 day thus spent will more adequately impress the mind with the magnitude and 
 marvels of this glorious Wonderland than a perusal of all the maps, reports and 
 other descriptions of the Park that have ever been published. 
 
 Of all the visitors to the National Park, none has written more eloquently 
 than the Rev. Wayland Hoyt, D. D., of Brooklyn, N. Y. He says : 
 
 " Let us take our stand for a little now upon Mount Washburn. Its rounded 
 crest is more than 10,000 feet above the level of the sea, and perhaps 5,000 feet 
 above the level of the valley out of which it springs. Its smooth slopes are easy 
 of ascent. You need not dismount from your horse to gain its summit. Stand- 
 ing there, you look down upon the whole grand panorama as does that eagle 
 yonder, holding himself aloft upon almost motionless wings. I doubt if there is 
 another view at once so majestic and so beautiful in the whole world. Your vision 
 darts through the spaces for 150 miles on some sides. You are standing upon a 
 mountain lifting itself out of a vast saucer-shaped depression. Away yonder, 
 where the sky seems to meet the earth on every side around the whole circum- 
 ference of your sight, are lines and ranges of snow-capped peaks shutting your 
 glances in. Yonder shoot upward the serrated peaks of Pilot Mountain in the 
 Clark's Fork Range. Joined to that, sweep on around you in the dim distance 
 the snowy lines of the Madison Range. Yonder join hands with these the 
 Stinking Water Mountains, and so on and on and around. Do you see that 
 sharp, pinnacle-pointed mountain away off at the southwest, shining in its gar- 
 ments of white against the blue of the summer sky? That is Mount Evarts, 
 named after the poor lost wanderer who for thirty-seven days of deadly peril 
 and starvation sought a way of escape from these frowning mountain barriers, 
 which shut him in so remorselessly, and it marks the divide of the continent. 
 
 "Take now a closer view for a moment. Mark the lower hills folded in their 
 thick draperies of pine and spruce, like dark green velvet of the softest and the 
 deepest; notice, too, those beautiful park-like spaces where the trees refuse to 
 grow, and where the prairie spreads its smooth sward freely toward the sunlight. 
 And those spots of steam breaking into the vision every now and then, and float- 
 ing off like the whitest clouds that ever graced the summer sky those are the 
 signals of the geysers at their strange duty, yonder in the geyser basins thirty 
 miles away. And those bits of silver flashing hither and thither on the hillsides 
 amid the dense green of the forests these are waterfalls and fragments of ice 
 
30 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 glaciers, which for ages have been at their duty of sculpturing these mountains, 
 and have not yet completed it. And that lovely deep blue sheet of water, of 
 such a dainty shape, running its arms out toward the hills, and bearing on its 
 serene bosom emeralds of islands that is the sweetest sheet of water in the 
 world that is the Yellowstone Lake. And that exquisite broad sheen of silver, 
 winding through the green of the trees and the brown of the prairie that is the 
 Yellowstone River, starting on its wonderful journey to the Missouri, and thence 
 downward to the Gulf, between 6,000 and 7,000 miles away. But, nearer to us, 
 almost at our feet, as we trace this broad line of silver, the eye encounters a 
 frightful chasm, as if the earth had suddenly sunk away; and into its gloomy 
 depths the brightness and beauty of the shining river leaps, and is thencefor- 
 ward lost altogether to the view that is the tremendous canon, or gorge, of 
 the Yellowstone." 
 
 Bishop Foss, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in a letter to the North- 
 western Christian Advocate, of Sept. 12, 1883, after referring to his journey of a 
 thousand miles on the Northern Pacific Railroad as the perfection of ease and 
 comfort in railway travel, writes thus of the National Park : 
 
 " Nowhere else on the face of the earth can there be found such a multitude 
 and variety of natural wonders, and especially such abundant evidences of 
 intensely heated subterranean waters. The eye of the tourist is arrested, 
 delighted and startled in turn by grand mountains flecked with perpetual snow, 
 and radiant with strange varieties of color ; lovely lakes ; roaring torrents, the 
 greenest of green and the bluest of blue; towering precipices, immense gulches 
 and canons, cliffs of volcanic glass, mighty cataracts, verdant valleys, seething 
 pots of many-colored mud; boiling springs many hundreds of them of every 
 conceivable variety, some of them large, steaming lakes of wondrously transpar- 
 ent depth, and of indescribable richness of coloring, emerald, turquoise, topaz, 
 prismatic ; appalling caldrons, roaring steam vents ; above all, genuine geysers 
 of every size, form, and period of eruption, including much the largest known in 
 any land. 
 
 ********** 
 
 " By far the largest collection of geysers is in the Upper Geyser Basin, fifty 
 miles south from the Mammoth Hot Spring. Here, in a narrow valley two miles 
 long, are geysers far surpassing in number and in size those of Iceland, New 
 Zealand, or any other part of the world. Some of their names are very suggest- 
 ive : Old Faithful, the Bee Hive, Castle, Splendid, Grand, Giantess, Giant, Lion, 
 Lioness and Cubs, the Saw Mill, Comet, Riverside, Fan. Some of them have built 
 up sloping mounds covering many acres, and capped with cones from four to 
 twenty feet high. Their periods of eruption vary from a few seconds to fifteen 
 days or longer ; their height, from a few yards to 300 feet ; their volume, from 
 an amusing spray to an awful flood. Some are steaming, sizzling, boiling, roar- 
 ing or groaning constantly ; others, entirely quiet until just before eruption. The 
 first large geyser I saw in action was Old Faithful ; and as its stately column rose 
 to a height of 150 feet, this deep impression thrilled me : 'Great and marvelous 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 31 
 
 are thy works, O Lord God Almighty ! ' For two days, whenever I sat at my 
 tent door, the 'same august spectacle greeted me, at intervals ranging from forty 
 to seventy-five minutes, with an ever-heightening impression. Majestically beau- 
 tiful art thou, Old Faithful ! Thou shalt ever keep thy place in the picture 
 gallery of my memory beside Jungfrau, Lake George and the Milan Cathedral." 
 
 President Arthur, after his trip to the National Park, in 1883, said: "The 
 scenery of the National Park seemed to me simply magnificent. The Catskills 
 are wild enough and sufficiently beautiful in their own way, but they fall far short 
 of that majestic grandeur which so pre-eminently characterizes the Yellowstone 
 Park the vast spur's of the Rocky Mountains traversed by the Yellowstone at 
 an elevation of not less than 8,000 feet." 
 
 Said a distinguished member of the royal household of Denmark, who made 
 a tour of the Yellowstone National Park in June, 1882 : " I am expected to deliver 
 a lecture on America before a geographical congress to be held in Europe this 
 fall, but I fear it will be all 'Yellowstone.' All the other leading features of my 
 trip around the world seem for the present in a grand confusion, while I am so 
 possessed with this one ineffable attraction." 
 
 Who has not heard of, and what lover of the stage has not seen, the popular, 
 genial tragedian, John McCullough ? Listen to this great actor while he speaks 
 of his visit to the National Park : 
 
 " It was the pleasantest five weeks of my life, this last vacation. I debated 
 whether I should -go with Sheridan or to Europe. I am exceedingly glad I stayed 
 in America. It is the grandest country, spectacularly, God Almighty has made. 
 Shakespeare's dictum, ' Nature is greater than art,' is here verified again and 
 again. I confess I was skeptical ; I read the most exaggerated (as I then thought) 
 accounts of the Park and its wonders, and was as heretical as could be : the half 
 was not told. The half? Not the thousandth part ; nor can it be. Pages of 
 description are all too faint, though the strongest superlatives in the language 
 are used unstintedly. Why ! to sit on the edge of Hell's Half Acre and watch 
 the Sheridan geyser, is to have a lifetime memory. It is twice as big as this 
 hotel (the Metropolitan), and the steam and water ascend to a height of 400 feet. 
 It is indescribably grand to watch it first sending up a cloud of steam, then water, 
 higher and higher, until the stupendous magnitude of a full eruption is reached. 
 * * * The Grand Canon is a marvel of the world, and the falls why ! what 
 is Niagara to them ? When I tell you that a vast body of water leaps down a 
 precipice 350 feet high, you can gather a faint idea of what it is. I could go on 
 for hours telling of the wonders ! " 
 
 Of the beauties of the Lower Geyser Basin, which extends southward from 
 the junction of the east fork of the Firehole river with the main stream, Pro- 
 fessor R. W. Raymond says : 
 
 " In some of the elements of beauty and interest, the Lower Geyser Basin is 
 superior to its more startling rival. It is broader and more easily surveyed as a 
 whole, and its springs are more numerous, though not so powerful. Nothing 
 can be lovelier than the sight, at sunrise, of the white steam columns, tinged 
 
32 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 with rosy morning, ascending against the background of the dark pine woods 
 and the clear sky above. The variety in form and character of these springs is 
 quite remarkable. A few of them make faint deposits of sulphur, though the 
 greater number appear to be purely silicious. One very large basin (forty by 
 sixty feet) is filled with the most beautiful slime, varying in tint from white to 
 pink, which blobs and spits away, trying to boil, like a heavy theologian forcing 
 a laugh to please a friend, in spite of his natural specific gravity. * * * * 
 The extinct geysers are the most beautiful objects of all. Around their borders 
 
 the white incrustations form 
 quaint arabesques and orna- 
 mental bosses, resembling pet- 
 rified vegetable growths. The 
 sides of the reservoir are corru- 
 gated and indented fancifully, 
 
 like the recesses and branching passages of a fairy cavern. The water is 
 brightly but not deeply blue. Over its surface curls a light vapor ; through its 
 crystal clearness one may gaze, apparently, to unfathomable depths ; and, seen 
 through this wondrous medium, the white walls seem like silver, ribbed and 
 crusted with pearl. When the sun strikes across the scene, the last touch 
 of unexpected beauty is added. The projected shadow of the decorated edge 
 reveals by contrast new glories in the depths; every ripple on the surface makes 
 marvelous play of tint and shade on the pearly bottom. One half expects to see 
 a lovely naiad emerge with floating grace from her fantastically carven covert, 
 and gaily kiss her snowy hand through the blue wave. In one of these laugs the 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 33 
 
 whitened skeleton of a mountain buffalo was discovered. By whatever accident 
 he met his fate there, no king or saint was ever more magnificently entombed. 
 Not the shrine of St. Anthony of Padua, with its white marbles and its silver 
 lamps, is so resplendent as this sepulchre in the wilderness." 
 
 Of the Lower Falls and Grand Canon of the Yellowstone, Dr. Wayland 
 Hoyt, in a magnificent piece of descriptive writing, worthy of his subject, 
 says : 
 
 " Well, we nave reaqhed Cascade Creek at last; and a beautiful grove of trees, 
 beneath whose shade sparkles a clear stream, whose waters are free from the 
 nauseous taste of alkali, furnishes a delightful place in which to camp. Now 
 dismounting, and seeing that your horse is well cared for, while the men are un- 
 loading the pack-mules and pitching the tents walk up that trail winding up 
 that hillside; follow it for a little among the solemn pines, and then pass out 
 from the tree shadows, and take your stand upon that jutting rock clinging to 
 it well meanwhile, and being very sure of your footing, for your head will surely 
 grow dizzy and there opens before you one of the most stupendous scenes of 
 nature THE LOWER FALLS AND THE AWFUL CANON OF THE YELLOWSTONE. 
 
 " And now, where shall I begin, and how shall I, in any wise, describe this 
 tremendous sight its overpowering grandeur, and, at the same time, its inex- 
 pressible beauty ? 
 
 " Look yonder those are the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone. They are not 
 the grandest in the world, but there are none more beautiful. There is not the 
 breadth and dash of Niagara, nor is there the enormous depth of leap of some 
 of the waterfalls of the Yosemite. But here is majesty of its own kind, and 
 beauty, too. On either side are vast pinnacles of sculptured rock. There, where 
 the rock opens for the river, its waters are compressed from a width of 200 feet 
 between the Upper and Lower Falls to 100 feet where it takes the plunge. The 
 shelf of rock over which it leaps is absolutely level. The water seems to wait a 
 moment on its verge; then it passes with a single bound of 300 feet into the 
 gorge below. It is a sheer, unbroken, compact, shining mass of silver foam. 
 But your eyes are all the time distracted from the fall itself, great and beautiful 
 as it is, to its marvelous setting to the surprising, overmastering canon into 
 which the river leaps and through which it flows, dwindling to but a foamy 
 ribbon there in its appalling depths. As you cling here to this jutting rock the 
 falls are already many hundred feet below you. The falls unroll their whiteness 
 down amid the canon glooms. * * * These rocky sides are almost perpendic- 
 ular indeed, in many places the boiling springs have gouged them out so as to 
 leave overhanging cliffs and tables at the top. Take a stone and throw it over 
 you must wait long before you hear it strike. Nothing more awful have I ever 
 seen than the yawning of that chasm. And the stillness, solemn as midnight, pro- 
 found as death ! The water dashing there, as in a kind of agony, against those 
 rocks, you can not hear. The mighty distance lays the finger of its silence on its 
 white lips. You are oppressed with a sense of danger. It is as though the vast- 
 ness would soon force you from the rock to which you cling. The silence, the 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 sheer depth, the gloom, burden you. It is a relief to feel the firm earth beneath 
 your feet again, as you carefully crawl back from your perching place. 
 
 " But this is not all, nor is the half yet told. As soon as you can stand it, go 
 out on that jutting rock again and mark the sculpturing of God upon those vast 
 and solemn walls. By dash of wind and wave, by forces of the frost, by file of 
 snow plunge and glacier and mountain torrent, by the hot breath of boiling 
 springs, those walls have been cut into the most various and surprising shapes. 
 I have seen the middle-age castles along the Rhine: but those castles are repro- 
 duced exactly. I have seen the soaring summits of the great cathedral spires in 
 the country beyond the sea: there they stand in prototype, only loftier and 
 sublimer. 
 
 " And then, of course, and almost beyond all else, you are fascinated by the 
 magnificence and utter opulence of color. Those are not simply gray and 
 hoary depths and reaches and domes and pinnacles of sullen rock. The whole 
 gorge flames. It is as though rainbows had fallen out of the sky and hung 
 themselves there like glorious banners. The underlying color is the clearest 
 yellow; this flushes onward into orange. Down at the base the deepest mosses 
 unroll their draperies of the most vivid green; browns, sweet and soft, do their 
 blending; white rocks stand spectral; turrets of rock shoot up as crimson as 
 though they were drenched through with blood. It is a wilderness of color. It 
 is impossible that even the pencil of an artist can tell it. What you would call, 
 accustomed to the softer tints of nature, a great exaggeration, would be the 
 utmost lameness compared with the reality. It is as though the most glorious 
 sunset you ever saw had been caught and held upon that resplendent, awful 
 gorge. 
 
 " Through nearly all the hours of that afternoon until the sunset shadows 
 came, and afterward, amid the moonbeams, I waited there, clinging to that 
 rock, jutting out into that overpowering, gorgeous chasm. I was appalled and 
 fascinated; afraid, and yet compelled to cling there. It was an epoch in my 
 life." 
 
 Hotel Accommodations in the Park. 
 
 At Mammoth Hot Springs of which mention has already been made a 
 large and commodious hotel, which would do credit to Long Branch, has been 
 built, having capacity for 400 guests. It is handsomely furnished throughout, 
 and has all the modern improvements of hot and cold water, gas, etc., etc. 
 Other hotels are being erected at different points in the Park. 
 
 It will be the aim of the parties controlling the stage routes, hotels and other 
 appurtenances of the Park, to make charges reasonable for services performed, 
 and assurances are given that no imposition will be permitted; on the contrary, 
 everything will be done to make a visit to the Park one of pleasure, profit and 
 economy. The management fully appreciate the fact that the Yellowstone 
 National Park is the finest pleasure resort on the continent, indeed, it may be 
 said, in the world ; and every effort will be made to make visitors welcome, and 
 to give them a full equivalent for their expenditure. 
 
LAKE PEND D'OREILLE, IDA.HO. See page 42. 
 
 (35) 
 
SdUUlC-UUlSCS, ^UlUCS ctllU aiLCUUclUUS, LUU3 GlldUUUg LUCU1 LU UldlvC d UUlllplCLC 
 
 tour of the Park with comparative comfort. 
 
 It is well to be provided with an extra overcoat, a gum rubber coat, as a pro- 
 tection against storms, and warm underclothing and outer garments; colored 
 glasses, as the sun is very blinding during the middle of the day; and to avoid 
 drinking much water. 
 
 Should visitors desire to extend their tour through the Park, and visit the 
 Great Yellowstone Lake and Mount Washburn, arrangements can be made with 
 parties having charge of the stage routes, at Mammoth Hot Springs. 
 
 Westward Still. 
 
 Although we have now visited what we have several times referred to as the 
 greatest of all natural wonders, we are far from having explored the whole of 
 our Wonderland. A thousand miles of railway still lie before us, a railway 
 which, after scaling the dizzy heights and threading its way through the lonely 
 passes of the Rocky Mountains, will conduct us through the most magnificent 
 river scenery in the world, and bring us at last to the far-famed glaciers of Mount 
 Tacoma. Surely the passion for sight-seeing grows with what it feeds upon; 
 for, so long as such a tour as this is not unduly hurried, and does not involve 
 any sacrifice of personal comfort, it really seems as though it may be extended 
 to almost any length. 
 
 After leaving Livingston the railroad runs for twelve miles from the valley 
 of the Yellowstone to the approach of the Bozeman tunnel, on a grade of about 
 116 feet to the mile. The tunnel pierces the mountains a distance of 3,610 feet, 
 at an elevation of 5,565 feet above the ocean. Some months before the comple- 
 tion of the work a short, steep-grade track was laid over the summit of the pass 
 for temporary use. It is far more agreeable to ride over the mountain than 
 through it, and there are glorious views in every direction. The train runs- 
 down the western slope in the wild defile of Rock Canon, passing out into the 
 broad, fertile valley of the West Gallatin, at Elliston, near the military post of 
 Fort Ellis, twenty-two miles from Livingston. 
 
 A few minutes more and we run into Bozeman, one of the oldest towns in 
 Montana. This place was laid out long before any active operations were com- 
 menced in the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and it has grown 
 to considerable size and importance. It seems not a little strange in these days- 
 of railroads to read that, when the first train arrived in Bozeman, there were 
 people, not savages, but well educated and refined, who turned out to look at a 
 railway train for the first time. Bozeman is situated near the eastern end of the 
 Gallatin valley. North of the city the mountains are about three miles distant, 
 but the range suddenly diverges in the same direction, and afterward the valley 
 becomes twenty miles in width. The city presents a very attractive appearance, 
 with its many substantial brick structures, among which are business blocks, 
 churches, graded schools, and a fine court-house, while on every side appear 
 handsome residences and neat, cozy cottages. The scenery surrounding Bozeman 
 
broad valley can be seen, with its fields of grain, its swift streams, its irrigating 
 ditches glistening in the sunlight like silver ribbons, its cozy little farm houses, 
 .and its encircling rim of gray mountains crowned with snow. 
 
 After leaving Bozeman the road continues westward for thirty miles through 
 the beautiful Gallatin valley. There are many farms, but no large villages, on 
 this part of the route. The junction of the Gallatin, the Madison and the Jeffer- 
 .-son rivers is effected at Gallatin City. Here the three minor streams are merged 
 into the Missouri, which flows northward 150 miles to Fort Benton, passing on 
 its course through several grand canons, whose walls rise from 1,000 to 2,000 
 feet above the river. At Fort Benton the Missouri turns eastward and south- 
 ward, uniting with the Mississippi more than 3,000 miles from its point of begin- 
 ning in the Gallatin valley. For all this distance the Missouri is navigable by 
 steamboats of at least 200 tons burden, except for eighteen miles at the Great 
 Falls above Fort Benton. Many people visit these falls in small boats, which 
 leave the Helena landing. Within a distance of ten miles above the Great Falls 
 .are ten others, varying in height from three to forty-seven feet, three of which, 
 viz., the Black Eagle, Rainbow and Crooked Falls, can scarcely be surpassed for 
 perfection of form and graceful beauty. 
 
 In the large and fertile valley of the Missouri, fifty-nine miles from Bozeman, 
 has recently sprung up a town which will become the distributing point for a 
 large and fruitful section of country. The name of Townsend has been given 
 to it ; and it is the nearest station to the celebrated White Sulphur Springs, at 
 the head of Smith river, which are a favorite summer resort, and also for many 
 remarkable places of picturesque beauty in the mountains. 
 
 Across the Missouri valley, in a northeasterly direction, a series of deep 
 gorges, or canons, has been cut by the waters in the faces of the precipitous 
 mountains. Crowning the summits of the first range skirting the valley is a 
 gigantic ledge of lime rock. This ledge has been thrown up in places to a great 
 height, with almost vertical sides, which are partly smooth, partly seamed and 
 gashed by ages of storms, and sometimes cut through from top to bottom by the 
 streams, forming narrow gorges of fantastic shapes. Avalanche Canon is of great 
 note for its wild beauty and extensive and rich placer mines. This canon received 
 its name from the frequency of avalanches, or snow slides, which rush down 
 its almost perpendicular sides in winter, sometimes completely filling the gorge. 
 Hell Gate Canon, about two miles westward, while having a peculiarly suggest- 
 ive name, amply merits the appellation. Perhaps in no other accessible spot in 
 Montana is there as much rugged beauty in so small a place. The canon forms 
 the tortuous passage of a silvery stream through a series of gates cut in very 
 high walls. These gates are so narrow that a man can span their width with ex- 
 tended arms. The walls are only a few feet in thickness, but of a surprising 
 height. On each side of the main gorge are smooth fissures, called Devil's 
 Slides, and every nook is filled with bright mosses and lichens. 
 
(38) 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 39 
 
 Two miles beyond the crossing of the Missouri river the railroad passes 
 through the mining town of Bedford, which was established in 1864. Much 
 placer mining is still carried on in the vicinity, and the country for miles and 
 miles around is covered with enormous piles of stones and earth, and the debris 
 of the diggings. The road follows down the valley of the Missouri, past one or 
 two old and thrifty settlements, to Helena, twenty miles beyond. 
 
 Helena, the capital of Montana, is situated at the eastern foot of the main 
 chain of the Rocky Mountains, on both sides of the famous Last Chance gulch, 
 from which at least $10,000,000 worth of nuggets and gold dust have been taken, 
 and which still yields annually a considerable amount of the precious metal. 
 Its situation, as the nearest point in the mining region to the head of navigation 
 on the Missouri river at Fort Benton, made Helena a distributing centre in the 
 days when merchants brought in a year's supply of goods during the brief sea- 
 son of navigation. It thus got a start as the chief commercial town of the Terri- 
 tory, the advantage of which it is not likely to lose. 
 
 Helena is surrounded by mountains, rising one above the other until the more 
 distant are lost among the clouds, forming a view of striking beauty and grand- 
 eur, which is visible from every part of the city. To the south and west these 
 mountains recede, in long, picturesque, timbered ridges, to the main ridge of the 
 continental divide. The Missouri river is only twelve miles distant; and eighteen 
 miles north of the city begins the famous canon of the Missouri river, named by 
 Lewis and Clarke's expedition, in 1805, "The Gates of the Rocky Mountains." 
 Here the river has forced its way through a spur of the Belt Mountains, forming 
 cliffs, frequently vertical, from 500 to 1,500 feet high, which rise from the water's 
 edge for a distance of twelve miles. Near the lower end of this wonderful canon, 
 in plain view of Helena, thirty miles distant, is the jagged peak called by the 
 Indians "The Bear's Tooth," rising abruptly from the river to a'height of 2,500 
 feet, and almost hanging over the head of the voyager as he floats down the 
 stream. 
 
 To the left of this curious object a few miles, and breaking through the same 
 range of stratified mountains, is the canon of the Little Prickly Pear creek, a 
 chasm some fifteen miles long, with an endless variety of views of lofty cliffs 
 crowned with pines, and romantic dells and gorges, where the cottonwood and 
 the alder hang over deep, shady pools, in which hundreds of trout await their 
 destiny in the shape of a man with a bamboo rod and book of flies. This canon, 
 with hotel accommodation at each end of it, is accessible by carriages, as well as 
 by a stage line of "palace jerkies," which pass through it three times a week 
 for Fort Benton. "The Gates of the Rocky Mountains" are reached either by 
 carriages to the upper end of the canon, or by boat through the canon itself. 
 
 Among the other attractions of Helena are the Hot Springs, situated in a 
 romantic glen four miles west of the city, which are much resorted to by persons 
 afflicted with rheumatism. The temperature of the water as it bubbles up from 
 the earth varies from no to 140 Fahrenheit. 
 
 By no means pleasing to the eye, with its scrambling, shadeless streets cling- 
 
its Chinese suburb, Helena is, nevertheless, an attractive place. It has good 
 hotel accommodations, numerous churches, and stores as large and well stocked 
 as are found in the East in cities ten times its size ; and visitors may enjoy the 
 society of people who add to culture that stamp of originality of character so 
 common in the Far West, and so rare in old communities. Small as is the city, 
 it has a good deal of the metropolitan flavor, due to its comparative isolation 
 in conjunction with its great local importance. 
 
 About nineteen miles from Helena the main range of the Rocky Mountains 
 is crossed by the railroad at the Mullan Pass, so named after Lieutenant John 
 Mullan, U. S. A., who, in 1867, built a wagon road from Fort Benton, M. T., to 
 Fort Walla Walla, W. T., thus bringing these distant military posts into direct 
 communication. Here there is a tunnel 3,850 feet in length, and 5,547 feet 
 above sea level. The route from Helena to the Mullan Pass is through the 
 charming valley of the Prickly Pear, across Ten Mile creek, and up past heavy 
 growths of pine and spruce and masses of broken boulders, the narrow basin of 
 Ten Mile creek, to the eastern portal of the tunnel. The scene from above 
 reveals one of the most picturesque regions in Montana, in which mountain and 
 valley, forest and stream, are all conspicuous features. Describing the region 
 in a recent letter, Mr. E. V. Smalley wrote : 
 
 "Approached from the east, the Rocky Mountains seem well to deserve their 
 name. Gigantic cliffs and buttresses of granite appear to bar the way, and to 
 forbid the traveler's further progress. There are depressions in the range, how- 
 ever, where ravines run up the slopes, and torrents come leaping down, fed by 
 melting snows. Over one of these depressions Lieut. John Mullan built a wagon 
 road, a score of years ago, to serve the needs of army transportation between the 
 head of navigation at the Great Falls of the Missouri and the posts in Oregon. 
 Mullan's wisdom in selecting the pass which bears his name, was indorsed when 
 the railroad engineers found it to be the most favorable on the Northern Pacific 
 Line. The road is carried up ravines and across the face of foot-hills to a steep 
 wall, where it dives into the mountain side, runs under the crest of the divide 
 through a tunnel three-quarters of a mile long, and comes out upon smiling green 
 and flowery meadows, to follow a clear trout stream down to a river whose waters 
 seek the mighty Columbia. The contrast between the western and eastern sides 
 of the main divide of the Rockies is remarkable. On the eastern slope the 
 landscapes are magnificently savage and sombre ; on the western slope they have 
 a pleasant pastoral beauty, and one might think himself in the hill country of 
 Western Pennsylvania instead of high up on the side of the great water-shed of 
 the continent. The forest tracts look like groves planted by a landscape gardener 
 in some stately park, and the grassy slopes and valleys covered with blue and 
 yellow flowers, and traversed by swift, clear brooks, add to the pleasure-ground 
 appearance of the country. What a glorious place this would be for summer 
 camping, trout fishing and shooting, is the thought of every traveler as he 
 descends from the summit, with his hands full of flowers picked close to a snow- 
 
rowell s reak, a massive white pyramid, cuts the clear sky with its sharp out- 
 lines on the further horizon, and a cool breeze blows straight from the Pacific 
 Ocean." 
 
 After leaving Garrison, fifty-two miles west of Helena, there are fine views 
 of mountain scenery, especially on the left hand, where the snow-mantled peaks 
 of Mount Powell appear. The railroad passes along near the Deer Lodge 
 river, which skirts the heights to the right. The entire region is noted for 
 the richness and extent of its placer mines, many of the creeks having pro- 
 duced large quantities of fine gold. Farther 'on, as we approach Missoula, 
 Hell Gate Cafion is entered. The scenery here is very fine. Rock-ribbbed 
 mountains rise on either hand, their slopes black with noble specimens of 
 yellow pine, and flecked in autumn with the bright gold of giant tamaracks. 
 
 Beautifully situated at the western gateway of the Rocky Mountains, on a 
 broad plateau on the north side of the Missoula river, stands Missoula, the 
 county seat of Missoula county. It commands a lovely view of the valley and 
 the surrounding mountain ranges, that stretch away far as the eye can see. 
 This town used to be as isolated and remote a frontier post as could be 
 found in the Northwest, but the railroad has converted it into a stirring, ambi- 
 tious place. 
 
 From Missoula the course of the railroad is northwest for nearly 200 miles, 
 and before it again turns south it approaches within about forty-five miles of the 
 international boundary. 
 
 Fourteen miles from Missoula the road enters the Coriacan defile, and crosses 
 the Marent gulch by means of a trestle bridge 866 feet in length and 226 feet in 
 height, the construction of which required i;ooo,ooo feet of lumber. The track 
 follows no valley, bu-t proceeds along the faces of hills, which are covered with 
 fir, pine and tamarack, down into the valley of the Jocko river, where the Agency 
 of the Flathead Indians is established. This beautiful valley is followed to the 
 confluence of the Jocko and Flathead rivers, forty-four miles from Missoula. 
 To the north is the reservation of the Flathead Indians, in which is Flathead 
 Lake, an extensive and beautiful sheet of water, in the midst of the most pictur- 
 esque scenery. The Flatheads boast that their tribes never killed a white man, 
 and it may truly be said that nowhere are life and property safer than they are 
 here. The Flathead river, for twenty-five miles after it receives the waters of 
 the Jocko, until it is itself united with the Missouri, is called the Pend d'Oreille 
 river. Eight miles beyond the railroad crossing, the muddy waters of the Mis- 
 soula, pouring in from the south, mix with the bright flood of the Pend d'Oreille, 
 and the united streams take the designation Clarke's Fork of the Columbia. 
 This name is retained, except where the river widens out into Lake Pend 
 d'Oreille, 100 miles westward, until the waters mingle with those of the Columbia 
 river, in the British Possessions. 
 
 Two small and charming valleys soon appear, to vary the fine mountain 
 views. They are Paradise valley, which well deserves the name, and Horse 
 
visioie 10 tne ngnt, tne rauroaa continues westwara along tne ngnt Dank or tne 
 river through a mountain region which affords a succession of magnificent 
 views. Everywhere along Clarke's Fork there is the grandest scenery. Magnifi- 
 cent vistas are presented as the train moves along, changing and wearing new 
 forms at every turn. The mountains are conical, and sometimes vertical, as 
 where the river has cut through them with tremendous force. The constant 
 succession of towering hills, grouped in wild array, is never wearying, and is 
 sometimes startling in effect, as when some tributary from the north or south 
 tears its way to the greater stream, and offers a vista, reaching far through the 
 deep-worn caiion or ravine, along which the heights are ranged as far as eye 
 
 FLOATING FISH WHEEL, ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER, OREGON. 
 
 can see. One of the most striking of these side effects 
 is where Thompson's river comes in from the north, and 
 you look up the long and sharp ravine to catch a momentary glimpse, from the 
 trestle bridge, of the foaming waterfall and the. heights that wall it in. 
 
 The whole of the Clarke's Fork district contains rich mineral deposits, and 
 several mining camps have recently been established, from which the most en- 
 couraging reports have been received. 
 
 A few miles southeast of the point at which the river widens out into Lake 
 Pend d'Oreille, the road enters the Territory of Idaho, and is soon skirting 
 the shores of the beautiful and far-famed lake. This sheet of water may be 
 likened to a broad and winding valley among the mountains, filled to the brim 
 with gathered waters. The shores are mountainous, but wherever there is 
 a bit of beach it is covered with dense forest. The view of the lake from 
 the car windows is superb. Numerous mountain peaks slope up from the 
 water's edge, covered with thick forests of dark pine, intermingled with patches 
 
the most permanent features of civilization are the saw mills, which, having 
 supplied material for railroad construction, are now employed in manufacturing 
 lumber for shipment. The forest is interminable, but where the mountains 
 are abrupt the trees do not grow large enough and clear enough to make good 
 lumber. One of the best places at which to lie over for a day's hunting or for 
 catching some of the trout with which the lake abounds, is Sand Point. The 
 great Pend d'Oreille forest, stretching across the northwest corner of Montana 
 and the panhandle of Idaho into Eastern Washington, is one vast flower-garden, 
 there being scarcely a square foot of the ground, save in the dark recesses along 
 the courses of the small streams, which does not bear a blossom. 
 
 Leaving the lake, the railway takes a southwesterly sweep, and, nine miles 
 beyond the town of Rathdrum, crosses the Idaho line and enters Washington 
 Territory. One of the most singular districts of this country is the Spokane 
 valley. It is thirty miles long and from three to six miles in width, surrounded 
 by the western ranges of the Lower Cceur d'Alene or Bitter Root Mountains. 
 
 The Spokane river rises in Coeur d'Ale^ne Lake, close under the timbered 
 mountains in Idaho, about ten miles south of the railroad. While the rivers 
 that drain the western water-shed of the Cceur d'Alene Mountains pour im- 
 mense volumes of water into the lake, the Spokane river, the lake's only outlet, 
 is but a brook in size, with no tributaries of importance. Still, thirty miles 
 below the lake, it becomes a roaring cataract, at the town of Spokane Falls. 
 The theory is advanced that the increased volume is. due to the percolation 
 of the upper waters through the gravelly soil. Lake Cceur d'Alene rivals in 
 the beauty of its waters and the grandeur of its mountain surroundings its 
 more accessible neighbor, Lake Pend d'Oreille. It is surrounded by a rich 
 mining country. 
 
 The first point of importance in Washington Territory is Spokane Falls, 
 which has, in some respects, a greater claim to consideration than any other place 
 east of the Cascade Mountains. Its situation is very beautiful, looking out, as 
 it does, upon the hills, with the grand roaring waterfall close at hand. 
 
 The falls, seen when melting snows swell the flow and the banks are brimming 
 with the hurrying flood, are a sight never to be forgotten. Basaltic islands divide 
 the broad river, and the waters rush in swift rapids to meet these obstructions. 
 A public bridge crosses from island to island. The width of the river is 
 nearly half a mile. There are three great streams curving toward each other, 
 and pouring their floods into a common basin. Reunited, the waters foam and 
 toss for a few hundred yards in whirling rapids, and then make another plunge 
 into the canon beyond. Standing on the rocky ledge below the second water- 
 fall, and looking up the stream, a fine view is obtained of the wonderful display 
 of force. All things else seem weak and trivial compared with the tremendous 
 torrent that heaves and plunges below, and the grand cascades that foam 
 and toss above. 
 
44 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 Sixty-eight miles north of Spokane Falls is the Chewelah country, a region 
 of extraordinary mineral wealth. Considerable quantities of gold have been 
 brought thence by the Indians, who bear emphatic testimony to its abundance. 
 Capitalists are already arranging to commence operations for the development 
 of this rich country. 
 
 A few miles to the north of the road, almost equidistant between Spokane 
 and Cheney, there is a group of five lakes, from one to three miles long. Three 
 of these lakes, having great depth, are very strongly impregnated with alkaline 
 salts, and their waters have remarkable curative properties. One in particular 
 attracts hundreds of invalids, especially persons afflicted with rheumatism, skin 
 diseases and nervous complaints. Many undoubted cures of a remarkable 
 nature are recorded. This medical lake, par excellence, has a medium strength 
 of salts, while another has a very strong impregnation, and the third but a 
 mild one. The region is delightful, and can be made a very pleasant resort. 
 The proprietors of the town Medical Lake are doing what they can to 
 accommodate the public by building hotels and erecting bathing establishments. 
 
 Not until the Columbia river is reached, 165 miles southwest of the Idaho 
 line, does the country present any further features upon which we need dwell ; 
 but in the land 
 
 "Where rolls the Oregon," 
 
 we are in a region of surpassing interest. As has well been said by a writer from 
 whose graphic descriptions of Northwestern scenery we have already quoted : 
 
 " There are few points on the American continent that can rival Oregon for 
 grand and imposing scenery. The lofty peak of Mount Hood, like a magnified 
 Egyptian pyramid, sheeted in snow, and set upon an immense green wall, is the 
 most beautiful mountain of the whole Pacific coast, if symmetry of form be 
 regarded as the first element in beauty, and in height and massiveness it is sur- 
 passed only by Mount Tacoma. The great Sugar Loaf of Mount St. Helens, 
 though on the Washington side of the Columbia, belongs to the scenery of 
 Oregon as well as to that of the neighboring Territory, and so does Mount 
 Adams. All three of these glittering peaks, as well as the summit of Tacoma, 
 far in the north, and of Jefferson on the southern horizon, can be seen from the 
 hills back of Portland. The lower peaks and ranges of the Coast and Cascade 
 Mountains, and of the Calapovia and Siskiyou Mountains in Southern Oregon, 
 present to the eye a thousand pleasing outlines. 
 
 " In the grandeur of its shores the Columbia ranks first of American rivers. 
 Its current is as impetuous as that of the Mississippi ; its mountain walls and 
 palisades are far loftier than those of the Hudson ; cataracts like those of the 
 Yosemite valley dash over its basaltic cliffs. At the Dalles it buries itself in a 
 profound crevice, whose depth has never been fathomed, showing of its surface 
 only as much as can be compassed by a stone's throw ; at Astoria it becomes a 
 broad tidal estuary, whose farther shores lie in dim distance ; at the Cascades it 
 is a foaming, headlong torrent ; at the mouth of the Willamette it is a placid 
 lake, encircling many green islands. The Willamette has an emerald-green cur- 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 45 
 
 rent, and flows between gentle slopes, through farms and woodland, past orchards 
 anH pretty villages a placid and idyllic stream, save where it leaps down forty 
 feet in one bound at its falls, and makes a small Niagara of white foam and rain- 
 bow-tinted spray. Indeed, to briefly catalogue half the special scenic features of 
 Oregon would demand a great deal more space than this chapter affords. Enough 
 to say that the State has all the grandeur and loveliness in landscapes that mount- 
 ains, rivers, valleys, waterfalls, lakes and the ocean can give, and that tourists 
 will find within its bounds, and those of its neighbor, Washington, a combination 
 of Switzerland and Maine, of Italy and Norway." 
 
 At Ainsworth the train crosses the Snake river, near its confluence with the 
 Columbia, by a massive iron bridge, 1,541 feet in length next to the Bismarck 
 bridge over the Missouri river the most important structure of the kind on the 
 entire Northern Pacific system and enters the Walla Walla country, a magnifi- 
 cent farming belt, of amazing fertility. Throughout its entire extent of 12,000 
 square miles or more, there is scarcely an acre of waste land, and the harvests of 
 fruit and grain yielded by its uniformly productive soil are enormous. 
 
 Some 200 miles to the southeast, midway between the Blue Mountains and 
 Snake river, lies the old town of Baker City, a business point of considerable 
 importance, commanding the trade of a wide section of Eastern and Southeastern 
 Oregon. The locality is rich in minerals; and gold mining, both placer and 
 quartz, is being successfully carried on. Baker City is reached by a branch 
 diverging from the main line at Umatilla Junction, forty-one miles west, or, more 
 strictly, southwest, of Ainsworth. Thirteen miles on the Portland side of Ains- 
 worth there is, however, a still more important junction Wallula the eastern 
 terminus of the Cascade Division of the Northern Pacific Railroad, running 
 northwest to Puget Sound. This section, the only portion of the original project 
 not yet brought to completion, is being rapidly pushed on with from both ends, 
 and another year will see it open for traffic. In addition to rendering accessible 
 some of the finest scenery of the majestic Cascade Range, and promoting the set- 
 tlement and development of a tract of country of surpassing fertility, this line 
 will shorten the distance from all eastern points to the finest harbor on the Pacific 
 coast by nearly 150 miles. 
 
 For upward of 200 miles we now follow the windings of the Columbia river 
 the peerless Columbia. For some distance the shores of the river are low, and 
 the surrounding country is level and uninteresting ; but, that region passed, the 
 lordly stream flows through deep-cut banks, hundreds of feet in height. At the 
 mouth of the John Day river the scenery increases in rugged grandeur, and the 
 rapids in the river render navigation somewhat difficult. Near this point is a 
 remarkable lava bed, over and through which the railroad passes. The space 
 between the river and the bluffs is narrow, and is filled with black incrustations 
 of lava, affording a glimpse of a region in appearance veritably infernal. It is 
 pleasant to know that on the heights above us are waving fields of grain, and that 
 a little way up the John Day river is an orchard, with thousands of fruit-bearing 
 trees. 
 
MtlLTNOMAH PALLS COLUMBIA RlVER 
 
 (46) 
 
famous Yakima valley, where hop growing is now being carried on with great 
 success. The Cascade Division of the Northern Pacific Railroad was recently 
 completed to Yakima City. The facilities for transportation thus afforded will 
 doubtless give a great impetus to the development of the country. 
 
 Celilo, 127 miles from Ainsworth, means "The Place of the Winds." The 
 hills on the Washington side rise steep and frowning, and on the Oregon shore 
 the shifting sands are driven by the unceasing winds. For hundreds of miles 
 above this point the river is navigable ; but for the next thirteen miles navigation 
 is beset with difficulties that are seldom faced only, in fact, when it becomes 
 necessary to transfer a steamer from the upper to the middle river, or vice versa. 
 When the melting snows have swollen the Columbia to its fullest flow, and the 
 waters boil so far above the rocks as to make the passage possible, a cool nerve 
 and consummate skill will carry a steamboat through in safety. 
 
 Soon after leaving Celilo the classic regions of the great river are approached. 
 If it is early summer, the hills to the north have not entirely thrown off their 
 tinge of silver gray, given by the waving bunch grass. Later, after the grass has 
 matured, these great hills, as well as the plains, turn to tints of golden brown. 
 A short distance below Celilo the track curves around a steep basaltic cliff that 
 overlooks the river, and bears the name of Cape Horn. Early travelers were 
 not apt at names, and too often attached commonplace appellations to grand 
 objects that deserve respectful treatment. This Cape Horn has no distinctive 
 name, because there is another and grander Cape Horn on the river below. 
 
 If it is early summer, and the Columbia is at flood, there will be seen below 
 Celilo the Little Dalles of the river, a spot where the fall is enough to create 
 foaming rapids for half a mile or more, as the pent-up water rushes between the 
 lava walls. The Little Dalles, however fine in itself, is rendered almost insignifi- 
 cant by comparison with the Great Dalles, six or eight miles below. 
 
 On the Washington side is a picturesque Indian village, where, in the season, 
 the red-skins may be seen catching salmon, which they dry for winter food. 
 
 We are now drawing near the Great Dalles of the Columbia. When the river 
 is low, this spot would not strike an unobservant stranger. 
 
 It is, however, at all times one that will abundantly repay a careful examina- 
 tion. During the dry season the mighty Columbia shrinks to little over sixty 
 yards in width, and you can wander over the rocky channel for a considerable 
 distance. The roaring, boiling flood that rushes furiously along and hurls itself 
 impetuously against the huge rocks which bar its progress, is, however, absolutely 
 fathomless. For more than two mile^ the waters seethe and foam in their narrow, 
 tortuous course, between the black and rock-bound shores. When the visitor 
 looks up from the wild and narrow scene to take in a wider field of vision, he 
 gazes upon a scene of grandeur and majesty that overawes while it impresses 
 him. 
 
 To the west lies Dalles City, with its' background of near hills and distant 
 
48 
 
 mountains. Towering above all, in regal splendor, is the queenly Mount Hood, 
 whose majestic form, grand and imposing, yet having nothing of the stern and 
 forbidding aspect of so many other famous mountains, enraptures every 
 beholder, and leaves an impression on both heart and mind that no traveler 
 would willingly let die. 
 
 From Dalles City westward the train follows the river's edge, the scenery 
 growing in beauty and interest with every mile. Soon after entering the mount- 
 ains we find pines and firs scattered on the hillsides. Here and there they 
 become more or less dense. Presently we come upon the Upper Cascades, amid 
 scenery of the most charming character. We pass many lovely waterfalls, which 
 pour over the cliffs so near that you are startled with the sound of plashing 
 waters. It is hard to say whether the configuration of the country, as seen to-day, 
 owes more to those mighty convulsions which have assuredly taken place in the 
 past, or to the slower, but not less effectual, processes of nature which are still 
 going on. It is stated that a narrow-gauge road, laid down during the early days 
 of railroad construction, was once found twisted out of line as much as ten feet 
 by the movement of the mountain at the foot of which it ran. The Cascades are 
 near the centre of the range. Majestic mountains stand around like walls of 
 adamant, with rocky pinnacles of fantastic form. At the Lower Cascades the 
 United States Government is building an extensive system of locks, for the con- 
 struction of which the sum of $3,000,000 has been appropriated. 
 
 One great advantage of the westward journey is that the scenery increases in 
 beauty and sublimity the farther we travel, the most magnificent stretch of all 
 being entered upon after leaving Bonneville. Every moment reveals something 
 to interest and attract. Attention is demanded in every direction, as new objects 
 are revealed in an unceasing panorama. There are terraced heights, abrupt 
 cliffs, crags of curious shapes, and mountain upon mountain, sometimes standing 
 as a wall, then grouped like an amphitheatre, at other times assuming grotesque 
 and romantic shapes, and ever and anon affording glimpses of enchanting water- 
 falls. Oneonta Falls, 800 feet in height, are like a silver ribbon waving in the 
 wind. The water at Multnomah Falls makes a plunge of several hundred feet, 
 and then gathers itself together for a further leap that makes 800 feet in all. 
 Anything more beautiful in scenery of this description is not to be found in the 
 world. There are other never-failing cascades of less note, and in early spring 
 the face of the cliffs glistens with them. 
 
 A few miles more and we come to the Pillars of Hercules, between which the 
 railroad passes as through a colossal portal to the more open lands beyond. The 
 huge dimensions of these towering rocks excite the greatest astonishment and 
 admiration. We think, with a gifted writer : 
 
 " How God's hand built them not in a manner of slow-mounting masonry, 
 gaining adventurously and toilsomely, foot by foot, and pushing its scaffolding 
 ever higher to keep command of the work, and straining its energy to raising 
 aloft the chiseled and ponderous blocks to their place but with one lift, without 
 break or course, or any gradations of rising completeness, the Supreme Builder 
 
(49) 
 
50 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 set the domed mountains in their place foundation, wall, and top stone one 
 sublime integral whole, unprofaned by craftsman's tools, untrod by foot of 
 man." 
 
 Near by is Rooster Rock, rising out of the river, and pointing upward like a 
 mighty index finger. Here the railroad leaves the river, and, proceeding directly 
 west, soon reaches the great city of Portland, finely situated on the west side of 
 the Willamette river, twelve miles above its confluence with the Columbia. Four- 
 teen years ago Portland contained a population of 1,103. By 1880 the construc- 
 tion of the western section of the Northern Pacific Railroad and the approach- 
 ing completion of the great trans-continental system had so stimulated the 
 growth of the city that its population numbered 23,000. 
 
 Its rate of increase is so rapid that any estimate of its population that does 
 not largely outrun its growth is soon left far behind. Perhaps, therefore, the most 
 satisfactory course is to state that at the end of 1884 its inhabitants approached, 
 if they did not actually number, 40,000. But what of its commercial interests ? 
 Were it an Eastern city, these might be unimportant ; but in his long journey of 
 2,320 miles even if he has come no farther than from Chicago the traveler 
 has learned that the relations between population and commercial importance 
 are altogether unlike what he has been accustomed to in the East. For truly, 
 Chicago is a long way east. In the towns of Dakota and Montana you often 
 hear that such and such a one has "gone East " ; and when visions of your own 
 New England home rise up before you and you venture to inquire to what part, 
 you are probably told St. Paul or Minneapolis. But with regard to the commer- 
 cial interests of Portland. Limited formerly to the surplus grain raised by a 
 small settlement in the Willamette valley, and accepted by its " merchants " in 
 exchange for clothing and implements, its trade now requires a large fleet of ocean 
 steamships, and great cargoes of grain and canned salmon leave the Columbia 
 river for foreign ports. The canning industry has witnessed an astonishing 
 development within a very few years, the product of the Columbia river fish- 
 eries having, in 1883, reached 620,438 cases, representing a value of two and 
 three-fourths millions of dollars. Between Astoria and the Cascades there are 
 something like fifty canneries, and the shoals of fish with which the river 
 abounds are captured and converted into " canned salmon " as systematically 
 and expeditiously as hog is translated into pork at the stock yards and packing 
 houses of Chicago. An ingenious contrivance, known as the salmon wheel 
 boat, or floating fish wheel, by means of which the fish are literally scooped up 
 out of the water in shoals, plays an important part in this great industry. 
 
 The industries of the country tributary to Portland are as diversified as 
 are its surface, soil and climate. In addition to its abundant crops of grain 
 and its practically inexhaustible fisheries, it has a wool clip of great annual 
 value, the Yamhill country being almost entirely given up to sheep farming, 
 and producing an exceedingly fine grade of wool. 
 
 Although one hundred miles from the coast, Portland, like London, Antwerp 
 and Rotterdam, is, as has already been implied, virtually a seaport, and its 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 51 
 
 -growth and progress are based upon the solid foundations of its natural advan- 
 tages. As a city, it may be remarked that it has nothing crude or new in its 
 appearance, and no feature of agreeable town life is wanting. It is a novel 
 experience to stand in the primeval forest which hugs the city closely on all sides 
 and look down upon the bustling activity of trade and pleasure. Here are the tall 
 pines and the dark thicket there the masts, the smoky chimneys, the dusty 
 streets, while far away the lofty peaks of snow-clad mountains pierce the blue 
 vault of heaven, and glisten in the sunlight like crystals and gems. Five of the 
 grandest mountains in the world are visible from here: Mount Hood and 
 Mount Jefferson to the south ; Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens and Mount 
 Tacoma (the Mount Ranier of the maps) to the north. 
 
 If it is convenient to take a trip down the river to Astoria, a town near the 
 mouth of the river, founded by the trading expedition sent out by John Jacob 
 Astor, in 1810, it will be found to be a most delightful excursion, affording an 
 opportunity of observing the progress Portland is making in its manufacturing 
 and other enterprises, and of seeing something of the busy commerce, as well 
 as the scenery, of the Lower Columbia. While lacking the startling effects 
 peculiar to the upper and middle river, the lower stretch of the Columbia is 
 nevertheless very beautiful, with its wilderness of shores and islands, its occa- 
 sional bluffs and cliffs often covered with heavy fir ; its broad flood, sometimes 
 widening to miles, and always spreading out in majestic volume. Enjoying all 
 the comforts of first-class travel, the tourist reads his "Wonderland" and 
 pencils his notes as the boat glides down the stream amid scenes of ever- 
 varying beauty. 
 
 The business part of Astoria is built upon piles, and its residences climb the 
 sides of the ridge which protects it from the southwest storms. Its broad bay 
 is alive with shipping, from the river tug to the ocean steamer of 3,000 tons. 
 
 Lumbering is becoming an important industry here, but the great incentive 
 to growth is the salmon trade and fisheries. There are upward of fifty great 
 canning establishments, employing, during the fishing and packing season, thou- 
 sands of men. The shores, for a long distance, are lined with these establish- 
 ments, and they give the traveler a far better idea of the magnitude of the 
 business to which they are devoted than any figures as to the number of cases 
 or the value of the product. Various delightful excursions may be made in the 
 vicinity of Astoria ; among the attractions of the neighborhood being the 
 remarkable waterfall on Young's river, and the bold headland that forms the 
 cape north of the entrance to the bay. From the latter the view is very fine, 
 the outlook showing a long sweep of ocean with the surf dancing on the wind- 
 ing shore-line to the north. 
 
 South of the bay, and directly facing the ocean, is Seaside House, which 
 travelers seeking rest and quiet enjoyment after the exciting pleasures of their 
 Wonderland tour, or as a prelude to those still to come, will find as admirably 
 adapted to those ends as heart could wish or fancy picture. 
 
 We stated at the outset that Portland and Tacoma were to the western 
 
Sound, is but 143 miles distant. The Northern Pacific line from Portland fol- 
 lows for about eight miles the west shore of the Willamette river, and reaches 
 the head of Sauvie's Island. Thence it continues down the west arm of the 
 river to its confluence with the Columbia at St. Helen's. From Hunter's Point, 
 thirty-eight miles from Portland, the train is conveyed across the river to Kalama 
 by the finest transfer boat in the world, built expressly for the Northern Pacific 
 Railroad Company, and constructed to carry no fewer than thirty cars at one 
 time. From Kalama the track strikes almost directly northward for Puget 
 Sound. The country through which it passes is well settled, and the farms 
 give evidence of thrift and prosperity. But the attention of the tourist, as he 
 travels onward in a luxurious Pullman car, is almost exclusively occupied with 
 the magnificent peaks of the Cascade Range, whose forms of dazzling white- 
 ness constitute, with their background of deepest blue and the sombre forests 
 which clothe their base, a series of pictures of surpassing beauty. For more 
 than a hundred miles after we leave Portland, there looms up behind us the 
 imposing contour of Mount Hood ; while to the east Mount St. Helens, on the 
 nearer, and Mount Adams, on the farther, side of the Cascades, afford many 
 fine views as the train pursues its way northward. 
 
 The latter, Mount Adams, is seen across the wooded valley of the Nisqually, 
 its white mass in bold relief against the sky, its sides seamed in summer with 
 outcropping rock ridges, the hollows between being filled with never-melting 
 snows. After leaving Tenino, and at Yelm Prairie, fourteen miles beyond, 
 there is a revelation of unsurpassed grandeur in the view of Mount Tacoma, 
 the loftiest of all the snow mountains. As the train rushes onward, occasional 
 breaks in the forest reveal this magnificent snow-clad peak. It is about forty 
 miles distant, although it is so distinct that it appears much nearer. 
 
 A few miles more and we are looking over the waters of Puget Sound, that 
 magnificent inland sea on the bosom of which all the navies of the world could 
 ride in safety. The exact location of Tacoma, the terminus of the line, and, 
 by the way, the first point on the Pacific Ocean touched by the Northern Pacific 
 Railroad, is upon a high plateau on Admiralty Inlet, at the head of Commence- 
 ment Bay. The city occupies a commanding position, and has an excellent 
 harbor, capable of receiving the largest ocean-going vessels. Its commercial 
 interests are considerable, and rapidly increasing in importance. 
 
 The excellence of the hotel accommodations at all the more important points 
 along the Northern Pacific Railroad has frequently been a subject of remark 
 in these pages. But while high praise has been bestowed, extravagant eulogy 
 has been carefully avoided. To do the barest justice, however, to the hotel, The 
 Tacoma, recently opened in this enterprising and prosperous city on Puget Sound, 
 it must be compared as well it may, without suffering from the comparison 
 with the most famous hotels of Chicago or New York. 
 
 The climate of this region in summer and in the fall is delightful, the 
 
>sj( oh 
 
 (53) 
 
54 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 combination of sea and mountain air producing a most invigorating atmosphere. 
 Though somewhat humid in winter, it is so mild that roses, geraniums and other 
 varieties of flowers bloom in the open air in the month of December. To the 
 scenery it is impossible to do justice an exquisitely beautiful combination of 
 blue sky and bluer waters, and of the bright green of the grass and the darker 
 color of the vast fir and cedar forests ; away to the left the bold, brown range of 
 the Olympian Mountains ; on the right, seemingly not ten miles away, is Mount 
 Tacoma, a mass of snow and ice, nearly 15,000 feet high, and red, pink, white 
 or gray, according to the condition of the atmosphere and the position of the 
 sun in the sky. In lines that will live as long as the English language itself, 
 Byron pronounced Mont Blanc the monarch of mountains. But Byron never 
 saw the matchless Tacoma. It, too, has its throne of rocks, its diadem of 
 snow, and, though much less frequently than Mont Blanc, its robe of clouds, an 
 adjunct of doubtful advantage except in the exigencies of versification. This 
 great mountain, forty miles in circumference at its base, and with a superficial 
 area of 1,600 miles, lifts its snowy head to a height of 14,444 f eet - It towers 
 like a huge colossus above the great Cascade Range, and can be seen standing 
 out against the sky a hundred miles away. In all its history but two men have 
 been known to reach its summit, and they were obliged to cut footsteps in the 
 ice and frozen snow with their axes. But to a height of 11,000 feet its northern 
 face is accessible to the most timid ; ladies, even, who can ride on horseback 
 need not shrink from the ascent. This elevation commands a panoramic view 
 of Puget Sound and of all the intervening country, the majestic Olympian and 
 Cascade Ranges forming the background. At one's feet lie the great glaciers of 
 the Puyallup, Carbon and White rivers, over whose edges the avalanche contin- 
 ually thunders. 
 
 Mount Tacoma has no fewer than fifteen glaciers, three of which have been 
 made accessible to tourists. Their magnificence completely defies all power of 
 language to describe ; and we are struck dumb with astonishment and awe as we 
 gaze upon them, imbedded, as they are, in the mighty bosom of the mountain ; 
 the stupendous sides of the canons in which they lie forming alone one of the 
 most awe-inspiring pictures upon which the eye of man ever rested. Comparing 
 them with the glaciers of the Alps, Senator Edmunds, of Vermont, says that 
 the finest effects he ever saw, during a long tour through the mountains of 
 Switzerland, fell far short of what is seen at Mount Tacoma. 
 
 For the benefit of tourists who desire to visit the glaciers, it may be stated 
 that the best starting point is Tacoma. The manager of the Hotel Tacoma (a 
 most magnificent hostelry, built by the Northern Pacific Railroad and Tacoma 
 Land Company at a cost of $200,000), always has competent guides in his employ, 
 and furnishes complete camping outfits for parties of all sizes. From Tacoma 
 the railway is taken to Wilkeson, thirty-one miles distant, whence the remaining 
 thirty miles to the mountain are traversed on horseback. The journey may be 
 made in easy stages, as there are camps along the entire route. Adjacent to 
 them, are the best trout streams in the Territory, affording to the angler rare 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 55 
 
 sport. As one nears the mountain, flower-bespangled meadows and lakes in 
 extinct volcanic craters become frequent, relieving the monotony of the miles of 
 otherwise unbroken forest through which the approach is made. Deer, bear, 
 wolf and beaver, with that rarest of game, the Rocky Mountain goat, are all 
 plentiful about the base of the mountain. 
 
 Had the opening of the Northern Pacific Railroad only revealed and ren- 
 dered accessible to the tourist the wonders which have been so inadequately 
 described in these pages, it would have done more for that ubiquitous personage 
 than any other single enterprise since the invention of the steam engine. It has, 
 however, done much more ; for it has brought within the limits of a summer 
 
 vacation 
 
 The Land of the Midnight Sun. 
 
 It is to be presumed that those who have journeyed so far on this delightful 
 excursion will want to extend their trip to Alaska ; and, as this may now be 
 done cheaply, comfortably, and in quick time, we shall ask them to accompany 
 us thither. 
 
 Those of us who have to look back to our school days farther than some 
 others remember the green-painted left-hand top corner of the continent that 
 used to say "Russian America." None of us is so young or so ignorant as to 
 have to be told how, in 1867, the United States purchased from the Russian gov- 
 ernment the territory in question. There, however, we may stop ; for no writer 
 can proceed to pay his readers the compliment of stating that to tell them any- 
 thing about that country is unnecessary, seeing that little has been written about 
 it, and still less read. It is, indeed, a great country, covering over 580,000 square 
 miles, an area which considerably exceeds the areas of Great Britain, France and 
 Germany combined. In other words, Alaska is more than ten times the size of 
 the State of Illinois, or as large as all of the United States east of the Mississippi 
 river, and north of Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina. Its extreme length 
 from east to west is 2,200 miles, and its breadth from north to south 1,400 miles. 
 Its shore line, including the adjacent islands, measures 25,000 miles, or more than 
 the circumference of the globe. 
 
 Alaska is not only " a great land " for such is the etymology of its name 
 in its large area, but also in its natural phenomena. 
 
 Its mountain chain is the loftiest in North America, Mount St. Elias rising to 
 19,500 feet. It has its great rivers the Yukon, navigable for 1,500 miles, being 
 for a thousand miles of its course from one to five miles wide, and seventy miles 
 across its five mouths. Its volcanic, glacial and geyser systems are probably the 
 greatest in the world. Its forests are practically unlimited, its fisheries and its 
 mineral wealth inexhaustible. 
 
 We have had many surprises in the course of our long tour through the north- 
 western portion of Uncle Sam's dominions. We are not going to crown them all 
 by telling our fellow travelers, who are now ready to believe almost anything, that 
 they can travel through Alaska in a Pullman car. That day has not yet come, 
 and this generation will probably wait for it in vain. But if we can not do that, 
 
(56, 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 57 
 
 we can at least take a peep at one of the most interesting portions of that vast 
 country. We can go upon an excursion of 2,000 miles that shall be one con- 
 tinued revelation of beauty and wonders, and which need not occupy more than 
 twenty days. 
 
 Surrounded by the sublimest scenery in the world, we can walk the deck of a 
 large and superbly equipped steamship, and never feel the wave of the open 
 ocean, or experience the slightest sensation of sea-sickness, as we pursue our way 
 through the marvelous archipelago of the North Pacific Ocean. 
 
 The Alaska steamers to and from Portland do not call at Tacoma, but con- 
 nection is made with them at Victoria, B. C., between which port and Tacoma the 
 Oregon Railway and Navigation Company has a regular service of first-class 
 steamers. The latest additions to the company's fleet are the " Olympian " and 
 "Alaskan," which are veritable floating palaces. Built of steel, and with engines 
 that propel them at an average speed of seventeen miles an hour, they accom- 
 plish the distance between Tacoma and Victoria in eight hours. Each is con- 
 structed to carry 1,500 passengers, and in the completeness and magnificence of 
 their appointments, and especially in the elegance and comfort of their sleeping 
 accommodations, they are not surpassed by the most noted steamer on Long 
 Island Sound, or the most luxurious Atlantic liner. 
 
 Steaming straight across the sound to Victoria, we are there reminded by the 
 British flag that we are in the dominions of Her Britannic Majesty. 
 
 Victoria is delightfully situated at the southeastern extremity of Vancouver 
 Island. With its multitudinous attractions of climate, charming scenery, beauti- 
 ful drives, and rapidly increasing advantages of communication with the rest of 
 the world, it bids fair to become one of the most attractive towns in the " Florida 
 of the Northwest." The course of our vessel lies through Haro Strait, the Island 
 of San Juan being to the right. As we pass through the narrows it is impossi- 
 ble to see whither the steamer is going, for its bow is apparently directed at a 
 mountain. But presently, just as is so often the case on the Rhine, we see the 
 way opening before us, and after two sharp turns we are steaming up the Straits 
 of Georgia. On, straight on we go, leaving behind the snow-crowned Olympian 
 Range, with the majestic summit of Mount Baker looming up against the blue 
 sky, past Nanaimo, a coal-mining camp, with an old black fort which is fast decay- 
 ing, and we are in Departure Bay. By this time we have become acquainted 
 with our compagnons du voyage, and we promenade the deck with new-found 
 friends, listening to the delightful strains of the ship's band, and looking over 
 the blue waters at the dim outlines of the now distant mountains. Passing 
 round the northern extremity of Vancouver Island, we enter the waters of 
 Queen Charlotte's Sound, and soon come to Grenville Channel, where some of 
 the finest scenery of the excursion awaits us. The mountains on both sides, 
 rugged and grand, lift their snowy heads thousands of feet into the air ; rocks 
 rise abruptly from the water to a height of three or four thousand feet, and 
 cascades here delicate and ribbon-like, there foaming and impetuous run 
 down to the sea. 
 
58 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 The first point in Alaska at which we shall touch will be Fort Wrangel, situ- 
 ated on the northwestern coast of Wrangel Island, near the mouth of the Stickeen 
 river, a stream some 200 miles in length, having its source in British Columbia. 
 During the period of the Cassair mining excitement in the Stickeen valley, 
 Wrangel was somewhat thickly settled, but now it consists merely of a few strag- 
 gling houses, and its white population is exceedingly scanty. 
 
 The Alaska Indians are somewhat after the Mongolian type, reminding the 
 traveler of the Chinese, rather than of the Indians of the United States and 
 Canada. Among the customs peculiar to them is that by which every family is 
 distinguished by a badge, known as a totem, which is used much in the same way 
 as is the crest or coat-of-arms among the old families of Europe, being marked 
 on the houses, household utensils, ornaments and even clothing of the people. 
 
 In front of many of their leading houses and at their burial places are 
 immense timbers covered with these devices. They vary from two to five feet in 
 diameter, and are often sixty feet or more in height, costing from $1,000 to 
 $2,000. The people have, to a great extent, adopted the American style of dress. 
 Their food consists largely of berries and fish, large quantities of salmon being 
 smoked and put away for future use. 
 
 After a brief stay we weigh anchor, and are soon winding through Wrangel 
 Straits, a narrow passage which saves us a long stretch of open sea. Just after 
 we leave the straits the Great Glacier, as it is called, comes in view, and a little 
 farther on a second. The evenings have all the while been getting perceptibly 
 longer ; and, although we are still considerably below the latitude at which, at 
 the summer solstice, the sun never sinks below the horizon, night is but as a long 
 twilight, and we may walk the deck till the sun recommences his daily round, 
 and hardly miss the rest we have lost. 
 
 The distance from Fort Wrangel to Sitka is only 162 miles. In less, there- 
 fore, than twenty-four hours, we are sailing up the island-studded Sitka Bay, said 
 to rival in picturesqueness the far-famed Bay of Naples. Mount Edgecumbe, 
 an extinct volcano, discovered by Bodega, in 1775, guards the entrance to the 
 bay, while the sharp, snowy summit of Vostovia, surrounded by a group of peaks 
 and glaciers, stands guard in the rear. 
 
 The bay was first visited by Baranoff, in 1799, who built a fort which he called 
 Fort Archangel Gabriel, and took possession of the country for Russia. Three 
 years later the Indians rose, captured the fort, and murdered all the officers and 
 thirty men. In 1804 Baranoff returned and recaptured the town, rebuilt the fort, 
 and named the settlement New Archangel. From 1809 ship-building became one 
 of the active industries of the place. The following year the settlement was 
 visited by the Enterprise, one of the ships of John Jacob Astor's fur company, 
 and a Greek priest arrived in a sloop-of-war to minister to the colonists in spir- 
 itual things. 
 
 The growth and importance of the place were finally assured in 1832, when 
 Baron Wrangel transferred the capital of Russian America from St. Paul to 
 Sitka. In 1834 it was made the seat of a bishopric, Veniaminoff, an eminent 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 59 
 
 prelate, afterward head of the Greek Church, being elevated to the episcopal 
 throne. About 1837 a school was established for the children of the employes 
 of the Russian Fur Company. In 1841 an ecclesiastical school of the Greek 
 Church was established, and four years later it was raised to the rank of a semi- 
 nary, a school for the natives being opened about the same time. 
 
 With the American occupation, in 1867, these schools were discontinued, but 
 their places were afterward taken by voluntary schools, established first by the 
 Presbyterians, and subsequently by other Christian churches. 
 
 When, in October, 1867, Brig. Gen. Lovell H. Rousseau took possession of 
 Sitka in the name of the United States Government, the place consisted of little 
 more than an aggregation of rude log huts, with a Greek church and governor's 
 residence. But a change rapidly came over it ; and it is now a well-built town, 
 thoroughly Americanized, except in its ecclesiastical architecture and the re- 
 ligious rites of that section of the community which still adheres to the Greek 
 Church. 
 
 The church is the most conspicuous object in the town. It is built in the 
 form of a Greek cross ; has an emerald-green dome over the centre, and a bell 
 tower surmounted by a cupola. One wing is used as a chapel, and contains, 
 besides a curious font, an exquisite painting of the Virgin and Child, copied 
 from the celebrated picture at Moscow. All the drapery is of silver, and the halo 
 of gold ; so of the painting itself nothing is seen but the faces and background. 
 The chancel, which is raised above the body of the church, is approached by 
 three broad steps, leading to four doors, two of which are handsomely carved and 
 richly gilded, and contain .four oval and two square has reliefs. Above is a large 
 picture of the Last Supper, covered like that of the Madonna, with silver, as are 
 two others, one on each side of the altar. Across the threshold of these doors 
 no woman may set her foot. The doors, however, usually stand open, and the 
 priest in residence is exceedingly courteous to visitors, showing them the costly 
 and magnificent vestments and the Bishop's crown, almost covered with pearls 
 and amethysts. The ornaments and the candelabra are all of silver, the walls 
 are hung with portraits of princes and prelates, and the general effect is rich in 
 the extreme. 
 
 Next to the church in interest with some visitors probably ranking before 
 it is the old castle on the hill. Here, in days gone by, the stern Romanoff 
 ruled with iron hand. After being twice destroyed, first by fire and then by 
 an earthquake, the castle was rebuilt so strongly that it will probably stand for 
 ages much as it is to-day. It is now used as a United States signal office, and 
 it has a ball-room and theatre with the same old brass chandeliers that adorned 
 it in its glory. The whole building has a melancholy and desolate appearance ; 
 but it is of exceeding interest, speaking to us as it does of the despotism that 
 formerly ruled in its halls and courts. There is a tradition, that, when Baron 
 Romanoff was governor, he had living with him an orphan niece and ward 
 who was very beautiful. But when the baron commanded her to marry a power- 
 ful prince, who was a guest at the castle, she refused, having given her heart to 
 
(GO; 
 
TO THE PACIFIC COAST. 61 
 
 a handsome young lieutenant of the household. The old baron, who, like the 
 rest of his race, was an accomplished diplomat, feigning an interest in the young 
 lieutenant which he did not feel, sent him away on a short expedition, and in the 
 meantime hurried on the preparations for the marriage of the unhappy girl to the 
 prince. Deprived of the support of her lover's counsels and presence, she yielded 
 to the threats of her uncle, and the ceremony was solemnized. Half an hour 
 after the marriage, while the rejoicing and the gayety were at their height, the 
 young lieutenant strode. into the ball room, his travel-stained dress and haggard 
 appearance contrasting strangely with the glittering costumes and gay faces of 
 the revelers ; and during the silence which followed his ominous appearance, he 
 stepped up to the hapless girl and took her hand. After gazing for a few 
 moments on the ring the prince had placed there, he, without a word, and before 
 any one could interfere, drew a dagger from his belt and stabbed her to the heart. 
 In the wild confusion that followed he escaped from the castle ; and, overcome 
 with grief, unable to live without the one he so fondly loved yet ruthlessly mur- 
 dered, he threw himself into the sea. And now her spirit is seen on the anni- 
 versary of her wedding night, her slender form robed in heavy silk brocade, 
 pressing her hands on the wound in her heart, the tears streaming from her 
 eyes. Sometimes, before a severe storm, she makes her appearance in the little 
 tower at the top of the building once used as a lighthouse. There she burns a 
 light until dawn for the spirit of her lover at sea. 
 
 The whole of the Sitkan district is mountainous in the extreme, and the 
 larger portion covered . with dense forests. Craters of extinct volcanoes are 
 numerous, among the most notable being that of Mount Edgecumbe, which is 
 2,000 feet across and about 400 feet deep. This mountain is to the Indians a 
 veritable Olympus. On the Naass river is a remarkable lava overflow from a 
 volcano in the neighborhood. This, too, is the great glacier region. On Lynn 
 Channel is a glacier computed to be 1,200 feet thick at its lower projection. 
 In one of the gulches of Mount Fairweather is a glacier that extends fifty miles 
 to the sea, where it ends abruptly in a perpendicular ice-wall 300 feet high and 
 eight miles broad. On the Stickeen river, between two mountains 3,000 feet 
 high, is another, forty miles long, and four to five miles across at its base, with a 
 depth variously estimated at from 500 to 1,000 feet. There is a magnificent 
 glacier near Cape Fanshaw, of which the following admirable description is 
 given by Professor John Muir, State Geologist of California : 
 
 " The whole front and brow of this majestic glacier is dashed and sculptured 
 into a maze of yawning chasms and crevices and a bewildering variety of strange 
 architectural forms, appalling to the strongest nerves, but novel and beautiful 
 beyond measure ; clusters of glittering lance-tipped spires, gables and obelisks, 
 bold outstanding bastions and plain mural cliffs, adorned along the top with 
 fretted cornice and battlement, while every gorge and crevasse, chasm and 
 hollow was filled with light, shimmering and pulsing in pale blue tones of ineffa- 
 ble tenderness and loveliness. On the broad, waving bosom of the glacier 
 water streams are outspread in a complicated network, each in its own friction- 
 
62 THE WONDERLAND ROUTE 
 
 less channel cut down through the porous, decaying ice of the surface into the 
 quick and living blue, and flowing with a grace of motion and a ring and gurgle 
 and flashing of light to be found only on the crystal hills and dales of a glacier. 
 Along the sides we can see the mighty flood grinding against the granite with 
 tremendous pressure, rounding the outswelling bosses, deepening and smoothing 
 the retreating hollows, and shaping every portion of the mountain walls into the 
 forms they were meant to have. Two or three miles from the front the current 
 is now probably about 1,200 feet deep ; but the grooved and rounded features of 
 the walls, so surely glacial, show that in the earlier days of the ice-age they were 
 all overswept, this glacier having flowed at a height of from three to four 
 thousand feet above its present level." 
 
 The country abounds in hot mineral springs, several large ones being situated 
 south of Sitka. On Unimak Island is a lake of sulphur. Near the Volcano 
 Pogrumnoi are hot marshes. In the crater of Goreloi is a vast boiling, steaming 
 mineral spring eighteen miles in circumference ! A lake strongly impregnated 
 v:ith nitre is found on Beaver Island, while the thermal springs on the island of 
 Unalashka hold sulphur in solution. These are but a few of the natural phe- 
 nomena of Alaska. It is, indeed, a land of manifold wonders, and a fit climax to 
 our tour through the Wonderland of the World. 
 
 With regard to the climate, it would be a great mistake to suppose that it is 
 tolerable only in summer. The greatest cold recorded at Sitka during a period 
 of forty-five years was -4, while on the other hand the temperature never 
 exceeded 87. During only four of those forty-five years did the thermometer 
 register a temperature below zero, and during only seven did it rise above 80. 
 During the winter of 1877-8 the coldest night at Sitka only formed ice the thick- 
 ness of a knife-blade on a barrel of rain-water under the eaves of a house. This 
 mild climate is due to the Japan Gulf Stream, which first strikes the North Amer- 
 ican continent at the Queen Charlotte Islands, in latitude 50 north. Here the 
 stream divides, one portion going northward and westward along the coast of 
 Alaska, and the other southward along the coast of British Columbia, Washing- 
 ton Territory, Oregon, and California, giving them their mild winter climate. 
 The former stream, flowing northward, has been named the Alaska Current, and 
 gives the great southern coast of Alaska a winter climate as mild as that of one- 
 third of the United States. Part of it continues up through Behring's Straits, 
 and that is the reason why ice never drifts through those straits into the Pacific 
 Ocean. 
 
 The mineral wealth of the country is not of particular interest to us as tour- 
 ists. The quartz mining carried on at the Haley & Miletich mine, near Sitka, is, 
 however, worth seeing. We reach the mine by crossing to the head of Silver 
 Bay, ten miles distant, over a beautiful sheet of water in which vessels of any 
 tonnage can ride at anchor within twenty-five feet of the shore. A walk of less 
 than a mile will bring us to the shaft. 
 
 The Governor of the Territory, in a report dated October i, 1884, states that 
 the mining industry of the country bids fair to become of great importance ; and 
 
(63} 
 
64 
 
 he adds that, wheje it has languished in the past, it has been because the only 
 recognized title to the property of the miner was that of force. 
 
 " The good old rule, 
 
 The simple plan, 
 
 That they should take who have the power, 
 And they should keep who can," 
 
 has, however, passed away with the introduction of civil law, and henceforward 
 a stable and equal government will see that every legitimate encouragement is 
 given to the development of the mineral resources of the country. 
 
 Whatever measure of success may, however, attend the -endeavors put forth 
 from time to time to this end, the purchase of Alaska by the United States Gov- 
 ernment has been abundantly justified by the value of its fisheries. Its waters 
 are so richly stocked with herring, cod and salmon that it is not unlikely that 
 the Territory will become the great supply ground of the world. The North- 
 west Trading Company, consisting chiefly of Portland capitalists, has established 
 stations at all the more important points along the coast, and has erected 
 machinery, at a cost of no less than $18,000, for extracting from the fish the 
 valuable oil they contain. 
 
 Alaska possesses, furthermore, the most valuable fur-seal fisheries in exist- 
 ence, and it is something to know that under a system of protection, of the wis- 
 dom of which there can not be two opinions, fur-seals, diminishing in number 
 in every other part of the world, are here increasing so rapidly that the number 
 annually slaughtered might be doubled without even the remotest danger of 
 exhausting the supply. 
 
 Home Again. 
 
 A pleasant sail to Portland, a rapid run over mountain and prairie, and our 
 Wonderland becomes a thing of the past. It remains, however, to the end of 
 our lives a bright chapter in our experience, to the glowing pictures of which* we 
 shall constantly recur with ever-increasing delight. And when the Chicagos of 
 the coming time line the Northern Pacific Railroad, and the valleys of the great 
 Northwest teem with a happy and prosperous people, we shall have a peculiar 
 satisfaction in remembering that we traveled through that great country before 
 commerce and manufactures had robbed it of any of its original beauty, or the 
 development of its vast resources wrought that entire change in its character 
 which is' now only a question of time. 
 
 We do not want to see the Falls of the Yellowstone driving the looms of a 
 cotton factory, or the great geysers boiling pork for some gigantic packing-house, 
 but in all the native majesty and grandeur in which they appear to-day, without, 
 as yet, a single trace of that adornment which is desecration, that improvement 
 which is equivalent to ruin, or that utilization which means utter destruction. 
 

 
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