CHAPTER VII.

JUNEAU, SILVER BOW BASIN, AND DOUGLASS ISLAND MINES.

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

All of this Taku region is rich in the indications of precious minerals, and prospectors have explored miles of the most rugged mountain country in their search for float and gravel. The presence of gold along the shores of Taku River was long known, but the Taku Indians, who guarded the mouth of the river and kept the monopoly of the fur trade with the interior Indians, were known to be hostile and kept prospectors aloof. Prof. Muir found signs of gold in every stream in the territory, ground by and swept down from the higher ranges by the vast ice-sheet that once covered this region, and by the glaciers that are still at work in all the fiords and ravines. He believed that the great mineral vein extending up the coast from Mexico to British Columbia continued through Alaska and into Siberia. With British Columbian miners producing $1,000,000 and $2,000,000 each year, and Siberia yielding its annual $22,000,000, Professor Muir was certain that Alaska would prove to be one of the rich gold fields of North America. In one of his letters to the San Francisco _Bulletin_ in 1879, he gave it as his belief that the richest quartz leads would be found on the mainland shores east of Sitka, and that the true mineral belt followed the trend of the continental shores. A year later his prophecy was verified, and the present mining town of Juneau, a hundred miles north and east of Sitka in a direct line, promises soon to distance the capital and become the most important town in the territory.

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

As a mining camp, this settlement dates back but a few years. In 1879 the Indians gave fine quartz specimens to the officers of the U. S. S. _Jamestown_, claiming to have found them on the shores of Gastineaux Channel. In the following summer a prospecting party was formed at Sitka, and left there headed by Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris. They camped on the present site of Juneau on Oct. 1, 1880, and followed up the largest of three creeks emptying into the channel near that point. Three miles back on this Gold Creek in the Silver Bow Basin, they found rich placers and outcropping quartz ledges. When they returned to Sitka with their sacks of specimens, there was a stampede and a rush for the new El Dorado, and the camp, established in midwinter, has since grown into a town. Harris took up a town site of one hundred and sixty acres, and in the spring of 1881 miners from British Columbia and from Arizona flocked to the new gold-fields.

The place was first called Pilsbury, for one prospector; then Fliptown, as a miner’s joke; next Rockwell, for the officer of the U. S. S. _Jamestown_, who came down with a detachment of marines to keep the camp in order; fourthly it was named Harrisburg, and fifthly Juneau. This last name was formally adopted by the miners at a meeting held in May, 1882, and in the same conclave resolutions were passed ordering all Chinamen out of the district, and warning the race to stay away; which they have done. At the same time the miners perfected an organization, elected a recorder, and adopted a code of laws which should be enforced until the United States should establish civil government and declare it a land district. Even with this volunteer attempt at law and order, the ownership of mining claims was uncertain, as they belonged to the first and the strongest ones who began work in the spring. For want of a civil tribunal, miners’ quarrels were settled by fists, shotguns, or an appeal to the man-of-war at Sitka. The whole town site and the Basin are staked off and claimed by three and four first owners, and lawsuits are impending over every piece of mining property. Without surveys, titles, or protection, the Juneau miners have done little more than the necessary assessment work each year, although some of the placers have paid richly. With things in such an insecure state, capitalists were not willing to venture anything in the development of these mines, and owners did little boasting of the richness of their lodes, lest more miscreants should be invited to jump their claims. The newly established district court, whose clerk is _ex officio_ recorder of deeds, mortgages, and certificates of location of mining claims, will be overwhelmed with mining suits at its first sessions, and every claim will supply one or more cases for trial.

It is very difficult to ascertain the exact amounts produced by these mines, although from ten to fifty thousand dollars in gold is sent down by each steamer during the summer months. To avoid the heavy express charges, many of the provident miners carry down their own hard earnings in the fall, and buckskin bags, tin cans, and bottles of gold dust are among the curios put in the purser’s safe. As far as known, $135,000 was washed from the placers in 1881, $250,000 in 1882, and about $400,000 in 1883.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the traders’ stores in town we found whole museums of Indian curios, and revelled in the oddities and strange art-works of the people. The round baskets of split cedar, woven so tightly as to be waterproof, and ornamented in rude geometrical designs in bright colors, are the first choice for souvenirs among tourists. After that the carvings, the miniature totems and canoes, the grotesque masks and dance rattles, take the eye. There were, too, the fine ancestral spoons made from the horns of mountain goat and musk ox, and finished with handles carved in full and high relief, and inlaid with bits of abalone-shell, bears’ teeth, and lucky stones from the head of the codfish. Of furs and skins every store held a great supply, and when bearskins and squirrel robes had no effect the traders would bring out their treasures of otter, fox, and seal, and show the bales of furs that awaited transportation to the south. A robe of gray squirrel two yards square was bought for one dollar and fifty cents, and sealskins at eight dollars, silver-fox skins for twenty-five dollars, and sea-otter skins for one hundred dollars, continued the ascending scale of prices. The real entertainment of the day came after we had bought our baskets and spoons and carvings at the traders’ stores, and were enjoying a few dry hours in the cabin. Then the Indian women came tapping at the windows with their bracelets, and the keen spirit of the trade having possessed us, we made wonderful bargains with the relenting savages. A tap on the window, and the one word “Bracelet!” or the Chinook “_Klickwilly_,” would bring all the ladies to their feet, and the mechanical “how much” that followed became so automatic during the day, that when the porter rapped at night for lights to be put out, he was greeted with a “how much” in response. For each bracelet the Indians wailed out a demand for “_mox tolla_,” two dollars in our tongue. They finally came down to “_ict tolla sitcum_,” or one dollar and fifty cents, and rapidly disposed of their treasures. Some lucky purchasers happened upon the unredeemed pledges in the pawn branch of a jolly old trader’s store, and for “_sitcum tolla_,” or fifty cents, walked off with flat silver bracelets a quarter of an inch wide, carved in rude designs of leaves and scrolls.

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

Halibut of ninety and one hundred pounds have been caught over the ship’s side in these channels, and Captain Cook tells of one weighing five hundred pounds, and other navigators of those weighing nine hundred pounds. Halibut is a staff of life to the Indians, and their _menu_ always comprises it. They catch the halibut with elaborately-carved wooden hooks made of red cedar or the heart of spruce roots, fastened to lines of twisted cedar bark, or braided seaweed. Clubs carved with the fisherman’s _totem_ and other designs are used to kill them with when drawn up to the side of the canoe. At many of the fisheries a great deal of halibut is salted and packed before the salmon season begins, and halibut fins are choice morsels that command a higher price by the barrel than salmon bellies.

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

The site of the mining camp in the Silver Bow Basin is even more picturesque, and the trail from Juneau leads straight up the mountain side, then down to a second valley, and along the wild cañon of Gold Creek and into the basin of the Silver Bow. All the way it leads through dense forests and luxuriant bottom land, where the immense pine-trees, the thickets of ferns and devil’s club, and the rank undergrowth of bushes and grasses, continually excite one’s wonder. We rose at half past five in order to go out to the basin and get back before the ship sailed at ten o’clock, and in the fresh, dewy air and the pure light of the early morning it was a walk through an enchanted forest and a happy valley. The trail wound up to fifteen hundred feet, dropped by long jumps and slides to the first level of the cañon and reached fifteen hundred feet above the sea again in the Basin. The devil’s club, a tall, thorny plant with leaves twelve and more inches across, grew in impassable clumps in the woods, and the sunlight falling on these large leaves gave a tropical look to the forest. The devil’s club is the prospectors’ dread, and the thorny sticks used to do to switch witches with in the Indians’ old uncivilized days. _Echinopanax horrida_ is the botanist’s awful name for it, and that alone is caution enough for one to avoid it. There were thickets of thimbleberry bushes covered with large, creamy-white blossoms; and clusters of white ranunculus, white columbine, blue geranium, and yellow monkey flowers grew in patches and dyed the ground with their massed colors. The ferns were everywhere, and under bushes and beside fallen logs, delicate maidenhair ferns, with fine ebony stems, were gathered by the handful. We met a few well-dressed Indians hurrying to town, and an occasional miner, who gave us a cheery greeting.

Blue jays flitted down the path before us, flashing their beautiful wings in the sunshine; and where the cañon grew steeper and narrower, Gold Creek roared like a muddy Niagara. High up in a ravine a melting snowbank disclosed a great cave underneath, and its edges were fringed with waving grasses and flowers. Even hydraulic mining cannot scar and disfigure this country, where a mantle of green clothes every bare patch in a second season, and mosses and lichens cover the stones and boulders. The moss or sphagnum, that covers the ground, is as great an obstacle to the prospectors’ search as the thickets of “devil’s club.” A campfire built on this moss gradually burns and sinks through, and the miner, returning to his open fire, often finds it lying deep in a well-hole that it has made for itself. In view of the obstacles encountered, the discovery of these mining regions is most remarkable, and is the greatest monument to the prospectors’ zeal.

We passed picturesque little log cabins and crossed the débris of hydraulic mines, watched the men in a narrow gulch cleaning up their sluices, and going around the corner of Snowslide Gulch, just this side of Specimen Gulch, we met Mr. B. and his dog. Down we all sat, dog included, and indulged in the light and dry repast that we carried in our pockets. Mr. B. was a typical and ideal miner, and in his high boots, canvas trousers, flannel shirt, big felt hat, and heavy gold watch chain, made exactly the figure for the landscape, as he rested on a big boulder beside the roaring creek. We started to tell him the great news that Alaska at last had a governor and a government, and, bethinking ourselves of the little side incident of Presidential nominations, began to tell him about them. He manifested so little excitement over Blaine and Logan that we asked if his seven years without seeing the polls had made him so indifferent.

“Oh! Lord no; I’m a Democrat though, I guess, ma’am,” said Mr. B., apologetically.

“Then we’ll never tell you who they have nominated, if you are on that side,” said a Republican, firmly, and Mr. B.’s Homeric laugh made that mountain glen ring before he was enlightened as to Cleveland and Hendricks.

Our miner told us of a piece of quartz that he had found the day before, that looked “as if the gold had been poured on hot and had spattered all over it,” and then we had to part with him and hurry on in different ways.

Silver Bow Basin is a place to delight an æsthetic miner with in the way of landscape, and any one with a soul in him would surely appreciate that little round valley sunk deep in the heart of great mountains, with snow-caps on every horizon line, a glacier slipping from a great ravine, and waterfalls tumbling noisily down the slopes. A little cluster of cabins is set in the middle of this Basin, and tiny cabins, dump piles, and lines of flumes can be seen on the sides of the steep mountains. The camp had fallen away in numbers since the preceding year, and the mining community dwindled from two hundred to less than one hundred workers. As the placers showed signs of exhaustion, the roving adventurers had left, and the most of those living in the basin were chiefly occupied in holding down their quartz claims until the reign of law and the rush of capitalists should begin. Placer claims that had yielded thirty dollars and fifty dollars a day to the man were abandoned, as the débris from the old glaciers and land-slides came to an end. Across the range in Dix Bow Basin the same conditions existed. Returning on the trail, we met a few miners going back to their cabins and claims, and one sociable fellow stopped for a time to talk to us. He complimented the small party on our energy in taking that early stroll, and in the most regretful way apologized for the roughness and wildness of the very surroundings with which we were so enraptured. A jolly old fellow with a shrewd twinkle in his eye came up the trail swinging his coat gayly, and, planting himself in the pathway, took off his hat with a fine flourish and said to me, “Madam, I was told to watch out for you on this road, and to look you squarely in the eye and tell you to hurry back to the ship or you would be left.” There was a shout all round at this unmistakable message of the skipper, and the gay miner enjoyed it most of all. Timing ourselves by our watches, we lingered long on the last mile, sitting on a log in the cool shade of the forest, where the trail almost overhung the little town. We could watch the people walking in the streets beneath, and in the still, slumbering sunshine almost catch the hum of their voices. Pistol-shots raised crashing echoes between the high mountain walls, and set all the big ravens to croaking in hoarse concert.

On the east shore of Douglass Island, opposite Juneau, the group of Indian huts and canoes on the beach, and the skeleton of a flume stalking across a gorge and down to the water, tell of the mining camp there. Running across the narrow channel, the ship anchored off the Treadwell mine, on Douglass Island, and while the miners’ supplies were being put in the lighter, we all went ashore and climbed the steep and picturesque trail to the mill. The superintendent took his lantern and marshalled the file into the tunnel to see the air-drill at work, and then we all filed out again. The Treadwell is one of the remarkable mines on the Pacific coast, and said to be one of the largest quartz ledges in the world. The vein is over four hundred feet wide, cropping out on the surface and crossed by three tunnels. The ore is not high grade, but is easily mined and milled, and the supply is inexhaustible. The owners are Messrs. Treadwell, Frye, Freeborn, and Hill, of San Francisco, and Senator J. P. Jones of Nevada. So far only a small 15-stamp mill has been at work on the ore, but the owners have decided to erect a 120-stamp mill this year and develop the property systematically. The progress of the Treadwell mine has been carefully watched by miners and capitalists, and its success has done much to encourage others to hold on to their properties in the face of all the discouragements they have had to undergo through government neglect.

The Bear Ledge, owned by Captain Carroll and his partners, adjoins the Treadwell or Paris claim, and is a continuation of the same rich vein; and from the richness and extent of these and other mines, it is believed that a large town will eventually spring up on the island. A town-site was located and called Cooperstown, in 1881, soon after the discovery of gold on the island, but so far only the tents of placer miners have marked it. For two seasons lawless bodies of men worked the placers on the surface of the Treadwell lode, and, as there was no power to appeal to, the Treadwell company were forced to endure it. During the summer of 1883, over twenty-five thousand dollars was taken from the surface of the ledge in this way. The miners pounded up the rich, decomposed quartz in hand-mortars, and as it was impossible to extract all the gold by the rude process employed, they dumped over into the channel richer quartz, in many instances, than had been worked in the Treadwell mill. The deposit of decomposed quartz on the top of the ledge was in some places ten feet deep, and in working it the squatters took the water of the Paris, or Hayes Creek, and shut off the mill supply entirely. There was a sharp contest between the mill-owners and the hydraulic miners, and the man-of-war at Sitka had to be sent for before the matter was adjusted. They pledged themselves, “until such time as they should have civil law,” to let the mill have the use of the water for twelve hours and the miners for the other twelve hours of each twenty-four, and the squatters were not to blast the lode, but only wash the surface ground.

An island gold field is a rarity in mining annals, but all Douglass Island is said to be seamed with quartz lodes, and it is ridged with high mountains from end to end of its twenty-mile boundaries. It was eighty-seven years after Vancouver’s surveys before the prospectors found the gold on its shores, but the miners have retained the old nomenclature, and the island is still Douglass Island, as Vancouver named it in honor of his friend, the Bishop of Salisbury.