Part 3

The Canadian Rockies are the most beautiful and picturesque of any section of the mountain chain from Mexico north. The air is cooler in the far northern latitude, keener, more bracing, and the hustling American has begun to find this out. The great hotels of the Canadian Pacific are already best patronized by the American visitor, and this year the sun-baked Californians have come up in swarms and promise another year even greater numbers. And the Canadian Pacific Railroad welcomes them all--all who can pay. At Banff, too, were the advance guard of the English Colony from China, brought over from Shanghai by the sumptuous steamships of the Canadian Pacific Railway, taken to and kept at their great hotels, and carried home again, at so low a round-trip rate that these Rocky Mountain resorts promise to become the summering-place of the Oriental Englishmen as well as Australian and Californian! How these things bring the world together!

Our journey from Kanawha, across Ohio, from Cleveland through the Great Lakes, across the wheatfields of Minnesota and Dakota and Manitoba, and over the wonderful prairies and plains of the opening far Northwest, has had a fit ending in the last few days climbing and plunging over and down the wildest, most picturesque, most stupendous valleys and passes of the Rocky Mountain and Selkirk Mountain ranges. How vast and varied and splendid is the continent we live on, and which one of these days the people of the United States will inevitably wholly possess!

And now the wonders of these Pacific slopes and waters! All the afternoon we have been wandering through Vancouver's superb Natural Park, among its gigantic trees, and gazing westward over and across the waters of Puget Sound, the most mighty fjord of the Pacific seas, the most capacious land-locked harbor of the world. I must not say more about this now. I have not yet seen enough. I am only beginning dimly to comprehend what is the future power of our race and people in the development of this side of the earth.

VICTORIA A SLEEPY ENGLISH TOWN.

THE DRIARD HOTEL, VICTORIA, B. C., } August 21, 1903. }

We came over here yesterday, leaving Vancouver by a fine new 1,800-ton steamer "Princess Victoria," and making the voyage in four hours,--all the way in and out among the islands and straits and inlets. The shores of the mainland high, lofty;--the mountain summits rising right up till snow-capped, six or seven thousand feet in the air, their flanks green with the dense forests of fir that here everywhere abound. The islands all fir-clad, the trees often leaning out over the deep blue waters. Many fishing-boats were hovering about the points and shoals below the mouth of the Fraser River, awaiting the autumnal rush of salmon into the death-traps of that stream. I hope to see one of these salmon stampedes--they often pushing each other high and dry on the shores in their mad eagerness to go on.

Tuesday we reached Vancouver. Wednesday we consumed seeing the lusty little city.

Yesterday we spent the morning in picking up the few extra things needed for the Yukon--among others a bottle of tar and carbolic--a mixture to rub on to offend the yet active mosquito.

Vancouver is a city of some 30,000 people, full of solid buildings, asphalted streets, electric car lines, bustle and activity. Much of the outfitting for the Canadian Yukon is done there, though Seattle gets the bulk of even this trade.

To-day we are in Victoria, a town of twelve or fifteen thousand, a fine harbor, and near it the British naval and military station of Esquimault, the seat of its North Pacific war power. The town is sleepy, the buildings low and solid, the air of the whole place very English. The capitol building is an imposing structure of granite, surmounted by a successful dome.

FOURTH LETTER.

VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY; FJORDS AND FORESTS.

FIRST AND SECOND DAY OUT, } August 23, 1903. }

We arrived in Vancouver by the steamer "Charmer" from Victoria about ten o'clock A. M.--two hours late--a small boat, packed with passengers. We could not get a state-room to ourselves, so were glad of berths, while many people lay on mattresses in the cabin and many sat up. Tourist travel surprises the slow-going Canadian, and he does not catch up with it.

We went to the Hotel Vancouver, where we had been staying, and there breakfasted.

Our boat, "City of Seattle," is roomy and comfortable. We have a large upper state-room on the starboard side, plenty of fresh air and sunlight. It is loaded down with an immense cargo of miscellaneous freight, from piles of boxes of Iowa butter and fresh eggs, to sheep and live stock, chickens and pigs, vegetables and canned goods, most of it billed to Dawson and even to points below. The Yukon has been so low this year--less snow than usual falling last winter--that the bulk of the freight "going in" has had to be shipped via these Skagway boats and the White Pass Railway, despite the exorbitant freight rates they are charging for everything.

The travellers are of two sorts. A good many making the round trip from Seattle to Skagway, and the Yukoner "going in" for the winter. The former are not of much concern to us, but among the latter I have found a number of interesting acquaintances. One, a man who hunts for a business, and is full of forest lore and hunting tales. He is also something of a naturalist and taxidermist, and I have been showing him our volumes of the report of the Harriman Expedition, to his delight. He has also explored along the Kamtschatka coasts of Siberia, and describes it as a land stocked with salmon and fur animals. He says, too, that I have done right to bring along my gun, for there are lots of ptarmigan as well as mountain sheep and goats in the Yukon Valley, and caribou and moose are also plentiful.

Another man has spent a year or more on the Yukon--our chief engineer--and thinks we will have no difficulty in getting a boat down from Dawson, and the scenery he says is grand. Another is a lumber-man of Wrangel--from Pennsylvania--and tells me they have some fine timber there, though most of that of these far northern latitudes is too small to now profitably compete with the big logs of Washington.

Our vis-a-vis at table is going up to the Porcupine Placer district to try his luck with finding gold, and several men are going into Atlin--whither we are bound--to find work at big pay.

The atmosphere of the company is buoyant and hopeful, even the women have a dash of prosperity about them--gold chains and diamonds--of which there are not a few.

From all I can pick up, an immense trade is already developed with Alaska and is still growing with bounds. The United States Government statisticians give thirty-seven millions as the figure for the trade of the past year. Already three or four lines of steamers ply between Skagway alone and Puget Sound ports, and several more run to St. Michaels and Nome.

The sail from Vancouver is most delightful. You come out of a narrow channel through which the tides foam and churn, and then turn north through the "Gulf of Georgia," twenty or thirty miles wide. Vancouver Island stretches for three hundred miles along the west, fir-clad, backboned by a chain of mountains rising up into the snows. On the east a coast indented with multitudinous bays and deep channels, sharp promontories and islands; the forest coming to the water's edge, the mountains rising sharply six and seven thousand feet into the snows and clouds, as lofty as the fjelde of Norway, but not so bare and naked, the dense, deep green fir forests growing from water to snow line.

We were crossing Queen Charlotte Sound when we awoke this morning, and all day long have been threading our way among islands, through narrow channels, across seemingly shut-in lakes, ten and twelve miles wide, and then no wider than the Kanawha River or even narrower. As we come north the mountains grow higher and come closer to the water we sail upon, and there is more snow on their summits.

You might imagine yourself with Henrik Hudson on his first voyage, when the Hudson valley was covered with primeval forests.

Last evening we saw a number of humpbacked whales, and to-day more. This morning saw my first sea lions and also fur and hair seals. To-morrow, they say, we shall see yet more. Only gulls, a few terns and ducks to-day. No larger birds as yet.

MONDAY, August 24, 1903.

The greyness of yesterday is vanished. The sky is cloudless, the atmosphere translucent. The mountains are more lofty, the snow patches grown into wide fields, and the air has taken on a certain added keenness, telling of distant snow and ice. To-morrow we shall see more snow and even glaciers. All day we have been going from one broad sound or channel through narrow straits into others as broad. We crossed Dixon's Channel at breakfast-time, through which the commerce of the Orient will come to Port Simpson, the Canadians hope, when the Grand Trunk Pacific shall have been built.

About noon we came around a wooded island and made our first port of Ketchikan, where there are salmon canneries, and hard by quartz mines yielding gold, and saloons and stores. Here we had our first view of near-by totem poles, and our first sight of the shoals of salmon that make alive these waters. From a foot-bridge crossing a little creek that debouched near our steamer wharf, we looked down into the clear water and saw it fairly swarming with salmon, fish from ten to fifteen pounds, "small ones," they said. But the waters were choked with them. Dipping a net down, you might haul up a wagon load as easily as one. Yet no one was catching them. So plentiful are the fish that no one wants to eat salmon except as a last resort--"food fit only for dogs," they say, and the distant tenderfeet whom the canneries supply. And these swarming fish below us shoved each other upon the shallow shore continually, when there would be a great splashing to get back.

From Ketchikan we have come out into the great Clarence Strait, with Belim and Ernest Sounds stretching away into the snow-covered mountains toward the east. The strait is as wide as the Hudson at the Palisades, the shores fir clad, the mountains six to seven thousand feet, up into clouds and snow. The water to-day is like a mirror, and many porpoises are playing about. I have just seen three big blue herons, and awhile ago we passed a loon. Last night just at dusk, we saw several flocks of snipe or plover, small, brown, swift in flight, close above the water.

We have just looked upon the most superb panorama we have yet beheld. The last four hours the mountains both east and west of us have come closer to the shores, and risen higher, the fir mantle enveloping them has grown a darker green, larger timber than for the last few hundred miles, and then we came round a bend in our great strait--about six to ten miles wide--forty or fifty miles long--and there in front of us, bounding the horizon on the north, stretched an immense mass of jagged, serrated mountain chain, glittering like silver in the slanting sun rays. Not mere snow patches, not mere fields of snow, but vast "fjellen" of snow, snow hiding all but the most ragged rock peaks, and even sometimes enveloping these. Valleys all snow-filled and from which descend mighty glaciers. Below the miles of snow lay the deep green forests of the lesser mountain summits and sloping flanks, and then the dark blue waters of the giant fjord, dotted with many fir-clad islands. We agree that we have seen nothing in our lives so sublimely beautiful. Never yet nature on so stupendous a scale.

The quiet waters of the last two days are now alive with gulls and ducks and grebes and divers, many loons. More bird life than we have yet seen. Just as is told by the Harriman naturalist. Only at Wrangel does the real bird life of the north begin. Curving around another wooded promontory, we beheld the town of Wrangel, at Fort Wrangel, on Wrangel Island, ten miles away, nestling at the mouth of a little valley, below the firs and snow summits behind. We are now tied up to the pier at this port, and shall lie here till 2 A. M., when flood tide will allow us to continue the voyage, and at daylight pass through the narrowest and most hazardous strait of the trip. We mean to be waked at four o'clock so as to see the pass.

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

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

August 25, 1903.

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

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

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

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

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

SKAGWAY, ALASKA, Wednesday, August 25.

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

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

FIFTH LETTER.

SKAGWAY, CARIBOU CROSSING[A] AND ATLIN.

ATLIN, BRITISH COLUMBIA, August 29, 1903.

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

[A] Caribou Crossing now called Carcross.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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