The Project Gutenberg eBook, Alaska, by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

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Lothrop’s Historical Library.

EDITED BY ARTHUR GILMAN, M. A.

Other volumes in preparation.

Each volume 12mo, Illustrated, cloth, $1.50.

D. LOTHROP & CO., Publishers,

Franklin and Hawley Streets, Boston.

U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey
Map of Alaska.
Compiled by W. H. Dall
1884.
[Larger view]

ALASKA
ITS SOUTHERN COAST
AND
THE SITKAN ARCHIPELAGO

BY

E. RUHAMAH SCIDMORE

WITH MAP AND ILLUSTRATIONS

“Berlin, Sept. 5.—We have seen of Germany enough to show that its climate is neither so genial, nor its soil so fertile, nor its resources of forests and mines so rich as those of Southern Alaska.”—William H. Seward—Travels Around the World, Part VI. chap. v. page 708.

BOSTON

D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY

32 Franklin Street

Copyright, by

D. Lothrop and Company,

1885.

Electrotyped by

C. J. Peters and Son, Boston.

PREFACE.

These chapters are mainly a republication of the series of letters appearing in the columns of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat during the summer of 1883, and in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the New York Times during the summer of 1884. To readers of those journals, and to many exchange editors, who gave further circulation to the letters, they may carry familiar echoes. The only excuse for offering them in this permanent form is the wish that the comparatively unknown territory, with its matchless scenery and many attractions, may be better known, and a hope that those who visit it may find in this book information that will add to their interest and enjoyment of the trip.

In rearranging the original letters many errors have been corrected and new material incorporated. During brief summer visits it was impossible to make any serious study, solve the mysteries of the native people, or give other than fleeting sketches of their out-door life and daily customs. Elaborate resumés of the writings of Baron Wrangell and Bishop Veniaminoff have been given by Professor Dall in his work on “The Resources of Alaska,” and by Ivan Petroff in the Census Report of 1880 (Vol. IX.), and have since been so often and so generally quoted as hardly to demand another introduction to those interested in ethnology. Such mention as I have made of the traditions and customs of the Thlinkets is condensed from many deck and table talks, and from conversations with teachers, traders, miners, and government officers in Alaska. Wherever possible, credit has been given to the original sources of information, and the “Pacific Coast Pilot” of 1883 and other government publications have been freely consulted. The nomenclature and spelling of the “Coast Pilot” have been followed, although to its exactness and phonetic severity much picturesqueness and euphony have been sacrificed.

The map accompanying the book is a reduced section of the last general chart of Alaska published by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and is reproduced here by the permission of the compiler, Prof. William H. Dall.

Of the illustrations, the cut of the Indian grave at Fort Wrangell was one accompanying an article published in Harper’s Weekly, August 30, 1884, and other pictures have been presented to readers of the Wide Awake magazine of March, 1885. For views of the Davidson glacier, the North River, and the top of the Muir glacier, and the interior of the Greek Church at Sitka, from which cuts were made, I am indebted to a daring and successful amateur photographer of San Francisco, to whom especial credit is due.

To the officers of the ship and agents of the company I have to express appreciation of the favors and courtesies extended by them to my friends and to myself. Each summer I bought my long purple ticket, reading from Portland to Sitka and return, with pleasurable anticipations; and all of them—and more—being realized, I yielded up the last coupons with regret.

For information given and assistance rendered in the course of this work I am under obligations to many people. I would particularly make my acknowledgments in this place to Prof. William H. Dall, Capt. James C. Carroll, Hon. Frederic W. Seward, Prof. John Muir, Prof. George Davidson, Capt. R. W. Meade, U.S.N., Capt. C. L. Hooper, U.S.R.M., and Hon. J. G. Swan.

E. R. S.

Washington, D. C., March 15, 1885.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

SOUTHERN ALASKA

AND

THE SITKAN ARCHIPELAGO.

CHAPTER I.
THE START—PORT TOWNSEND—VICTORIA—NANAIMO.

Although Alaska is nine times as large as the group of New England States, twice the size of Texas, and three times that of California, a false impression prevails that it is all one barren, inhospitable region, wrapped in snow and ice the year round. The fact is overlooked that a territory stretching more than a thousand miles from north to south, and washed by the warm currents of the Pacific Ocean, may have a great range and diversity of climate within its borders. The jokes and exaggerations that passed current at the time of the Alaska purchase, in 1867, have fastened themselves upon the public mind, and by constant repetition been accepted as facts. For this reason the uninitiated view the country as a vast ice reservation, and appear to believe that even the summer tourist must undergo the perils of the Franklin Search and the Greeley Relief Expeditions to reach any part of Alaska. The official records can hardly convince them that the winters at Sitka are milder than at New York, and the summers delightfully cool and temperate.

In the eastern States less has been heard of the Yukon than of the country of the Congo, and the wonders of the Stikine, Taku, and Chilkat rivers are unknown to those who have travelled far to view the less impressive scenery of the Scandinavian coast. Americans climb the well-worn route to Alpine summits every year, while the highest mountain in North America is unsurveyed, and only approximate estimates have been made of its heights. The whole 580,107 square miles of the territory are almost as good as unexplored, and among the islands of the archipelago over 7,000 miles of coast are untouched and primeval forests.

The Pribyloff or Seal Islands have usurped all interest in Alaska, and these two little fog-bound islands in Behring Sea, that are too small to be marked on an ordinary map, have had more attention drawn to them than any other part of the territory. The rental of the islands of St. Paul and St. George, and the taxes on the annual one hundred thousand sealskins, pays into the treasury each year more than four per cent interest on the $7,200,000 originally paid to Russia for its possessions in North America. This fact is unique in the history of our purchased territories, and justifies Secretary Seward’s efforts in acquiring it.

The neglect of Congress to provide any form of civil government or protection for the inhabitants checked all progress and enterprise, and kept the country in the background for seventeen years. With the development of the Pacific northwest, settlements, mining-camps, and fisheries have been slowly growing, and increasing in numbers in the southeastern part of Alaska, adjoining British Columbia. The prospectors and the hardy pioneers, who seek the setting sun and follow the frontiers westward, were attracted there by the gold discoveries in 1880, and the impetus then given was not allowed to subside.

Pleasure-travellers have followed the prospectors’ lead, as it became known that some of the grandest scenery of the continent is to be found along the Alaska coast, in the region of the Alexander or Sitkan Archipelago, and the monthly mail steamer is crowded with tourists during the summer season. It is one of the easiest and most delightful trips to go up the coast by the inside passage and cruise through the archipelago; and in voyaging past the unbroken wilderness of the island shores, the tourist feels quite like an explorer penetrating unknown lands. The mountain range that walls the Pacific coast from the Antarctic to the Arctic gives a bold and broken front to the mainland, and everyone of the eleven hundred islands of the archipelago is but a submerged spur or peak of the great range. Many of the islands are larger than Massachusetts or New Jersey, but none of them have been wholly explored, nor is the survey of their shores completed. The Yosemite walls and cascades are repeated in mile after mile of deep salt-water channels, and from the deck of an ocean steamer one views scenes not paralleled after long rides and climbs in the heart of the Sierras. The gorges and cañons of Colorado are surpassed; mountains that tower above Pike’s Peak rise in steep incline from the still level of the sea; and the shores are clothed with forests and undergrowth dense and impassable as the tangle of a Florida swamp. On these summer trips the ship runs into the famous inlets on the mainland shore and anchors before vast glaciers that push their icy fronts down into the sea. The still waters of the inside passage give smooth sailing nearly all of the way; and, living on an ocean steamer for three and four weeks, one only feels the heaving of the Pacific swells while crossing the short stretches of Queen Charlotte Sound and Dixon Entrance.

The Alaska steamer, however, is a perfect will o’ the wisp for a landsman to pursue, starting sometimes from Portland and sometimes from San Francisco, adapting its schedule to emergencies and going as the exigencies of the cargo demand. It clears from Puget Sound ports generally during the first days of each month, but in midwinter it arranges its departure so as to have the light of the full moon in the northern ports, where the sun sets at three and four o’clock on December afternoons.

When the steamer leaves Portland for Alaska, it goes down the Columbia River, up the coast of Washington Territory, and, reaching Victoria and Port Townsend three days later, takes on the mails, and the freight shipped from San Francisco, and then clears for the north. The traveller who dreads the Columbia River bar and the open ocean can go across overland to Puget Sound, and thence by the Sound steamers to whichever port the Alaska steamer may please to anchor in.

The first time that I essayed the Alaska trip, the steamship Idaho with its shining black hull, its trim spars, and row of white cabins on deck, slipped down the Columbia River one Friday night, and on Monday morning we left Portland to overtake it. It was a time of forest fires, and a cloud of ignorance brooded over Puget Sound, only equalled in density by the clouds of smoke that rolled from the burning forests on shore, and there was an appalling scarcity of shipping news. The telegraph lines were down between the most important points, and the Fourth of July fever was burning so fiercely in patriotic veins that no man had a clear enough brain to tell us where the ship Idaho was, had gone to, or was going to. For two restless and uncertain days we see-sawed from British to American soil, going back and forth from Victoria to Port Townsend as we were in turn assured that the ship lay at anchor at one place, would not go to the other, and that we ran the risk of losing the whole trip if we did not immediately embark for the opposite shore. The dock hands came to know us, the pilots touched their hats to us, the agents fled from their ticket-offices at sight of us, and I think even the custom-house officers must have watched suspiciously, when the same two women and one small boy paced impatiently up and down the various wharves at that end of Puget Sound. We saw the Union Jack float and heard the American eagle scream on the Fourth of July, and after a night of fire-crackers, bombs, and inebriate chorus-singing, the Idaho came slipping into the harbor of Port Townsend as innocently as a messenger of peace, and fired a shot from a wicked little cannon, that started the very foundations of the town with its echoes.

Port Townsend, at the entrance of Puget Sound, is the last port of entry and custom-house in the United States, and the real point of departure for the Alaska steamers. It was named by Vancouver in 1792 for his friend, “the most noble Marquis of Townsend,” and scorning the rivalry of the new towns at the head of Puget Sound, believes itself destined to be the final railway terminus and the future great city of this extreme northwest. The busy and thriving little town lies at the foot of a steep bluff, and an outlying suburb of residences stretches along the grassy heights above. A steep stairway, and several zig-zag walks and roads connect the business part of Port Townsend with the upper town, and it argues strong lungs and a goat-like capacity for climbing on the part of the residents, who go up and down the stairway several times a day. A marine hospital flies the national flag from a point on the bluff, and four miles west on the curve of the bay lies Fort Townsend, where a handful of United States troops keep up the traditions of an army and a military post. Near the fort is the small settlement of Irondale, where the crude bog ore of the spot is successfully melted with Texada iron ore, brought from a small island in the Gulf of Georgia. The sand spit on which Port Townsend society holds its summer clam-bakes, and the home of the “Duke of York,” the venerable chief of the Clallam tribe, are points of interest about the shores.

Across the Straits of Fuca there is the pretty English town of Victoria, that has as solid mansions, as well-built roads, and as many country homes around it, as any little town on the home island. It has an intricate land-locked harbor, where the tides rush in and out in a way that defies reason, and none have ever yet been able to solve the puzzle and make out a tide-table for that harbor. All Victoria breathes the atmosphere of a past and greater grandeur, and the citizens feelingly revert to the time when British Columbia was a separate colony by itself, and Victoria the seat of the miniature court of the Governor-General and commander-in-chief of its forces. There is no real joy in the celebration of “Dominion Day,” which reminds them of how British Columbia and the two provinces of Canada were made one under the specious promise of a connecting railway. Recent visits of Lord Dufferin and the Marquis of Lorne stilled some of the disaffection, and threats of annexation to the United States are less frequent now.

Victoria has “the perfect climate,” according to the Princess Louise and other sojourners, and there is a peace and rest in the atmosphere that charms the briefest visitor. Every one takes life easily, and things move in a slow and accustomed groove, as if sanctioned by the custom of centuries on the same spot. Business men hardly get down town before ten o’clock in the morning, and by four in the afternoon they are striding and riding off to their homes, as if the fever and activity of American trade and competition were far away and unheard of. The clerk at the post-office window turns a look of surprise upon the stranger, and bids him go across the street, or down a block, and buy his postage-stamps at a stationer’s shop, to be sure.

The second summer that my compass was set for the nor’-norwest, our party of three spent a week at Victoria before the steamer came in from San Francisco, and the charm of the place grew upon us every day. The drives about the town, along the island shores, and through the woods, are beautiful, and the heavy, London-built carriages roll over hard and perfect English highways. Ferns, growing ten and twelve feet high by the roadside, amazed us beyond expression, until a loyal and veracious citizen of Oregon assured us that ferns eighteen feet high could be found anywhere in the woods back of Astoria; and that he had often been lost in fern prairies among the Cascade mountains, where the fronds arched far above his head when he was mounted on a horse. Wild rose-bushes are matted together by the acre in the clearings about the town, and in June they weight the air with their perfume, as they did a century ago, when Marchand, the old French voyager, compared the region to the rose-covered slopes of Bulgaria. The honeysuckle attains the greatest perfection in this climate, and covers and smothers the cottages and trellises with thickly-set blossoms. Even the currant-bushes grow to unusual height, and in many gardens they are trained on arbors and hang their red, ripe clusters high overhead.

For a few days we watched anxiously every trail of smoke in the Straits of Fuca, and at last welcomed the ship, one sunny morning, when the whole Olympic range stood like a sapphire wall across the Straits, and the Angels’ Gate gave a clear view of more azure slopes and snow-tipped summits through that gap in the mountain front. Instead of the trim propeller Idaho, the old side-wheeler, the Ancon, was put on the Alaska route for the summer months, and the fact of its having taken five days for the trip up from San Francisco did not prepossess us with any false notions of its speed. The same captain and officers from the Idaho were on board, and after making the tour of Puget Sound again, we were quite resigned to the change of ships by the time we finally left Victoria.

At Victoria the steward buys his last supplies for the coming weeks of great appetites; for with smooth water and the tonic of sea and mountain air both, the passengers make great inroads on the ship’s stores. The captain often affects dismay at the way the provisions disappear, and threatens to take an account of stores at Sitka and bring the ship down by the outside passage in order to save some profit for the company. During the last hours at the Victoria wharf, several wagon-loads of meat had been put in the ice-boxes of the Ancon, when some live beef came thundering down the wharf, driven by hallooing horsemen. Each month the ship takes up these live cattle and sheep, and leaving them to fatten on the luxurious grasses of Sitka, insures a fresh supply of fresh beef for the return voyage. It was within half an hour of sailing-time when the herders drove the sleek fellows down to the wharf, and for an hour there was a scene that surpassed anything under a circus tent or within a Spanish arena. The sailors and stevedores had a proper respect for the bellowing beasts, and kept their distance, as they barricaded them into a corner of the wharf. The ship’s officer who had charge of loading the cargo is “a salt, salt sailor,” with a florid complexion; and it was his brave part to advance, flap his arms, and say “Shoo!” and then fly behind the first man or barrel, or dodge into the warehouse door. The crowd gathered and increased, the eighty passengers, disregarding all signs and rules, mounted on the paddle-boxes and clung to the ratlines forward, applauded the picador and the matador, and hummed suggestive airs from Carmen. When the lasso was fastened round one creature’s horns, and his head was drawn down close to a pile, there were nervous moments when we waited to see the herder tossed on high, or else voluntarily leaping into the water to escape the savage prods of the enraged beast. There was great delay in getting the belts ready to put round the animals so that they could be swung over into the ship, and while the great bull-fight was in progress and the hour of sailing had come, the captain rode down the wharf in a carriage, strode on to the ship and demanded, in a stiff, official tone, “How long have these cattle been here?” “More than an hour, sir,” replied the mate. “Turn those cattle loose and draw in the gang-plank,” was the brief order from the bridge, and the one warning shriek of the whistle scattered the spectators and sent the excited beasts galloping up the wharf. While the gang-plank was being withdrawn, two Chinamen came down on a dog trot, hidden under bundles of blankets, with balanced baskets across their shoulders, and pickaxes, pans, and mining tools in their arms. Without a tremor the two Johns walked out on the swaying plank, and, stepping across a gap of more than two feet, landed safely on deck, bound and equipped for the deserted placer mines on Stikine River.

We left Victoria at noon, and all the afternoon the passengers gave their preliminary ohs! and ahs! strewed the decks with exclamation points, and buried their heads in their pink-covered maps of British Columbia, while the ship ran through narrow channels and turned sharp curves around the picturesque islands for the possession of which England and America nearly went to war. San Juan Island, with its limekilns, its gardens, meadows, and browsing sheep, was as pretty and pastoral a spot as nations ever wrangled about, and the Emperor of Germany did just the right thing when he drew his imperial pencil across the maps and gave this garden spot of San Juan to the United States. The beautiful scenery of the lower end of the Gulf of Georgia fitly introduces one to the beauties of the inland passage which winds for nearly a thousand miles between the islands that fringe this northwest coast, and even the most captious travellers forgot fancied grievances over staterooms, table seats, and baggage regulations. The exhausted purser, who had been persecuted all day by clamoring passengers and anxious shippers, was given a respite, and all was peace, satisfaction, and joy on board. In the nine o’clock gloaming we rounded the most northern lighthouse that gleams on this shore of the Pacific, and, winding in and through the harbor of Nanaimo, dropped anchor in Departure Bay.

The coal mines of Nanaimo have given it a commercial importance upon which it bases hopes of a great future; but it has no bustling air to it, to impress the stranger from over the border with that prospect. In early days it was an important trading-post of the Hudson Bay Company, and a quaint old block-house still stands as a relic of the times when the Indian canoes used to blacken the beach at the seasons of the great trades. The traders first opened the coal seams near Nanaimo, and thirty years ago used to pay the Indians one blanket for every eight barrels of coal brought out.

Geologists have hammered their way all up the Pacific Coast without finding a trace of true coal, and on account of the recent geological formation of the country they consider further search useless. The nearest to true coal that has been found was the coal seam on the Arctic shore of Alaska near Cape Lisburn. Captain Hooper, U.S.R.M., found the vein, and his vessel, the Corwin, was supplied with coal from it during an Arctic cruise in 1880. Otherwise, the lignite beds of Vancouver Island supply the best steaming coal that can be had on the coast, and a fleet of colliers ply between Nanaimo and the chief ports on the Pacific.

The mines nearest the town of Nanaimo were exhausted soon after they were worked systematically, and operations were transferred to Newcastle Island in the harbor opposite the town. A great fire in the Newcastle mine obliged the owners to close and abandon it, and the whole place stands as it was left, the cabins and works dropping slowly to decay. Even the quarry from which the fine stone was taken for the United States Mint at San Francisco is abandoned, and its broken derricks and refuse heaps make a forlorn break in the beauty of the mild shores of the island.

Richard Dunsmuir found the Wellington mines at Departure Bay by accident, his horse stumbling on a piece of lignite coal as he rode down through the woods one day. The admiral of the British fleet and one other partner ventured £1,000 each in developing the mine, and at the end of ten years the admiral withdrew with £50,000 as his share, and a year since the other partner sold out his interests to Mr. Dunsmuir for £150,000. At present the mines pay a monthly profit of £8,000, and Yankee engineers claim that that income might be doubled if the mines were worked on a larger scale, as, with duty included, this black lignite commands the highest price and is most in demand in all the cities of California and Oregon. Mr. Dunsmuir is the prime mover in building the Island railway, which is to connect Nanaimo with the naval harbor of Esquimault near Victoria. Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific road are connected with Mr. Dunsmuir in this undertaking, and to induce these capitalists to take hold of it the colonial government gave a land grant twenty-five miles wide along the whole seventy miles of the railroad, with all the timber and mineral included.

The great Wellington mines have had their strikes, and after the last one the white workmen were supplanted by Chinese, who, though wanting the brawn and muscle of the Irishmen, could work in the sulphur formations without injuring their eyes. By an explosion of fire-damp in May, 1884, many lives were lost, and gloom was cast over the little settlement on the sunny bay.

On this lee shore of Vancouver Island the climate is even softer and milder than at Victoria, and during my three visits Nanaimo has always been steeped in a golden calm of steady sunshine. While waiting for the three or four hundred tons of coal to be dropped into the hold, carload by carload, the passengers amuse themselves by visiting the quiet little town, stirring up the local trade, and busying the postmaster and the telegraph operator. A small boy steers and commands the comical little steam-tug that is omnibus and street car for the Nanaimo and Wellington people, and makes great profits while passenger steamers are coaling.

When all the anglers, the hunters, the botanists and the geologists had gone their several ways from the ship one coaling day, the captain made a diversion for the score of ladies left behind, by ordering out a lifeboat, and having the little tug tow us around the bay and over to Nanaimo. When the ladies had all scattered into the various shops, the captain made the tour of the town and found that there was not a trout to be had in that market. Then he arranged that if the returning fishermen came back to the ship in the evening and laid their strings of trout triumphantly on deck, a couple of Indians should force their way into the admiring crowd and demand pay for fish sold to the anglers. Can any one picture that scene and the effect of the joke, when it dawned upon the group?

A great bonfire on the beach in the evening rounded off that coaling day, and the captain declared the celebration to be in honor of Cleveland and Hendricks, who had that day been nominated at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago. Although the partisans of the other side declined to consider it a ratification meeting on British soil, they helped heap up the burning logs and drift-wood until the whole bay was lighted with the flames. With blue lights, fire-crackers, rockets and pistol-popping the fête continued, the Republicans deriding all boasts and prophecies of their opponents, until the commander threatened to drop them on some deserted island off the course until after the election. History has since set its seal upon the prophecies then made, and some of the modest participants of the Democratic faith think their international bonfire assisted in the result.

CHAPTER II.
THE BRITISH COLUMBIA COAST AND TONGASS.

If Claude Melnotte had wanted to paint a fairer picture to his lady, he should have told Pauline of this glorious northwest coast, fringed with islands, seamed with fathomless channels of clear, green, sea water, and basking in the soft, mellow radiance of this summer sunshine. The scenery gains everything from being translated through the medium of a soft, pearly atmosphere, where the light is as gray and evenly diffused as in Old England itself. The distant mountain ranges are lost in the blue vaporous shadows, and nearer at hand the masses and outlines show in their pure contour without the obtrusion of all the garish details that rob so many western mountain scenes of their grander effects. The calm of the brooding air, the shimmer of the opaline sea around one, and the ranges of green and russet hills, misty purple mountains, and snowy summits on the faint horizon, give a dream-like coloring to all one’s thoughts. A member of the Canadian Parliament, in speaking of this coast country of British Columbia, called it the “sea of mountains” and the channels of the ocean through which one winds for days are but as endless valleys and steep cañons between the peaks and ranges that rise abruptly from the water’s edge. Only the fiords and inlets of the coast of Norway, and the wooded islands in the Inland Sea of Japan, present anything like a counterpart to the wonderful scenery of these archipelagos of the North Pacific. From the head of Puget Sound to the mouth of the Chilkat River there are seven hundred and thirty-two miles of latitude, and the trend of the coast and the ship’s windings between and around the islands make it an actual voyage of more than a thousand miles on inland waters.

The Strait or Gulf of Georgia, that separates Vancouver’s Island from the mainland, although widening at times to forty miles, is for the most part like a broad river or lake, landlocked, walled by high mountain ranges on both sides, and choked at either end with groups of islands. The mighty current of the Frazer River rolls a pale green flood of fresh water into it at the southern entrance, and the river water, with its different density and temperature floating on the salt water, and cutting through it in a body, shows everywhere a sharply defined line of separation. In the broad channels schools of whales are often seen spouting and leaping, and on a lazy, sunny afternoon, while even the mountains seemed dozing in the waveless calm, the idlers on the after deck were roused by the cry of “Whales!” For an hour we watched the frolicking of the snorting monsters, as they spouted jets of water, arched their black backs and fins above the surface, and then disappeared with perpendicular whisks of their huge tails.

Toward the north end of Vancouver’s Island, where Valdes Island is wedged in between it and the mainland shore, the ship enters Discovery Pass, in which are the dangerous tide rips of Seymour Narrows. The tides rushing in and out of the Strait of Georgia dash through this rocky gorge at the rate of four and eight knots an hour on the turn, and the navigators time their sailing hours so as to reach this perilous place in daylight and at the flood tide. Even at that time the water boils in smooth eddies and deep whirlpools, and a ship is whirled half round on its course as it threads the narrow pass between the reefs. At other times the water dashes over the rapids and raises great waves that beat back an opposing bow, and the dullest landsman on the largest ship appreciates the real dangers of the run through this wild ravine, where the wind races with the water and howls in the rigging after the most approved fashion for thrilling marine adventures. Nautical gossips tell one of vessels that, steaming against the furious tide, have had their paddle wheels reversed by its superior strength, and have been swept back to wait the favorable minutes of slack water. Others, caught by the opposing current, are said to have been slowly forced back, or, steaming at full speed, have not gained an inch of headway for two hours. The rise and fall of the tides is thirteen feet in these narrows, and although there are from twenty to sixty fathoms of water in the true channel, there is an ugly ledge and isolated rocks in the middle of the pass on which there are only two and a quarter fathoms. Long before Vancouver carried his victorious ensign through these unknown waters, the Indians had known and dreaded these rapids as the abode of an evil spirit, and for half a century the adventurous Hudson Bay traders went warily through the raging whirlpools.

Although the British Admiralty have made careful surveys, and the charts are in the main accurate, there have been serious wrecks on this part of the coast. The United States man-of-war Saranac was lost in Seymour Narrows on the 18th of June, 1875. The Saranac was an old side-wheel steamer of the second rate in naval classification, carrying eleven guns, and was making its third trip to Alaskan waters. There was an unusually low tide the morning the Saranac entered the pass, and the ship was soon caught in the wild current, and sent broadside on to the mid-rock. It swung off, and was headed for the Vancouver shore, and made fast with hawsers to the trees, but there was only time to lower a boat with provisions and the more important papers before the Saranac sunk, and not even the masts were left visible. The men camped on shore while a party went in the small boats to Nanaimo for help. No attempt was ever made to raise the ship, and in the investigation it was shown that the boilers were in such a condition when they reached Victoria, that striking the rock in Seymour Narrows was only one of the perils that awaited those on board. No lives were lost by this disaster, and Dr. Bessels, of the Smithsonian Institute, who was on his way up the coast to make a collection of Indian relics for the Centennial Exposition, showed a scientist’s zeal in merely regretting the delay, and continuing on his journey by the first available craft. In April, 1883, the steamer Grappler, which plied between Victoria and the trading-posts on the west coast, took fire late at night, just as it was entering Seymour Narrows. The flames reached the hempen rudder-ropes, and the boat was soon helplessly drifting into the rapids. Flames and clouds of smoke made it difficult to launch the boats, and all but one were swamped. The frantic passengers leaped overboard while the ship was whirling and careening in the rapids, and the captain, with life-preserver on, was swept off, and disappeared in midstream. The Grappler finally drifted in to the Vancouver shore, and burned until daylight. Another United States war vessel, the Suwanee was lost a hundred miles beyond the Seymour Narrows by striking an unknown rock at the entrance to Queen Charlotte Sound.

In crossing this forty-mile stretch of Queen Charlotte Sound the voyager feels the swell, and touches the outer ocean for the first time. If the wind is strong there may be a chopping sea, but in general it is a stilled expanse on which fog and mist eternally brood. The Kuro Siwo, or Black Stream, or Japan Current, of the Pacific, which corresponds to the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic, touches the coast near this Sound, and the colder air from the land striking this warm river of the sea produces the heavy vapors which lie in impenetrable banks for miles, or float in filmy and downy clouds along the green mountain shores. It is this warm current which modifies the climate of the whole Pacific coast, bends the isothermal lines northward, and makes temperature depend upon the distance from the sea instead of upon distance from the equator. Bathed in perpetual fog, like the south coast of England and Ireland, there is a climatic resemblance in many ways between the islands of Great Britain and the islands of the British Columbia shore. The constant moisture and the long days force vegetation like a hothouse, and the density of the forests and the luxuriance of the undergrowth are equalled only in the tropics. The pine-trees cover the mountain slopes as thickly as the grass on a hillside, and as fires have never destroyed the forests, only the spring avalanches and land-slides break their continuity. There is an inside passage between the mountains from Queen Charlotte to Milbank Sound that gave us an afternoon and evening in the midst of fine scenery, but for another whole day we passed through the grandest of fiords on the British Columbia coast.

The sun rose at three o’clock on that rare summer morning, when the ship thrust her bow into the clear, mirror-like waters of the Finlayson Channel, and at four o’clock a dozen passengers were up in front watching the matchless panorama of mountain walls that slipped silently past us. The clear, soft light, the pure air, and the stillness of sky, and shore, and water, in the early morning, made it seem like the dawn of creation in some new paradise. The breath of the sea and the breath of the pine forest were blended in the air, and the silence and calm added to the inspiration of the surroundings. The eastern wall of the channel lay in pure shadow, the forest slopes were deep unbroken waves of green, with a narrow base-line of sandstone washed snowy white, and beneath that every tree and twig lay reflected in the still mirror of waters of a deeper, purer, and softer green than the emerald.

The marks of the spring avalanches were white scars on the face of the mountains, and the course of preceding landslides showed in the paler green of the ferns, bushes, and the dense growth of young trees that quickly cover these places. Cliffs of the color and boldness of the Yosemite walls shone in the sunlight on the opposite side, and wherever there were snowbanks on the summits, or lakes in the hollows and amphitheatres back of the mountain ridge, foaming white cataracts tumbled down the sheer walls into the green sea water. Eagles soared overhead in long, lazy sweeps, and hundreds of young ducks fluttered away from the ship’s bow, and dived at the sharp echoes of a rifle shot. In this Finlayson Channel the soundings give from 50 to 130 fathoms, and from the surface of these still, deep waters the first timbered slopes of the mountains rise nearly perpendicularly for 1,500 feet, and their snow-crowned summits reach 3,000 feet above their perfect reflections. From a width of two miles at the entrance, the pass narrows one half, and then by a turn around an island the ship enters Tolmie and Fraser channels, which repeat the same wonders in bolder forms, and on deeper waters. At the end of that last fiord, where submerged mountain peaks stand as islands, six diverging channels appear, and the intricacy of the inside passage up the coast is as marvellous now, as when Vancouver dropped his anchor in this Wright Sound, puzzled as to which way he should turn to reach the ocean. Finer even than the three preceding fiords is the arrowy reach of Grenville Channel, which is a narrow cleft in the mountain range, forty-five miles long, and with scarcely a curve to break the bold palisade of its walls. In the narrowest part it is not a quarter of a mile in width; and the forest walls, and bold granite cliffs, rising there to their greatest height, give back an echo many times before it is lost in long reverberations.

Emerging from Grenville Channel, the church and houses of Metlakatlah, the one model missionary settlement on the coast, and an Arcadian village of civilized and Christianized Indians, were seen shining in the afternoon sun. At that point the water is tinged a paler green by the turbid currents of the Skeena River, and up that river the newest El Dorado has lately been found. Miners have gone up in canoes, and fishermen have dropped their lines and joined them in the hunt for gold, which is found in nuggets from the size of a pea to solid chunks worth $20 and $60. “Jerry,” the first prospector, took out $600 in two days, and in the same week two miners panned out $680 in six hours. One nugget, taken from a crevice in a rock, was sent down to Victoria, and found to be pure gold and worth $26. Other consignments of treasure following, that quiet colonial town has been shaken by a gold fever that is sending all the adventurous spirits off to the Lorne Creek mines.

Before the sunset hour we crossed Dixon Entrance and the famous debatable line of 59° 40´, and the patriots who said the northern boundary of the United States should be “Fifty-nine Forty, or Fight,” are best remembered now, when it is seen that the Alaska possessions begin at that line. We were within the Alaska boundaries and standing on United States soil again at the fishing station of Tongass, on Wales Island. It is a wild and picturesque little place, tucked away in the folds of the hills and islands, and the ship rounded many points before it dropped anchor in front of two new wooden houses on a rocky shore that constituted Tongass. A cluster of bark huts and tents further down the beach was the home of the Indians who catch, salt, and barrel the salmon. There was one white man as host at the fish house, a fur-capped, sad-eyed mortal, who wistfully said that he had not been “below” in seven years, and entertained us with the sight of his one hundred and forty barrels of salmon, and the vats and scow filled with split and salted or freshly caught fish. He showed us a string of fine trout that set the amateur fishermen wild, and then gallantly offered to weigh the ladies on his new scales. Over in the group of Tongass Indians, sitting stolidly in a row before their houses, there was a “one-moon-old” baby that gave but a look at the staring white people, and then sent up one pitiful little barbaric yawp. A clumsy, flat-bottomed scow was rowed slowly out to the steamer, and while the salt, the barrel hoops, barrel staves, and groceries were unloaded to it from the ship, a ball was begun on deck. A merry young miner bound for the Chilkat country gave rollicking old tunes on his violin, and a Juneau miner called off figures that convulsed the dancers and kept the four sets flying on the after deck. “The winnowing sound of dancers’ feet” and the scrape of the fiddle brought a few Indian women out in canoes, and they paddled listlessly around the stern, talking in slow gutturals of the strange performances of the “Boston people,” as all United States citizens have been termed by them since Captain Gray and John Jacob Astor’s ships first came to the Northwest coast. At half-past ten o’clock daylight still lingered on the sky, and the Chicago man gravely read a page of a Lake Shore railroad time-table in fine print for a test, and then went solemnly to bed, six hundred miles away from the rest of the United States.

CHAPTER III.
CAPE FOX AND NAHA BAY.

From the Tongass fishery, which is some miles below the main village of the Tongass Indians and the deserted fort where United States troops were once stationed, the ship made its way by night to Cape Fox. At this point on the mainland shore, beyond Fort Tongass, the Kinneys, the great salmon packers of Astoria, have a cannery that is one of the model establishments up here. Two large buildings for the cannery, two houses, a store, and the scattered line of log houses, bark houses and tents of the Indian village, are all that one sees from the water. In the cannery most of the work is done by the Indians, but a few Chinamen perform the work which requires a certain amount of training and mechanical skill. The Indians cast the nets and bring in the shining silver fish with their deep moss-green backs and fierce mouths, and heap them in slippery piles in an outside shed overhanging the water. A Chinaman picks them up with a long hook, and, laying them in a row across a table, goes through a sleight-of-hand performance with a sharp knife, which in six minutes leaves twenty salmon shorn of their heads, tails, fins, and inwards. Experienced visitors to such places took out their watches and timed him, and in ten seconds a fish was put through his first rough process of trimming, and passed on to men who washed it, cleaned it more thoroughly, scraped off a few scales, and by a turn of revolving knives cut it in sections the length of a can. Indian women packed the tins, which were soldered, plunged into vats of boiling water, tested, resoldered, laquered, labelled, and packed in boxes in quick routine. There was the most perfect cleanliness about the cannery, and the salmon itself is only touched after the last washing by the fingers of the Indian women, who fill the cans with solid pieces of bright red flesh. In 1883 there were 3,784 cases of canned salmon shipped from this establishment as the result of the first season’s venture. In the following year, 1,156 cases were shipped by the July steamer, and the total for the season was about double that of the preceding year.

Owing to the good salmon season and the steady employment given them at the cannery, the Indians held their things so high that even the most insatiate and abandoned curio-buyers made no purchases, although there has been regret ever since at the thought of the wide old bracelets and the finely-woven hats that they let escape them. At Cape Fox a shrewd Indian came aboard, and spied the amateur photographer taking groups on deck. Immediately he was eager to be taken as well, and followed the camera around, repeating, “How much Siwash picture?” He was not to be appeased by any statements about the photographer doing his work for his own amusement, and pleaded so hard that the artist finally relented and turned his camera upon him. The Indian stiffened himself into his most rigid attitude, when directed to a corner of the deck between two lifeboats, and when the process was over he could hardly be made to stir from his pose. When we pressed him to tell us what he wanted his picture for, he chuckled like any civilized swain, and confessed the whole sentimental story by the mahogany blush that mantled his broad cheeks.

Up Revillagigedo Channel the scenery is more like that of the Scotch lakes, broad expanses of water walled by forest ridges and mountains that in certain lights show a glow like blooming heather on their sides. The Tongass Narrows, which succeed this channel of the long name, give more views of cañons filled with water, winding between high bluffs and sloping summits. It was a radiant sunny morning when we steamed slowly through these beautiful waterways, and at noon the ship turned into a long green inlet on the Revillagigedo shore, and cast anchor at the head of Naha Bay. Of all the lovely spots in Alaska, commend me to this little landlocked bay, where the clear green waters are stirred with the leaping of thousands of salmon, and the shores are clothed with an enchanted forest of giant pines, and the undergrowth is a tangle of ferns and salmon-berry bushes, and the ground and every log are covered with wonderful mosses, into which the foot sinks at every step.

The splash of the leaping salmon was on every side and at every moment, and the sight of the large fish jumping above the surface and leaping through the air caused the excitable passenger at the stern to nearly capsize the small boat and steer wildly. As the sailors rowed the boat up the narrow bay, where the ship could barely swing round with the tide, the Chicago man pensively observed: “There’s a thousand dollars jumping in the air every ten minutes!”

The anglers were maddened at the sight of these fish, for although these wild northern salmon can sometimes be deluded by trolling with a spoon-hook, they have no taste for such small things as flies, and are usually caught with seines or spears, except during those unusual salmon runs when the Indians wade in among the crowded fins and shovel the fish ashore with their canoe paddles.

At the head of Naha Bay, over a narrow point of land, lies a beautiful mountain lake, whose surface is a trifle below the high-water mark, and at low tide there is a fine cascade of fresh water foaming from between the rocks in the narrow outlet. During the run of salmon, the pool at the foot of the fall is crowded with the struggling fish; but the net is cast in the lake as often as in the bay, and the average catch is eighty barrels of salmon a day. The salmon are cleaned, salted, and barrelled in a long warehouse overhanging the falls, and a few bark houses belonging to the Indians who work in the fishery are perched picturesquely on the little wooded point between the two waters. Floating across this lovely lake in a slimy boat that the Indians had just emptied of its last catch of salmon, the beauty of its shores was more apparent, and the overhanging trees, the thickets of ferns, bushes, and wild grasses, the network of fallen logs hidden under their thick coating of moss, and the glinting of the sunshine on bark and moss and lichens, excited our wildest enthusiasm. In Alaska one sees the greatest range of greens in nature, and it is an education of the eye in that one color to study the infinite shades, tints, tones, and suggestions of that primary color. Of all green and verdant woods, I know of none that so satisfy one with their rank luxuriance, their beauty and picturesqueness; and one feels a little sorrow for those people who, never having seen Alaska, are blindly worshipping the barren, burnt, dried-out, starved-out forests of the East. In still stretches of this lake at Naha there are mirrored the snow-capped summits whose melting snows fill its banks, and the echo from a single pistol-shot is flung back from side to side before it dies away in a roar. Beyond this lake there is a chain of lakes, reached by connecting creeks and short portages, and the few white men who have penetrated to the farthest tarn in the heart of Revillagigedo Island say that each lake is wilder and more lovely than the last one. A mile below the fishery, and back in the woods, there is a waterfall some forty feet in height; and a mountain stream, hurrying down from the clear pools and snow-banks on the upper heights, takes a leap over a ledge of rocks and covers it with foam and sparkling waters.

The fishery and trading-post at Naha Bay was established in 1883, and shipped 338 barrels of salted salmon that first season. In 1884 over 500 barrels were shipped, and throughout June and July the salmon were leaping in the bay so thickly that at the turn of the tide their splashing was like falling rain.

CHAPTER IV.
KASA-AN BAY.

Kasa-an, or Karta Bay opens from Clarence Strait directly west of Naha Bay, and the long inlet runs in from the eastern shore of the Prince of Wales island for twenty miles. There are villages of Kasa-an Indians in the smaller inlets and coves opening from the bay, and carved totem poles stand guard over the large square houses of these native settlements. The bay itself is as lovely a stretch of water as can be imagined, sheltered, sunny, and calm, with noble mountains outlining its curves, and wooded islands drifted in picturesque groups at the end. It was a Scotch loch glorified, on the radiant summer days that I spent there, and it recalled one’s best memories of Lake George in the softer aspects of its shores.

Smaller inlets opening from the bay afford glimpses into shady recesses in the mountain-sides, and one little gap in the shores at last gave us a sight of the trader’s store, the long row of lichen-covered and moss-grown sheds of the fishery, with the usual cluster of bark houses and tents above a shelving beach strewn with narrow, black canoes. A group of Indians gathered on shore, their gay blankets, dresses, and cotton kerchiefs adding a fine touch of color to the scene, and the men in the fishery, in their high rubber boots and aprons, flannel shirts and big hats, were heroic adjuncts to the picturesque and out-of-the-way scene.

There was a skurrying to and fro and great excitement when the big steamer rounded slowly up to the little wharf, and bow line, stern line, and breast lines were thrown out, fastened to the piles and to the trees on shore, and the slack hauled in at the stentorian commands of the mate. Karta, or Kasa-an Bay has been a famous place for salmon for a score of years, and is best known, locally, as the Baronovich fishery. Old Charles V. Baronovich was a relic of Russian days, and a character on the coast. He was a Slav, and gifted with all the cunning of that race, and after the transfer of the country to the United States, he disturbed the serenity of the customs officials by the steady smuggling that he kept up from over the British border. He would import all kinds of stores, but chiefly bales of English blankets, by canoe, and when the collector or special agent would penetrate to this fastness of his, they found no damaging proof in his store, and only a peppery, hot-headed old pirate, who swore at them roundly in a compound language of Russian, Indian, and English, and shook his crippled limbs with rage. He was also suspected of selling liquor to the Indians, and a revenue cutter once put into Kasa-an Bay, with a commander whom smugglers seldom baffled, and who was bound to uncover Baronovich’s wickedness. The wily old Slav received the officers courteously. He listened to the formal announcement of the purpose of their visit, and bade them search the place and kindly do him the honor of dining with him when they finished. Baronovich dozed and smoked, and idled the afternoon away, while a watch kept a close eye upon him, and the officers and men searched the packing-house, the Indian houses and tents, and the canoes on the beach. They followed every trail and broken pathway into the woods, tapped hollow trees, dug under the logs, and peered down into the waters of the bay, and finally gave up the search, convinced that there was no liquor near the place. Baronovich gave them a good dinner, and towards the close a bottle of whiskey was set before each officer, and the host led with a toast to the captain of the cutter and the revenue marine.

This queer old fellow married one of the daughters of Skowl, the Haida chief who ruled the bay. She is said to have been a very comely maiden when Baronovich married her, and is now a stately, fine-looking woman, with good features and a creamy complexion. While Baronovich was cleaning his gun one day, it was accidentally discharged, and one of his children fell dead by his own hand. The Indians viewed this deed with horror, and demanded that Skowl should take his life in punishment. As it was proved an accident, Skowl defended his son-in-law from the charge of murder, and declared that he should go free. Ever after that the Indians viewed Baronovich with a certain fear, and ascribed to him that quality which the Italians call the “evil eye.”

With the passion of his race for fine weapons and fine metal work, Baronovich possessed many old arms that are worthy of an art museum. A pair of duelling pistols covered with fine engraving and inlaying were bought of his widow by one of the naval officers in command of the man-of-war on this station, and an ancient double-barrelled flint-lock shot-gun lately passed into the hands of another officer. The shot-gun has the stock and barrels richly damascened with silver and gold, after the manner of the finest Spanish metal work, and the clear gray flints in the trigger give out a shower of sparks when struck. Gunnell of London was the maker of this fine fowling-piece, and it is now used in the field by its new owner, who prefers it to the latest Remington.

Baronovich was a man with a long and highly-colored history by all the signs, but he died a few years since with no biographer at hand, and his exploits, adventures, and oddities are now nearly forgotten. The widow Baronovich still lives at Kasa-an, unwilling to leave this peaceful sunny nook in the mountains, but the fishery is now leased to a ship captain, who has taken away the fine old flavor of piracy and smuggling, and substituted a régime of system, enterprise, and eternal cleanliness.

The wandering salmon that swarm on this coast by millions show clear instincts when they choose, without an exception, only the most picturesque and attractive nooks to jump in. They dart and leap up Kasa-an Bay to the mouths of all the little creeks at its head, and three times during the year the water is alive with them. The best salmon run in June and July, and in one day the seine brought in eighteen hundred salmon in a single haul. Two thousand and twenty-one hundred fish have weighted the net at different[different] hauls, and the fish-house was overrunning with these royal salmon. Indian women do the most of the work in the fishery—cleaning and splitting the fish and taking out the backbones and the worthless parts with some very deft strokes from their murderous-looking knives. The salmon are washed thoroughly and spread between layers of dry salt in large vats. Brine is poured over them, and they are left for eight days in pickle. Boards and weights are laid on the top of the vats, and they are then barrelled and stored in a long covered shed and treated to more strong brine through the bung-hole until ready for shipment. Of all salt fish the salt salmon is the finest, and here, where salmon are so plentiful, a barrelled dainty is put up in the shape of salmon bellies, which saves only the fattest and most tender portions of these rich, bright red Kasa-an salmon.

Over fifteen hundred barrels were packed in 1884, and under the new régime the Kasa-an fishery has distanced its rivals in quantity, while the quality has a long-established fame.

These Kasa-an Indians are a branch of the Haidas, the finest of the Indian tribes of the coast. They are most intelligent and industrious people, and are skilled in many ways that render them superior to the other tribes of the island. Their permanent village is some miles below the fishery, and their square whitewashed houses, and the tomb and mortuary column of Skowl, their great chief, makes quite a pretty scene in a shady green inlet near Baronovich’s old copper mine. A few of their houses at the fishery are of logs or rough-hewn planks, but the most of them are bark huts, with a rustic arbor hung full of drying salmon outside. These bits of bright-red salmon, against the slabs of rough hemlock bark, make a gay trimming for each house, and when a bronzed old hag, in a dun-colored gown, with yellow ’kerchief on her head, stirs up the fire of snapping fir boughs, and directs a column of smoke toward the drying fish, it is a bit of aborigine life to set an artist wild. Their bark houses are scattered irregularly along the beach above high-water mark, and a fleet of slender, black canoes, with high, carved bows, are drawn up on the sand and pebbles. The canoe is the only means of locomotion in this region of unexplored and impenetrable woods, and the Indian is even more at home in it than on shore. No horseman cares for his steed more faithfully than the Siwash tends and mends his graceful cedar canoe, hewn from a single log, and given its flare and graceful curves by being steamed with water and hot stones, and then braced to its intended width. The Haida canoe has the same high, double-beaked prow of the Chinook canoes of Puget Sound, but where the stern of the latter drops in a straight line to the keel, the Haida canoe has a deep convex curve. By universal fashion all of these canoes are painted black externally, with the thwarts and bows lined with red, and sometimes the interior brightened with that color. The black paint used to be made from a mixture of seal oil and bituminous coal, and the red paint was the natural clay found in places throughout all Indian countries. Latterly the natives have taken to depending on the traders’ stores for paint, but civilization has never grasped them so firmly as to cause them to put seats or cross-pieces in their canoes. They squat or sit flat in the bottom of their dugouts for hours without changing position. It gives white men cramps and stiff joints to look at them, and sailors are no luckier than landsmen in their attempts to paddle and keep their balance in one of these canoes for the first time. The Indians use a broad, short paddle, which they plunge straight down into the water like a knife, and they literally shovel the water astern with it. The woman, who has a good many rights up here that her sisters of the western plains know not, sits back of her liege, and with a waving motion, never taking the paddle out of the water once, steers and helps on the craft. Often she paddles steadily, while the man bales out the water with a wooden scoop. When the canoes are drawn up on the beach they are carefully filled with grass and branches, and covered with mats or blankets to keep them sound and firm. A row of these high-beaked canoes thus draped has a very singular effect, and on a gloomy day they are like so many catafalques or funeral gondolas. Baronovich’s old schooner, the Pioneer of Cazan, lies stranded on the beach in the midst of the native boats, moss and lichens tenderly covering its timbers, and vagrant grasses springing up in the seams of the old wreck. The dark, cramped little cabin is just the place for ghosts of corsairs and the goblins of sailors’ yarns, and although it has lain there many seasons, no Indian has yet pre-empted it as a home for his family and dogs.

THREE CARVED SPOONS AND SHAMAN’S RATTLE.

The thrifty Siwash, which is the generic and common name for these people, and a corruption of the old French voyagers’ sauvage, keeps his valuables stored in heavy cedar chests, or gaudy red trunks studded with brass nails; the latter costly prizes with which the Russian traders used to tempt them. At the first sound of the steamer’s paddle-wheels,—and they can be heard for miles in these fiords,—the Indians rummaged their houses and chests and sorted out their valuable things, and when the first ardent curio-seeker rushed through the packing-houses and out towards the bark huts, their wares were all displayed. The Haidas are famous as the best carvers, silversmiths, and workers on the coast; and there are some of their best artists in this little band on Kasa-an Bay. An old blind man, with a battered hat on his head and a dirty white blanket wrapped around him, sat before one bark hut, with a large wooden bowl filled with carved spoons made from the horns of the mountain goat. These spoons, once in common use among all these people, are now disappearing, as the rage for the tin and pewter utensils in the traders’ stores increases, although many of them have the handles polished and the bowls worn by the daily usage of generations. The horn is naturally black, and constant handling and soaking in seal oil gives them a jetty lustre that adds much to the really fine carvings on the handles. Silver bracelets pounded out of coin, and ornamented with traceries and chasings by the hand of “Kasa-an John,” the famous jeweller of the tribe, were the prizes eagerly sought and contended for by the ladies. The bangle mania rages among the Haida maids and matrons as fiercely as on civilized shores, and dusky wrists were outstretched on which from three to nine bracelets lay in shining lines like jointed mail. Anciently they pounded a single heavy bracelet from a silver dollar piece, and ornamented the broad two-inch band with heraldic carvings of the crow, the bear, the raven, the whale, and other emblematic beasts of their strangely mixed mythology. Latterly they have become corrupted by civilized fashions, and they have taken to narrow bands, hammered from half dollars and carved with scrolls, conventional eagles copied from coins, and geometrical designs. They have no fancy for gold ornaments, and they are very rarely seen; but the fancy for silver is universal, and their methodical way of converting every coin into a bracelet and stowing it away in their chests gives hope of there being one place where the surplus silver and the trade dollars may be legitimately made away with.

In one house an enlightened and non-skeptical Indian was driving sharp bargains in the sale of medicine-men’s rattles and charms, and kindred relics of a departed faith. His scoffing and irreverent air would have made his ancestors’ dust shake, but he pocketed the chickamin, or money, without even a superstitious shudder. The amateur curio-buyers found themselves worsted and outgeneralled on every side in this rich market of Kasa-an by a Juneau trader, who gathered up the things by wholesale, and, carrying them on board, disposed of them at a stupendous advance. “No more spoon,” said the old blind chief as he jingled the thirteen dollars that he had received from this trader for his twenty beautifully carved spoons, and the tourists who had to pay two dollars a piece for these ancestral ladles echoed his refrain and began to see how profits might mount up in trading in the Indian country. Dance blankets from the Chilkat country, woven in curious designs in black, white, and yellow wool, spun from the fleece of the mountain goat, were paraded by the anxious owners, and the strangers elbowed one another, stepped on the dogs, and rubbed the oil from the dripping salmon overhead in the smoky huts, in order to see and buy all of these things.

Old Skowl bid defiance to the missionaries while he lived, and kept his people strictly to the faith and the ways of their fathers. If they fell sick, the shaman or medicine-man came with his rattles and charms, and with great hocus-pocus and “Presto change” drove away or propitiated the evil spirits that were tormenting the sufferer. If the patient did not immediately respond to the treatment, the doctor would accuse some one of bewitching his victim, and demand that he should be tortured or put to death in order to relieve the afflicted one. It thus became a serious matter for every one when the doctor was sent for, as not even the chiefs were safe from being denounced by these wizards. No slave could become a shaman, but the profession was open to any one else, regardless of rank or riches, and the medicine man was a self-made grandee, unless some great deformity marked him for that calling from birth. As preparation for his life-work he went off by himself, and fasted in the woods for many days. Returning, he danced in frenzy about the village, seizing and biting the flesh of live dogs, and eating the heads and tongues of frogs. This latter practice accounts for the image of the frog appearing on all the medicine men’s rattles; and in the totemic carvings the frog is the symbol of the shaman, or speaks of some incident connected with him. Each shaman elected to himself a familiar spirit, either the whale, the bear, the eagle, or some one of the mythological beasts, and gifted with its qualities, and under the guidance of this totemic spirit, he performed his cures and miracles. This token was carved on his rattles, his masks, drums, spoons, canoes, and all his belongings. It was woven on his blankets, and after death it was carved on bits of fossil ivory, whale and walrus teeth, and sewed to his grave-clothes. The shaman’s body was never burned, but was laid in state in the large grave boxes that are seen on the outskirts of every village. Columns capped with totemic animals and flags mark these little houses of the dead, and many of them have elaborately carved and painted walls. The shaman’s hair was never cut nor touched by profane hands, and each hair was considered a sacred charm by the people. Captain Merriman, while in command of the U. S. S. Adams, repeatedly interfered with two shamans, who were denouncing and putting to torture the helpless women and children in a village where the black measles was raging. He found the victims of this witchcraft persecution with their ankles fastened to their wrists in dark, underground holes, or tied to the rocks at low tide that they might be slowly drowned by the returning waters. All threats failing, the two shamans were carried on the Adams, and the ship’s barber sheared and shaved their heads. The matted hair was carried down to the boiler room and burned, for if it had been thrown overboard it would have been caught and preserved, and the shamans could have retained at least a vestige of authority. The Indians raised a great outcry at the prospect of harm or indignity being offered their medicine-men, but when the two shaved heads appeared at the gangway, the Indians set up shouts of derision, and there were none so poor as to do them honor after that. A few such salutary examples did much to break up these practices, and though their notions of our medicine are rather crude, they have implicit faith in the white, or “Boston doctors.”

If these fish-eating, canoe-paddling Indians of the northwest coast are superior to the hunters and horsemen of the western plains, the Haidas are the most remarkable of the coast tribes, and offer a fascinating study to anyone interested in native races and fellow man. From Cape Fox to Mount St. Elias the Indians of the Alaska coast are known by the generic name of Thlinkets, but in the subdivision of the Thlinkets into tribes, or kwans, the Haidas are not included. The Thlinkets consider the Haidas as aliens, but, except in the language, they have many things in common, and it takes the ethnologist’s eye to detect the differences. The greater part of the Haida tribe proper inhabit the Queen Charlotte Islands in the northern part of British Columbia, and the few bands living in villages in the southern part of Alaska are said to be malcontents and secessionists, who paddled away and found homes for themselves across Dixon Entrance. I have heard it stated, without much authority to sustain it, however, that old Skowl was a deserter of this kind, and, not approving of some of the political methods of the other chiefs in his native village, withdrew with his followers and founded a colony in Kasa-an Bay. This aboriginal “mugwump,” as he would be rated in the slang of the day, was conservative in other things, and his people have the same old customs and traditions as the Haidas of the original villages on the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Where the Haidas really did come from is an unending puzzle, and in Alaska the origin and migration of races are subjects continually claiming one’s attention. There is enough to be seen by superficial glances to suggest an Oriental origin, and those who believe in the emigration of the Indians from Asia by way of Behring Straits, or the natural causeway of the Aleutian Islands, in prehistoric times, find an array of strange suggestions and resemblances among the Haidas to encourage their theories. That the name of this tribe corresponds to the name of the great mountain range of Japan may be a mere coincidence, but a few scholars who have visited them say that there are many Japanese words and idioms in their language, and that the resemblance of the Haidas to the Ainos of northern Japan is striking enough to suggest some kinship. Opposed to this, however, is the testimony of Marchand, the French voyager, who visited the Haidas in 1791, and recognizing Aztec words and terminations in their speech, and resemblances to Aztec work in their monuments and picture-writings, first started the theory that they were from the south, and descendants of those who, driven out of Mexico by Cortez, vanished in boats to the north. To continue the puzzle, the Haidas have some Apache words in their vocabulary, and have the same grotesque dance-masks, and many of the same dances and ceremonies that Cushing describes in his sketches of life among the Zunis in New Mexico. Hon. James G. Swan, of Port Townsend, who has given thirty years to a study of the Indians of the northwest coast, has lately given much attention to the Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, and has made large collections of their implements and art works for the Smithsonian Institute. He found the Haida tradition and representation of the great spirit,—the Thunder Bird,—to be the same as that of the Aztecs, and when he showed sketches of Aztec carvings to the Haidas they seemed to recognize and understand them at once. Copper images and relics found in their possession were identical with some silver images found in ruins in Guatemala by a British archæologist. Judge Swan has collected many strange legends and allegories during his canoe journeys to the isolated Haida villages, and his guide and attendant, Johnny Kit-Elswa, who conducts him to the great October feasts and dances, is a clever young Haida silversmith and a remarkable genius. Judge Swan has written a memoir on Haida tattoo masks, paintings, and heraldic columns, which was published as No. 267 of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, January, 1874. In The West Shore magazine of August, 1884, he published a long article with illustrations upon the same subjects, and his library and cabinet, his journals and sketch-books, contain many wonderful things relating to the history and life of these strange people.

CHAPTER V.
FORT WRANGELL AND THE STIKINE.

Those who believe that all Alaska is a place of perpetual rain, fog, snow, and ice would be quickly disabused could they spend some of the ideal summer days in that most lovely harbor of Fort Wrangell. Each time the sky was clearer and the air milder than before, and on the day of my third visit the fresh beams of the morning sun gave an infinite charm to the landscape, as we turned from Clarence Straits into the narrower pass between the islands, and sailed across waters that reflected in shimmering, pale blue and pearly lights the wonderful panorama of mountains. Though perfectly clear, the light was softened and subdued, and even on such a glorious sunny morning there was no glare nor harshness in the atmosphere. This pale, soft light gave a dreamy, poetic quality to the scenery, and the first ranges of mountains above the water shaded from the deep green and russet of the nearer pine forests to azure and purple, where their further summits were outlined against the sky or the snow-covered peaks that were mirrored so faithfully in the long stretches of the channel. The sea water lost its deep green tints at that point, and was discolored and tinged to a muddy tea green by the fresh current of the Stikine River, which there reaches the ocean.

The great circle of mountains and snow-peaks, and the stretch of calm waters lying in this vast landlocked harbor, give Fort Wrangell an enviable situation. The little town reached its half-century of existence last summer, but no celebrations stirred the placid, easy-going life of its people. It was founded in 1834 by order of Baron Wrangell, then Governor of Russian America and chief director of the fur company, who sent the Captain-Lieut. Dionysius Feodorovich Zarembo down from Sitka to erect a stockade post on the small tongue of land now occupied by the homes, graves, and totem poles of the Indian village. It was known at first as the trading post of St. Dionysius, and, later, it assumed the name of Wrangell, the prefix of Fort being added during the time that the United States garrisoned it with two companies of the 21st Infantry. The Government began building a new stockade fort there immediately after the transfer of the territory in 1867, and troops occupied it until 1870, when they were withdrawn, the post abandoned, and the property sold for $500. The discovery of the Cassiar gold mines on the head waters of the Stikine River in 1874 sent a tide of wild life into the deserted street of Fort Wrangell, and the military were ordered back in 1875 and remained until 1877, when General Howard drew off his forces, and the government finally recalled the troops from all the posts in Alaska.

During the second occupation of the barracks and quarters at Fort Wrangell, the War Department helped itself to the property, and, assigning a nominal sum for rent, held the fort against the protest of the owner. The Cassiar mines were booming then, and Fort Wrangell took on something of the excitement of a mining town itself, and being at the head of ocean navigation, where all merchandise had to be transferred to small steamers and canoes, rents for stores and warehouses were extravagantly high. Every shed could bring a fabulous price. The unhappy owner, who rejoices in the euphonious name of W. King Lear, could only gnash his teeth and violently protest against the monthly warrants and vouchers given him by the commandant of the post. Since the troops have gone, the Government has done other strange things with the property that it once sold in due form, and Mr. Lear has a just and plain claim against the War Department for damages. The barracks and hospital of the old fort are now occupied by the Presbyterian Mission. No alteration, repairs, or improvements having been made for many years, the stockade is gradually becoming more ruinous, weather-worn, and picturesque each year, and the overhanging block-house at one corner is already a most sketchable bit of bleached and lichen-covered logs.

The main street of Fort Wrangell, untouched by the hoof of horse or mule for these many years, is a wandering grass-grown lane that straggles along for a few hundred feet from the fort gate and ends in a foot-path along the beach. The “Miners’ Palace Restaurant,” and other high-sounding signs, remain as relics of the livelier days, and listless Indian women sit in rows and groups on the unpainted porches of the trading stores. They are a quiet, rather languid lot of klootchmans, slow and deliberate of speech, and not at all clamorous for customers, as they squat or lie face downward, like so many seals, before their baskets of wild berries. In the stores, the curio departments are well stocked with elaborately carved spoons made of the black horns of the mountain goat; with curiously-fashioned halibut hooks and halibut clubs; with carved wooden trays and bowls, in which oil, fish, berries, and food have been mixed for years; with stone pipes and implements handed down from that early age, and separate store-rooms are filled with the skins of bears, foxes, squirrels, mink, and marten that are staple articles of trade. Occasionally there can be found fine specimens of a gray mica slate set full of big garnet crystals, like plums in a pudding, or sprinkled through with finer garnets that show points of brilliancy and fine color. This stone is found on the banks of a small creek near the mouth of the Stikine River, and great slabs of it are blasted off and brought to Fort Wrangell by the boat-load to be broken up into small cabinet specimens in time for the tourist season each summer. None of the garnets are clear or perfect, and the blasting fills them with seams and flaws. The best silver bracelets at Fort Wrangell are made by a lame Indian, who as the chief artificer and silversmith of the tribe has quite a local reputation. His bracelets are beautifully chased and decorated, but unfortunately for the integrity of Stikine art traditions, he has given up carving the emblematic beasts of native heraldry on heavy barbaric wristlets, and now only makes the most slender bangles, adapted from the models in an illustrated jeweller’s catalogue that some Philistine has sent him. Worse yet, he copies the civilized spread eagle from the half-dollar, and, one can only shake his head sadly to see Stikine art so corrupted and debased. For all this, the lame man cannot make bracelets fast enough to supply the market, and at three dollars a pair for the narrower ones he pockets great profits during the steamer days.

On the water side of the main street there is a queer old flat-bottomed river-boat, stranded high and dry, that in its day made $135,000 clear each season that it went up the Stikine. It enriched its owner while in the water, and after it went ashore was a profitable venture as a hotel. This Rudder Grange, built over from stem to stern, and green with moss, is so settled into the grass and earth that only the shape of the bow and the empty box of the stern wheel really declare its original purpose. There is a bakeshop in the old engine-room, and for the rest it is the Chinatown of Fort Wrangell. A small cinnamon-bear cub gambolled in the street before this boat-house, and it stood on its hind legs and sniffed the air curiously when it saw the captain of the ship coming down the street, bestowing sticks of candy on every child in the way. Bruin came in for his share, and formed the centre for a group that watched him chew up mint sticks and pick his teeth with his sharp little claws.

The houses of the Indian village string along the beach in a disconnected way, all of them low and square, built of rough hewn cedar and pine planks, and roofed over with large planks resting on heavy log beams. One door gives entrance to an interior, often twenty and forty feet square, and several families live in one of these houses, sharing the same fireplace in the centre, and keeping peacefully to their own sides and corners of the common habitation. Heraldic devices in outline sometimes ornament the gable front of the house, but no paint is wasted on the interior, where smoke darkens everything, the drying salmon drip grease from the frames overhead, and dogs and children tumble carelessly around the fire and over the pots and saucepans. The entrances have sometimes civilized doors on hinges, but the aborigine fashion is a portière of sealskin or walrus hide, or of woven grass mats. When one of the occupants of a house dies he is never taken out by the door where the others enter, but a plank is torn off at the back or side, or the body is hoisted out through the smoke hole in the roof, to keep the spirits away.

Before many of the houses are tall cedar posts and poles, carved with faces of men and beasts, representing events in their genealogy and mythology. These tall totems are the shrines and show places of Fort Wrangell, and on seeing them all the ship’s company made the hopeless plunge into Thlinket mythology and there floundered aimlessly until the end of the trip. There is nothing more flexible or susceptible of interpretations than Indian traditions, and the Siwash himself enjoys nothing so much as misleading and fooling the curious white man in these matters. The truth about these totems and their carvings never will be quite known until their innate humor is civilized out of the natives, but meanwhile the white man vexes himself with ethnological theories and suppositions. These totems are for the most part picture writings that tell a plain story to every Siwash, and record the great events in the history of the man who erects them. They are only erected by the wealthy and powerful members of the tribe, and the cost of carving a cedar log fifty feet long, and the attendant feasts and ceremonies of the raising, bring their value, according to Indian estimates, up to one thousand and two thousand dollars. The subdivisions of each tribe into distinct families that take for their crest the crow, the bear, the eagle, the whale, the wolf, and the fox, give to each of these sculptured devices its great meaning. The totems show by their successive carvings the descent and alliances of the great families, and the great facts and incidents of their history. The representations of these heraldic beasts and birds are conventionalized after certain fixed rules of their art, and the grotesque heads of men and animals are highly colored according to other set laws and limitations. Descent is counted on the female side, and the first emblem at the top of the totem is that of the builder, and next that of the great family from which he is descended through his mother.

In some cases two totem poles are erected before a house, one to show the descent on the female side, and one to give the generations of the male side, and a pair of these poles was explained for us by one of the residents of Fort Wrangell, who has given some study to these matters. The genealogical column of the mother’s side has at the top the eagle, the great totem or crest of the family to which she belonged. Below the eagle is the image of a child, and below that the beaver, the frog, the eagle, the frog, and the frog for a third time, show the generations and the sub-families of the female side. By some interpreters the frog is believed to indicate a pestilence or some great disaster, but others maintain that it is the recognized crest of one of the sub-families. The male totem pole has at the top the image of the chief, wearing his conical hat, below that his great totem, the crow. Succeeding the crow is the image of a child, then three frogs, and at the base of the column the eagle, the great totem of the builder’s mother.

TOTEM POLES AT FORT WRANGELL.

In front of one chief’s house a very natural-looking bear is crouched on the top of a pole, gazing down at his black foot-tracks, which are carved on the sides of the column. A crossbeam resting on posts near this same house used to show three frogs sitting in line, and other grotesque fantasies are scattered about the village. With the advance of civilization the Indians are losing their reverence for these heraldic monuments, and some have been destroyed and others sold; for the richest of these natives are so mercenary that they do not scruple to sell anything that belongs to them. The disappearance of the totem poles would rob these villages of their greatest interest for the tourists, and the ethnologist who would solve the mysteries and read the pictures finally aright, should hasten to this rich and neglected field.

In their mythology, which, as now known, is sadly involved through the medium of so many incorrect and perverted explanations, the crow or raven stands supreme as the creator and the first of all created things. He made everything, and all life comes from him. After he had made the world, he created woman and then man, making her supreme as representative of the crow family, while man, created last, is the head of the wolf or warrior’s family. From them sprang the sub-families of the whale, the bear, the eagle, the beaver, and the frog. The Stikine Indians have a tradition of the deluge, in which the chosen pair were given the shape of crows until the water had subsided, when they again returned to the earth and peopled it with their descendants. No alliances are ever made within the great families, and a crow never marries a crow, but rather a member of the whale, bear, or wolf families. The man takes the totem of his wife’s family, and fights with them when the great family feuds arise in the tribe.

GRAVE AT FORT WRANGELL.

On many of the totem poles the chiefs are represented as wearing tall, conical hats, similar to those worn by certain classes in China, and this fact has been assumed by many ardent ethnologists to give certain proof of the oriental origin of these people, and their emigration by way of Behring’s Straits. Others explain the storied hats piled one on top of another, as indicating the number of potlatches, or great feasts, that the builder has given. Over the graves of the dead, which are square log boxes or houses, they put full-length representations of the dead man’s totemic beast, or smooth poles finished at the top with the family crest. One old chief’s tomb at Fort Wrangell has a very realistic whale on its moss-grown roof, another a bear, and another an otter. The Indians cremated their dead until the arrival of the missionaries, who have steadily opposed the practice. The Indian’s idea of a hell of ice made him reason that he who was buried in the earth or the sea would be cold forever after, while he whose ashes were burned would be warm and comfortable throughout eternity.

These Thlinket Indians of the coast have broad heavy faces, small eyes, and anything but quickness or intelligence in their expression. They are slow and deliberate in speech, lingering on and emphasizing each aspirate and guttural, and any theories as to a fish diet promoting the activity of the brain are dispersed after watching these salmon-fed natives for a few weeks. Many of their customs are such a travesty and burlesque on our civilized ways as to show that the same principles and motives underlie all human action. When those expensive trophies of decorative art, the totem poles, are raised, the event is celebrated by the whole tribe. A common Indian can raise himself to distinction and nobility by giving many feasts and setting up a pole to commemorate them. After he owns a totem pole he can aspire to greater eminence. That man is considered the richest who gives most away, and at the great feasts or potlatches that accompany a house-warming or pole-raising, they nearly beggar themselves. All the delicacies of the Alaska market are provided by the canoe-full, and the guests sit around the canoes and dip their ancestral spoons into the various compounded dishes. Blankets, calico, and money are distributed as souvenirs on the same principle as costly favors are given for the German. His rank and riches increase in exact ratio as he tears up and gives away his blankets and belongings; and the Thlinket has satisfied pride to console himself with while he struggles through the hard times that follow a potlatch.

In the summer season Fort Wrangell is a peaceful, quiet place; the climate is a soothing one, and Prof. Muir extolled the “poultice-like atmosphere” which so calms the senses. The Indians begin to scatter on their annual fishing trips in June, and come back with their winter supplies of salmon in the early fall. Many of the houses were locked or boarded up, while the owners had gone away to spend the summer at some other watering-place. One absentee left this notice on his front door:—

LET NO ONE OPEN OR SHUT THIS

HOUSE DURING MY ABSENCE.

Over another locked door was this name and legend, which combines a well-witnessed and legal testament, together with the conventional door-plate of the white man:—

ANATLASH.

Let all that read know that I

Am a friend to the whites. Let no

One molest this house. In case of my

Death it belongs to my wife.

Thus wrote Anatlash, a man of tall totems and many blankets; and stanzas in blank verse after the same manner decorated the doorway of many Thlinket abodes.

The family groups within the houses were as interesting and picturesque as the totem poles without; and strangers were free to enter without formality, and study the ways of the best native society without hindrance. These people nearly all wear civilized garments, and in the baronial halls of Fort Wrangell there are imposing heaps of red-covered and brass-bound trunks that contain stores of blankets, festal garments, and family treasures. In all the houses the Indians went right on with their breakfasts and domestic duties regardless of our presence; and the white visitors made themselves at home, scrutinized and turned over everything they saw with an effrontery that would be resented, if indulged in in kind by the Indians. The women had the shrewdest eye to money-making, and tried to sell ancient and greasy baskets and broken spoons when they had nothing else in the curio line. In one house two giggling damsels were playing on an accordeon when we entered, but stopped and hid their heads in their blankets at sight of us. An old gentleman, in a single abbreviated garment, crouched by the fireside, frying a dark and suspicious-looking dough in seal oil; and the coolness and self-possession with which he rose and stepped about his habitation were admirable. He was a grizzled and surly-looking old fellow, but from the number of trunks and fur robes piled around the walls, he was evidently a man of wealth, and his airy costume rather a matter of taste than economy. Many of the men showed us buckskin pouches containing little six-inch sticks of polished cedar that they use in their great social games. These gambling sticks are distinguished by different markings in red and black lines, and the game consists in one man taking a handful, shuffling them around under his blanket, and making the others guess the marks of the first stick drawn out. These Indians are great gamblers, and they spend hours and days at their fascinating games. They shuffle the sticks to see who shall go out to cut and gather firewood in winter, and if a man is seen crawling out after an armful of logs, his neighbors shout with derision at him as a loser.

SILVER BRACELETS.

LABRETTES.

In addition to their silver bracelets, their silver earrings and finger rings, many of the women keep up the old custom of wearing nose rings and lip rings, that no amount of missionary and catechism, seemingly, can break them of. The lip rings used to be worn by all but slaves, and the three kinds worn by the women of all the island tribes are marks of age that take the place of family records. When a young girl reaches marriageable age, a long, flat-headed silver pin, an inch in length, is thrust through the lower lip. After the marriage festival the Thlinket dame assumes a bone or ivory button a quarter or half inch across. This matronly badge is a mere collar-button compared to the two-inch plugs of wood that they wear in their under lips when they reach the sere and yellow leaf of existence. This big labrette gives the last touch of hideousness to the wrinkled and blear-eyed old women that one finds wearing them, and it was from the Russian name for this trough in the lip—kolosh—that all the tribes of the archipelago were known as Koloshians, as distinguished from the Aleuts, the Innuits, and Esquimaux of the northwest.

Far less picturesque than the natives in their own houses were the little Indian girls at the mission-school in the old fort. Combed, cleaned, and marshalled in stiff rows to recite, sing, and go through calisthenic exercises, they were not nearly so striking for studies and sketches aboriginal, but more hopeful to contemplate as fellow-beings. Clah, a Christianized Indian from Fort Simpson, B. C., was the first to attempt mission work among the Indians at Fort Wrangell. In 1877 Mrs. McFarland was sent out by the Presbyterian Board of Missions, after years of mission work in Colorado and the west, and, taking Clah on her staff, she labored untiringly to establish the school and open the home for Indian girls. Others have joined her in the work at Fort Wrangell, and everyone on the coast testifies to good results already attained by her labors and example. She is known and reverenced among all the tribes, and the Indians trust in her implicitly, and go to her for advice and aid in every emergency. With the establishment of the new industrial mission-school at Sitka, Mrs. McFarland will be transferred to the girls’ department of that institution. The Rev. Hall Young and his wife have devoted themselves to the good cause at Fort Wrangell, and will continue there in charge of the church and school. The Presbyterian missions have the strongest hold on the coast, and the Catholics, who built a church at Fort Wrangell, have given up the mission there, and the priest from Nanaimo makes only occasional visits to his dusky parishioners.

The steep hillside back of Fort Wrangell was cleared of timber during military occupancy, and on the lower slopes the companies had fine gardens, which remain as wild overgrown meadows now. In them the wild timothy grows six feet high, the blueberry bushes are loaded with fruit, salmon berries show their gorgeous clusters of gold and scarlet, and the white clover grows on long stems and reaches to a fulness and perfection one can never imagine. This Wrangell clover is the common clover of the East looked at through a magnifying glass, each blossom as large and wide-spread as a double carnation pink, and the fragrance has a strong spicy quality with its sweetness. The red clover is not common, but the occasional tops are of the deepest pink that these huge clover blossoms can wear. While the hillside looked cleared, there was a deep and tangled thicket under foot, the moss, vines, and runners forming a network that it took some skill to penetrate; but the view of the curved beach, the placid channel sleeping in the warm summer sunshine like a great mountain lake, and the ragged peaks of the snowy range showing through every notch and gap, well repaid the climb through it. It was a most perfect day when we climbed the ridge, the air as warm and mellow as Indian summer, with even its soft haze hung round the mountain walls in the afternoon, and from those superior heights we gazed in ecstasy on the scene and pitied all the people who know not Alaska.

When Professor Muir was at Fort Wrangell one autumn, he climbed to the summit of this first mountain on a stormy night to listen to the fierce music of the winds in the forest. Just over the ridge he found a little hollow, and gathering a few twigs and branches he started a fire that he gradually increased to quite a blaze. The wind howled and roared through the forest, and the scientist enjoyed himself to the utmost; but down in the village the Indians were terrified at the glow that illuminated the sky and the tree-tops. No one could explain the phenomenon, as they could not guess that it was Professor Muir warming himself during his nocturnal ramble in the forest, and it was with difficulty that the minister and the teachers at the mission could calm the frightened Indians.

On a second visit to Fort Wrangell on the Idaho, there was the same warm, lazy sunshine and soft still air, and as connoisseurs we could the better appreciate the fine carvings and ornamental work of these æsthetic people, who decorate every household utensil with their symbols of the beautiful. Mr. Lear, or “King Lear,” welcomed us back to his comfortable porch, and as a special mark brought forth his great horn spoon, a work of the highest art, and a bit of bric-a-brac that cost its possessor some four hundred dollars. Mr. Lear is that famous man, who “swears by the great horn spoon,” and this elaborately carved spoon, made from the clear, amber-tinted horn of the musk ox, is more than eighteen inches long, with a smooth, graceful bowl that holds at least a pint. This spoon constituted the sole assets of a bankrupt debtor, who failed, owing Mr. Lear a large sum; and the jocose trader first astonished us by saying that he had a carved spoon that cost him four hundred dollars. The amateur photographers on shipboard raved at sight of the beautiful amber spoon with its carved handle inlaid with abalone shell, and, rushing for their cameras, photographed it against a gay background of Chilkat blankets. Mr. Lear has refused all offers to buy his great horn spoon, routing one persistent collector by assuring him that he must keep it to take his medicines in.

The skies were as blue as fabled Italy when the Idaho “let go” from Fort Wrangell wharf that glorious afternoon, and we left with genuine regret. The Coast-Survey steamer Hassler came smoking around the point of an island just as we were leaving Fort Wrangell; and our captain, who would rather lose his dinner than miss a joke, fairly shook with laughter when he saw the frantic signals of the Hassler, and knew the tempestuous frame of mind its commander was working himself up to. After giving the Hassler sufficient scare and chase, the Idaho slowed up, and the mails that she had been carrying for three months were transferred to the Coast-Survey ship, while the skippers, who are close friends and inveterate jokers, exchanged stiff and conventional greetings, mild sarcasm, and dignified repartee from their respective bridges. The pranks that these nautical people play on one another in these out-of-the-way waters would astonish those who have seen them in dress uniforms and conventional surroundings, and such experiences rank among the unique side incidents of a trip.

A boat-race of another kind rounded off the day of my third and last visit to Fort Wrangell, and the Indians who had been waiting for a week made ready for a regatta when the Ancon was sighted. It took several whistles from our impatient captain to get the long war-canoes manned and at the stake-boat; and, in this particular, boat-races have some points in common the world round. Kadashaks, one of the Stikine chiefs, commanded one long canoe in which sixteen Indians sat on each side, and another chief rallied thirty-two followers for his war-canoe. It was a picturesque sight when the boatmen were all squatted in the long dug-outs, wearing white shirts, and colored handkerchiefs tied around their brows. While they waited, each canoe and its crew was reflected in the still waters that lay without a ripple around the starting-point near shore. When the cannon on the ship’s deck gave the signal, the canoes shot forward like arrows, the broad paddles sending the water in great waves back of them, and dashing the spray high on either side. Kadashaks and the other chief sat in the sterns to steer, and encouraged and urged on their crews with hoarse grunts and words of command, and the Indians, paddling as if for life, kept time in their strokes to a savage chant that rose to yells and war whoops when the two canoes fouled just off the stake-boat. It was a most exciting boat-race, and bets and enthusiasm ran high on the steamer’s deck during its progress. The money that had been subscribed by the traders in the town was divided between the two crews, and at night there was a grand potlatch, or feast, in honor of the regatta.

The trade with the Cassiar mines at the head of the Stikine River once made Fort Wrangell an important place, but the rival boats that used to race on the river have gone below, and the region is nearly abandoned. As early as 1862 the miners found gold dust in the bars near the mouth of the river; but it was twelve years later before Thibert and another trapper, crossing from Minnesota, found the gold fields and quartz veins at the head-waters of the stream, three hundred miles distant from Fort Wrangell, within the British Columbia lines. Immediately the army of gold-seekers turned there, leaving California and the Frazer River mines, and in 1874 there were two thousand miners on the ground, and the yield was known to have been over one million dollars. Light-draught, stern-wheel steamers were put on the river, and the goods and miners transferred from ocean steamers at Fort Wrangell were taken to Glenora at the head of navigation, one hundred and fifty miles from the mouth. From that point there was a steep mountain trail of another one hundred and fifty miles, and pack trains of mules carried freight on to the diggings. Freights from Fort Wrangell to the mines ranged at times from twenty to eighty and one hundred and sixty dollars per ton; and in consequence, when the placers were exhausted, and machinery was necessary to work the quartz veins, the region was abandoned.

The official returns as given by the British Columbia commissioners are not at hand for all of the years since the discovery of these mines, but for the seven years here given they show the great decrease in the bullion yield of the Cassiar fields:—

During this year of 1884 the steamers have been taken off the river, and Indian canoes are the only means of transportation. There are few besides Chinamen left to work the exhausted fields, and another year will probably find them in sole possession. While the mines were at their best, Fort Wrangell was the great point of outfitting and departure; and after the troops were withdrawn, the miners made it more and more a place of drunken and sociable hibernation, when the severe weather of the interior drove them down the river. They congregated in greatest numbers early in the spring, many going up on the ice in February or March, before the river opened; although no mining could be done until May, and the water froze in the sluices in September.

The Cassiar mines being in British Columbia, the rush of trade on the Stikine River caused many complications and infractions of the revenue laws of both countries, and great license was allowed. The exact position where the boundary line crosses the Stikine has not yet been determined by the two governments, and in times past it has wavered like the isothermal lines of the coast. The diggings at Shucks, seventy miles from Fort Wrangell, were at one time in Alaska and next time in British Columbia; and the Hudson Bay Company’s post, and even the British custom house, were for a long time on United States soil before being removed beyond the debatable region. The boundary, as now accepted temporarily, crosses the river sixty-five miles from Fort Wrangell at a distance of ten marine leagues from the sea in a direct line, and, intersecting the grave of a British miner, leaves his bones divided between the two countries; his heart in the one, and the boots in which he died in the other.

Vancouver failed to discover the Stikine on his cruise up the continental shore, and, deceived by the shoal waters, passed by the mouth. It then remained for the American sloop Degon, Captain Cleveland, to visit the delta and learn of the great river from the natives in 1799. The scenery of the Stikine River is the most wonderful in this region, and Prof. John Muir, the great geologist of the Pacific coast, epitomized the valley of the Stikine as “a Yosemite one hundred miles long.” The current of the river is so strong that while it takes a boat three days at full steam to get from Fort Wrangell up to Glenora, the trip back can be made in eight or twelve hours, with the paddle-wheel reversed most of the time, to hold the boat back in its wild flight down stream. It is a most dangerous piece of river navigation, and there have been innumerable accidents to steamboats and canoes.

Three hundred great glaciers are known to drain into the Stikine, and one hundred and one can be counted from the steamer’s deck while going up to Glenora. The first great glacier comes down to the river at a place forty miles above Fort Wrangell, and fronting for seven miles on a low moraine along the river bank, is faced on the opposite side by a smaller glacier. There is an Indian tradition to the effect that these two glaciers were once united, and the river ran through in an arched tunnel. To find out whether it led out to the sea, the Indians determined to send two of their number through the tunnel, and with fine Indian logic they chose the oldest members of their tribe to make the perilous voyage into the ice mountain, arguing that they might die very soon anyhow. The venerable Indians shot the tunnel, and, returning with the great news of a clear passageway to the sea, were held in the highest esteem forever after. This great glacier is from five hundred to seven hundred feet high on the front, and extends back for many miles into the mountains, its surface broken and seamed with deep crevices. Two young Russian officers once went down from Sitka to explore this glacier to its source, but never returned from the ice kingdom into which they so rashly ventured. Further up, at a sharp bend of the river called the Devil’s Elbow, there is the mud glacier, which has a width of three miles and a height of two hundred or three hundred feet where it faces the river from behind its moraine. Beyond this dirt-covered, boulder-strewn glacier, there is the Grand Cañon of the Stikine, a narrow gorge two hundred feet long and one hundred feet wide, into which the boiling current of the river is forced, and where the steamboats used to struggle at full steam for half an hour before they emerged from the perpendicular walls of that frightful defile. A smaller cañon near it is called the Klootchman’s, or Woman’s Cañon, the noble red man being always so exhausted by poling, paddling, and tracking his canoe through the Grand Cañon as to leave the navigation of the second one entirely to his wife. The Big Riffle, or the Stikine Rapids, is the last of these most dangerous places in the river; and at about this point, where the summit line of the mountain range crosses the river, the mythical boundary line is supposed to lie. The country opens out then into more level stretches, and at Glenora and Telegraph Creek, the steamboats leave their cargoes and start on the wild sweep down the river to Fort Wrangell again. As the boats are no longer running on the river, future voyagers who wish to see the stupendous scenery of this region will have to depend on the Indian canoes that take ten days for the journey up, or else feast and satisfy their imaginations with the thrilling tales of the old Stikine days that can be picked up on every hand, and study the topography of the region from the maps of Prof. Blake.

CHAPTER VI.
WRANGELL NARROWS AND TAKU GLACIERS.

If there were not so many more wonderful places in Alaska, Wrangell Narrows would give it a scenic fame, and make its fortune in the coming centuries when tourists and yachts will crowd these waters, and poets and seafaring novelists desert the Scotch coast for these northwestern isles. Instead of William Black’s everlasting Oban, and Staffa, and Skye, and heroines with a burr in their speech, we will read of Kasa-an and Kaigan, Taku and Chilkat, and maidens who lisp in soft accents the deep, gurgling Chinook, or the older dialects of their races. Wrangell Narrows is a sinuous channel between mountainous islands, and for thirty miles it is hard to determine which one of the perpendicular walls at the end of the strait will finally stop us with its impassable front. There are dangerous ledges and rocks, and strong tides rushing through this pass, and the average depth of from four to twelve fathoms is very shallow water for Alaska. Although long known and used by the Indians and the Hudson Bay Company’s traders, it was not considered a safe inside passage; and as Vancouver had not explored it, and there were not any complete charts, it was little traversed by regular commerce. After United States occupation, and the increased travel to Sitka, the perils of Cape Ommaney, off the south end of Baranoff Island, quite matched any dangers there might be in the unknown channel. Captain R. W. Meade, in command of the U. S. S. Saginaw, made a survey of the Narrows in 1869, and gradually the way through the ledges and flats and tide rips became better known. In 1884 Captain Coghlan, commander of the U. S. S. Adams carefully sounded and marked off the channel with stakes and buoys, and the navigators now only look for the favorable turn of the tide in going through the picturesque reaches.

Leaving Fort Wrangell in the afternoon, it was an enchanting trip up that narrow channel of deep waters, rippling between bold island shores and parallel mountain walls. Besides the clear, emerald tide, reflecting every tree and rock, there was the beauty of foaming cataracts leaping down the sides of snow-capped mountains, and the grandeur of great glaciers pushing down through sharp ravines, and dropping miniature icebergs into the water. Three glaciers are visible at once on the east side of the Narrows, the larger one extending back some forty miles, and measuring four miles across the front, that faces the water and the terminal moraine it has built up before it. The great glacier is known as Patterson Glacier, in honor of the late Carlisle Patterson, of the United States Coast Survey, and is the first in the great line of glaciers that one encounters along the Alaska coast. Under the shadow of a cloud the glacier was a dirty and uneven snow field, but touched by the last light of the sun it was a frozen lake of wonderland, shimmering with silvery lights, and showing a pale ethereal green, and deep, pure blue, in all the rifts and crevasses in its icy front.

With the appearance of this first glacier, and the presence of ice floating in the waters around us, the conversation of all on board took a scientific turn, and facts, fancies, and wild theories about glacial origin and action were advanced that would have struck panic to any body of geologists. Being all laymen, there was no one to expound the mysteries and speak with final authority on any of these frozen and well-established truths; and we floundered about in a sea of suppositions, and were lost in a labyrinth of lame conclusions.

A long chain of snow-capped mountains slowly unrolled as the ship emerged from Wrangell Narrows, more glaciers were brought to view, and that strange granite monument, the “Devil’s Thumb,” as named by Commander Meade, signalled us from a mountain top.

Farther up, in Stephens Passage, floating ice tells of the great glaciers in Holkam or Soundoun Bay, and beside the one great Soundoun glacier flowing into the sea, there are three other glaciers hidden in the high-walled fiords that open from the bay. One of the first and most adventurous visitors to the Soundoun glacier was Captain J. W. White, of the Revenue Marine, who anchored the cutter Lincoln in the bay in 1868. Seeing a great arch or tunnel in the front of the glacier, he had his men row the small boat into the deep blue grotto, and they went a hundred feet down a crystalline corridor whose roof was a thousand feet thick. The colors, he said, were marvellous, and, like the galleries cut in the Alpine glaciers, showed fresh wonders with each advance. At the furthest point the adventurous boatmen poured out libations and drank to the spirits of the ice kingdom. In 1876 gold was discovered, and the Soundoun placers were the first ones worked in Alaska. Professor Muir visited the glacier and mines of Soundoun Bay in 1879, and at Shough, a camp in a valley at the head of the inlet, found miners at work with their primitive rockers and sluices. In 1880 these mines yielded $10,000, and the miners believed the bed of gold-bearing gravel inexhaustible. The discovery of gold at Juneau drew the most of them away, and the Soundoun placers have hardly been heard of in later years.

Winding north, through a broad channel with noble mountain ranges on either side, we passed the old Hudson Bay Company’s trading post of Taku, and at mention of this name those who believe in the Asiatic origin of the Alaska Indians cried out in delighted surprise: “There is a Chinese city of the same name and spelled in the same way as this—Taku.”

Reaching the mouth of Taku Inlet, into which the Taku River empties, the floating ice gave evidence of the great glaciers that lie within; and, following up this fiord for about fifteen miles to a great basin, we came suddenly in sight of three glaciers. One sloped down a steep and rather narrow ravine, and its front was hidden by another turn in the overlapping hills. The second one pushed down between two high mountains, and, resting its tongue on the water, dropped off the icebergs and cakes that covered the surface of the dull, gray-green water. The front of this icy cliff stretched entirely across the half-mile gap between the mountains, and its face rose a hundred and two hundred feet from the water, every foot of it seamed, jagged, and rent with great fissures, in which the palest prismatic hues were flashing. As the tide fell, large pieces fell from this front, and avalanches of ice-fragments crashed down into the sea and raised waves that rocked our ship and set the ice-floes grinding together. On the other point of the crescent of this bay there lay the largest glacier, an ice-field that swept down from two mountain gorges, and, spreading out in fan shape, descended in a long slope to a moraine of sand, pebbles, and boulders. Across its rolling front this glacier measured at least three miles, and the low, level moraine was one mile in width. The moraine’s slope was so gradual that when the small boats were lowered and we started for shore, they grounded one hundred feet from the water-mark and there stuck until the passengers were taken off one by one in the lightest boat, and then carried over the last twenty feet of water in the sailors’ arms. It was a time for old clothes, to begin with, and everyone wore their worst when they started off; but at the finish, when the same set waded through a quarter of a mile of sand and mineral mud left exposed by the falling tide, and were dumped into the boats by the sailors, a near relative would not have owned one of us. The landing of the glacier pilgrims was a scene worthy of the nimblest caricaturist, and sympathy welled up for the poor officers and sailors who shouldered stout men and women and struggled ashore through sinking mud and water. The burly captain picked out the slightest young girl and carried her ashore like a doll; but the second officer, deceived by the hollow eyes of one tall woman, lifted her up gallantly, floundered for a while in the mud and the awful surprise of her weight, and then bearer and burden took a headlong plunge. The newly-married man carried his bride off on his back, and had that novel incident to put down in the voluminous journal of the honeymoon kept by the young couple.

We trailed along in files, like so many ants, across the sandy moraine, sinking in the soft “mountain meal,” stumbling over acres of smooth rocks and pebbles, and jumping shallow streams that wandered down from the melting ice. Patches of epilobium crimsoned the ground with rank blossoms near the base of the glacier, and at last we began ascending the dull, dirty, gray ice hills.

There was a wonderful stillness in the air, and the clear, sunny, blue sky brooded peacefully over the wonderful scene. The crunching of the footsteps on the rough ice could be heard a long way, and from every crevice came the rumble and roar of the streams under the ice. Rising five hundred feet or more by a gradual incline of half a mile, we were as far from seeing the source of the glacier as ever; and the vast snow-fields from which the streams of ice emerge were still hidden by the spurs of the mountain round which they poured. At that point there were some deep crevasses in the ice, and leaning over we looked down into the bottomless rifts. The young Catholic priest, forgetting everything in the ardor of the moment and the ice-fever, labored like a giant, hurling vast boulders into the depths, that we might hear the repeated crashes as they struck from side to side, before the splash told that they had reached the subterranean river that roared so fiercely. In the outer sunshine the ice sparkled like broken bits of silver, but in the crevasses the colors were intensified from the palest ice-green to a deeper and deeper blue that was lost in shadowy purple at the last point. The travellers who had learned their glaciers in Switzerland sat amazed at the view before them, and owned that the glacier on which they were sitting was much larger and more broken than the Mer de Glace, while nothing in the Alps could equal the smaller glacier beyond, that lay glittering like a great jewel-house and dropping bergs of beryl and sapphire into the sea.

Where the two arms of the glacier united, the lines of converging ice-streams were marked by great trains of boulders and patches of dirt; and fragments of quartz and granite, and iron-stained rocks were souvenirs that the pilgrims carried off by the pocketful. We sat on rough boulders and looked down into the ice-ravines on every side, and sighed breathlessly in the ecstasy of joy. An earthly and material soul roused the scorn of the young Catholic divine by sitting down in that exalted spot to eat—to munch soda crackers from a brown-paper bundle—while the wreck of glaciers, the crash of icebergs, the grinding of ice-floes, and world-building were going on about him.

We ran down the glacier slopes hand in hand, in long lines that “snapped the whip” and went all-hands-round on the more level places, or crept in cautious file along the narrow ridges between crevasses. We drank from icy rills that ran in channels of clear green ice, and crossing the moraine, we waded through mud ankle deep and were carried to the boats. The receding tide had obliged the sailors to push the boats further and further off, and when one frail bark was about full there was a crash, an avalanche of ice went splashing into the sea from the smaller glacier up the bay, and a great wave curling from it washed the boat back and left it grounded. Men without rubber boots were then so well soaked and so plastered with glacier mud that they just stepped over the boat’s side and helped the rubber-clad sailors float it off. The lower deck and the engine-room were hanging full and strewn with muddy boots and drying clothes all day, and the stewards were heard to wonder “what great fun there was in getting all their clothes spoiled, that the passengers need take on so over a glacier.”

When Vancouver went to the head of Taku Inlet in 1794 he found “frozen mountains” surrounding it on every side, and his boats were so endangered by the floating ice, that his men gladly hurried away from it. Prospectors have had their camps at the mouth of the river at the head of the basin, and have searched the bars and shores of Taku River for miles across the mountain wall. Their evidence and that of the fur traders, who give scant notice to such things, prove the Indian traditions, that the ice is receding rapidly, and that the ice mountain that now sets back with a great moraine before it, came down to the water’s edge in their fathers’ days.

That day on the Taku glacier will live forever as one of the rarest and most perfect enjoyment. The grandest objects in nature were before us, the primeval forces that mould the face of the earth were at work, and it was all so far away and out of the everyday world that we might have been walking a new planet, fresh fallen from the Creator’s hand. The lights and shadows on the hills, and the range of colors, were superb,—every tiny ice-cake in the water showing colors as rare and fleeting as the shades of an opal, while the gleaming ice-cliff, from which these jewels dropped, was aglow with all the prismatic lights and tinted in lines of deepest indigo in the great caverns and rifts of its front. The sunny, sparkling air was most exhilarating, and we sat on the after-deck basking in the golden rays of the afternoon sun, and looked back regretfully as the glaciers receded and were lost to sight by a turn in the fiord.

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.

A THLINKET BASKET.

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.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHILKAT COUNTRY.

Juneau is far enough north to satisfy any reasonable summer ambition, and with its latitude of 58° 16´ N., the young mining town and future metropolis is but little above the line of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, and Moscow. The deep waters of Gastineaux Channel are obstructed by ledges just north of Juneau, and the eighteen feet fall of the regular tides leaves islands and reefs visible in mid-channel. For this reason the ship had to return on its course, and round Douglass Island, before it could continue further north, and when that island of solid gold quartz was left behind, the vessel entered a maze of smaller islands and threaded its way into the grand reaches of Lynn Canal. Vancouver named this arm of the sea for the town of Lynn, in Norfolk, England, the place of his nativity, and his explorers began the song of praise that is chanted by every summer traveller who follows their course up the high-walled, glacier-bound fiord. The White Mountains present bold barriers on the west, and along the eastern shores the great continental range fronts abruptly on the water. Each point or peak passed brought another glacier into view, nineteen glaciers in all being visible on the way up the canal. The great Auk glacier was first seen, and then the Eagle glacier, toppling over a precipice three thousand feet in air, their frozen crests and fronts turning pinnacles of silver and azure to the radiant sun.

Not even “the blue Canary Isles” could have offered a more “glorious summer day” than the one that we enjoyed while the Idaho steamed straight up Lynn Canal, headed for the north pole. The sun shone so warmly on deck that we laid aside wraps, and sat under the grateful shade of an umbrella. There was a sparkle and freshness to the air, and under an ecstatic blue sky fleecy white clouds drifted about the mountain summits and mingled their vapory outlines with the fields of snow. We revelled in the beauties of the scenes, and appreciated at the moment that this passage leading to the Chilkat country is perhaps the finest fiord of the coast. Lynn Canal slumbered as a sapphire sea between its high mountain walls, with scarcely a ripple on its surface. The blue expanse was streaked with a greenish gray where the turbid streams poured in from the melting glaciers, and was marked with a distinct line where the azure water changed to green, and then it faded away into gray again, where the fresh waters of the Chilkat River flowed in.

At the head of Lynn Canal a long point juts out into the current, with the Chilkat Inlet opening at the left, and the Chilkoot Inlet at the right. Opposite this tongue of land on the Chilkat side is the great Davidson glacier, sweeping down a gorge between two mountains, and spreading out like an opened fan. The glacier is three miles across its front and twelve hundred feet high, where it slopes to reach the level ground, and it is separated from the waters of the inlet by a terminal moraine covered with a thick forest of pines. The symmetry of its outlines and the grand slope of its broken surface are most impressive, and this mighty torrent, arrested in its sweep, shows in every pinnacle and crevice all the blues of heaven, the palest tints of beryl and glacier ice, and the sheen of snow and silver in the sunshine. It is worthily named for Professor George Davidson, the astronomer, and its lower slopes were explored by him during his visits to the Chilkat country on government and scientific missions.

Rounding a sharp point beyond the glacier, the Idaho swept into a circling, half-moon cove, where a picturesque Indian camp nestled at the foot of the precipitous Mount Labouchere, not named for the witty editor of the London Truth, but for one of the Hudson Bay Company’s steamers that first penetrated these waters and anchored regularly in this Pyramid Harbor. The cannon-shot, which was such an important feature in the progress of the Idaho, gave a tremendous echo from mountain to mountain, and glacier to glacier, and thundered and rolled down the inlet for uncounted seconds, as the anchor dropped. The tents and bark huts, and the trader’s store of the little settlement, showed finely against the deep green mat at the foot of the vertical mountain, and in the early afternoon all lay in clear shadow, and the mountain seemed to almost overhang the ship as she swung round from her anchor chain. There was an excited rushing to and fro on shore; dogs and Indians gathered at the beach, and canoes put off before the ship’s boats were lowered to take us ashore.

THE DAVIDSON GLACIER.

The Northwest Trading Company’s large store and salmon cannery were quite overlooked in the travellers’ hasty rush for the Indian tents, that were scattered in groups along the narrow clearing between tide-water and mountain wall. Before each tent and cabin were frames, hung with what looked to be bits of red flannel at a distance, but proved to be drying salmon when we reached them. It was a gaudy and effective decoration, and a Chilkat salmon is as bright a color, when caught, as a lobster after it has been boiled. Though a warlike and aggressive people, the Chilkats practise many of the arts of peace, and the wood-carvings and curios that they had for sale were eagerly bought. Miniature totem poles and canoes, pipes, masks, forks, and spoons changed ownership rapidly, and Indians and passengers regretted that there were no more. Bone sticks, used for marten-traps[marten-traps] by the Tinneh tribes of the interior, were to be had, with every stick topped with some totemic beast, and there were queer little fish and toys of soapstone, made by the same peaceful natives. Copper bracelets, covered with Chilkat designs, were offered by a lame rascal, who said, “Gold! gold!” to the eager curio-seekers who snatched at his shining wares. Copper knives and arrow-tips were also displayed, and articles of this metal are distinctly Chilkat work, as the art of forging copper was long a secret of theirs. Relics of the stone age were brought forth, and granite mortars and axes, and leather dressers of slate, offered for sale. Stone-age implements are being rapidly gathered up in this country, and a trader, who has received and filled large orders for eastern museums and societies, threatens to bring up a skilled stonecutter to supply the increasing demands of scientists, now that the Indians have parted with most of their heirloom specimens.

CHILKAT BLANKET.

In one tent two women were at work weaving a large Chilkat blanket on a primitive loom. These blankets, woven from the long fleece of the mountain goat, have been a specialty of the Chilkats as long as white men have known them. The chiefs who met Vancouver were wrapped in these gorgeous totemic blankets or cloaks, and in early days they were commonly worn by the chiefs and rich men. Since the traders have introduced the woollen blankets of commerce, the native manufactures have been neglected, and now that the art is dying out, the few that remain in the possession of the natives are highly valued and only taken from their cedar boxes on the occasion of great feasts and ceremonies. These blankets are found among all the Thlinket tribes, and the Haidas at Kasa-an Bay had many Chilkat cloaks and garments stored away in their cabins. The blankets average two yards in width and about one yard in depth, and are bordered at the ends and across the bottom with a deep fringe. The colors are black, white, and yellow, with occasional touches of a soft, dull blue. Soot, or bituminous coal, gives the base for the black dye, and they get the pure, brilliant yellow from a moss that grows on the rocks. The blue is made by boiling copper and seaweeds together. They make fine trophies for wall decorations, or, as rugs or lambrequins, are superior to the Navajo and Zuni blankets of the New Mexico Indians. The totemic figures woven in these cloaks tell allegories and legends to the natives, and the conventionalized whales, eagles, and ravens are full of meaning, recording the great battles between the clans, the incidents of family history, and deeds at arms. The price of a blanket ranges from twenty to forty dollars; the fineness of the work, the beauty of the design, and the anxiety of the purchaser all helping to increase the price.

As in all Indian villages, the fierce, wolfish-looking dogs showed an inclination to growl and snap at the white people, but the hard-featured, strong-minded women of the Chilkat tribe silenced them with a word, or a skilfully thrown brand snatched from the family camp fire. The children and the dogs were always getting under foot and crowding into each group, and in the Alpine valley, where the afternoon shadows brought a pleasant sharpness to the air, the youngsters were as scantily clad as in the tropics. They sat on the damp ground and stole handfuls of rice from the pots boiling on the fires, or furtively dipped the spoons into the mess one minute and hit the dogs with the table utensil the next. One boy, who had sold a great many little carved toys to the visitors, dashed off into a thicket of wild roses, and gallantly brought back fragrant pink blossoms for his customers. Sitka Jack’s carved canoe was drawn up on shore, and that grandee at last appeared to us, and after selling his own pipe and carved possessions, he wandered about and interfered in every one’s bargains by urging the natives to ask more for their curios.

Of the white celebrities residing at Pyramid Harbor, there was one with the enviable fame of being “the handsomest man in Alaska,” and when he went gliding out to the ship in a swift native canoe, and appeared on deck as if just stepped aside from a Broadway stroll, there was a perceptible flutter in the ladies’ cabin. Another fine-looking man of distinguished manner, found wandering on shore, proved to be a French count, who, having dissipated three fortunes in the gayeties of a Parisian life, has hidden himself in this remote corner of the world to ponder on the philosophy of life, and wait for the favorable stroke that shall enable him to return and shine once more among his gay comrades of the boulevard, the Bois and the opera foyer.

At Pyramid Harbor the ship reached the most northern point on her course and the end of the inside passage. At 59° 11´ N. we were many degrees distant from the Arctic Circle, but, although it was mid-July, the sun did not set until half past nine o’clock by ship’s time, and the clear twilight lasted until the royal flush of sunrise was bathing the summits of the higher mountains. At midnight fine print could be read on deck, and at the hour when churchyards yawn the amateur photographers turned their cameras upon the matchless panorama before them, and the full witchery of that serene northern night was felt when the crescent of the young moon showed itself faint and ethereal in the eastern sky.

We had been watching a rocky platform up on the mountain side, in the hopes of seeing the bear with her cubs, who, living in some crevice near there, was said to promenade on her airy perch at all hours of the day and look down defiantly on the settlement. We were tiring of that cuckoo-clock amusement, when a shaggy man came on the scene and said to the photographers,—

“You ought to have been here in June, if you wanted to see long days. You never would know when it was time to go to bed then.”

“Doesn’t it ever get dark here?” we yawned at him in chorus.

“Sometimes,” he answered. “’Bout long enough to get your overcoat off, I reckon.”

A year later there was the same beautiful trip up Lynn Canal, and as a mark of growth and progress the Ancon found a large wharf to tie up to at Pyramid Harbor. The cannery building had been enlarged, and the Indian tents replaced with log and bark houses. The cannery, that had been a losing venture in the first year, gave promise of better returns, and Pyramid Harbor wore quite a prosperous air. The Indians and their curios were again the sole distracting interest of the passengers, and the Chilkats, as before, sold everything desirable that they owned.

A strapping young Indian seized upon us as we were wandering on shore, rattled off the few words, “My papa, Sitka Jack, my papa heap sick,” and soon we were chasing over grass and gravel, at the heels of this young Hercules, to his neat log house. The son of Sitka Jack showed first the curios he had for sale, and then his pretty wife, who wore a yellow dress and a bright blue blanket, and had a clean face illuminated by soft black eyes and rosy cheeks. Lastly he led us at a quickstep to the place where his venerable papa sat crouched in a blanket. The son spoke English well, but so rapidly, that he brought himself up breathless every few minutes, and the docile, infantile way in which this six-footed fellow spoke of his “papa” more than amused us.

The “papa” is one of the head chiefs of the Sitka tribe, but goes to Chilkat Inlet every summer to visit his wife’s relations during the salmon season. He is an arrant old rascal, and has made a great deal of trouble at times; but in his feeble old age he has a kindly and pleasant smile, and a quiet dignity that is in great contrast to his vehement, impetuous young son. Mrs. Sitka Jack is the sister of Doniwak, the one-eyed tyrant who rules the lower Chilkat village, and now that her liege is becoming helpless, her influence is more supreme than ever. She sat like a queen, kindly relaxing some of the grimness of her expression when she saw that we had been buying from her son, but everything indicated that she had the most eloquent and obstreperous chief of the Sitkans completely disciplined. One of her Chilkat nephews was introduced to us by her glib son, and the hulking young savage fairly crushed our civilized hands in his friendly grasp, and critically examined our purchases.

A wild-looking old medicine-man, with long red hair, hovered on the outskirts of the group, and finally showed us, with innocent pride, a naval officer’s letter of credentials, which testified to his having a good ear for music, since he neither flinched nor winked, when a large cannon was slyly touched off at his elbow, during one of his visits on board a man-of-war.

Three-Fingered Jack, a celebrity of another order, wandered about the camp arrayed in the cast-off uniform of a naval officer, with his breast pinned full of tin and silver stars, like a German diplomat. Sitka Jack’s son looked quite unconscious while the three-fingered lion passed by; but when we directed his attention to him, the son of his papa gave a pitying, contemptuous look and declared that he did not know who it was. As well might we have asked one of the Capulets who Romeo was.

Kloh-Kutz, or Hole-in-the-Cheek, the head chief of the Chilkats, appeared to us only in flying glimpses, as he ran up and down the steps of the trader’s store. He is a wrinkled old fellow now, and the hole left in his cheek by a wound is decorated by a large bone button similar to those that the women wear in their cheeks. When Professor Davidson, of the Coast Survey, went to the Chilkat country in 1867, on the revenue cutter Lincoln, Capt. J. W. White commanding, to gather material for a report upon the topography, climate, and the resources of Alaska, called for by the Congressional committees having the matter of the purchase of the territory in charge, he first made the acquaintance of Kloh-Kutz, then in his prime.

In 1869 Professor Davidson revisited the Chilkat country to observe the total eclipse of the sun, and, by invitation of Kloh-Kutz, established his observatory at the village of Klu-Kwan, twenty miles up the Chilkat River. The station was called Kloh-Kutz in honor of the distinguished patron and protector of the scientists, who gave them the great council-house for a residence. In the ardor of his hospitality Kloh-Kutz was going to have the name “Davidson” tattoed on his arm, but at the suggestion of the astronomer gave up that elaborate design, and had “Seward” traced across his biceps with a needle and thread dipped in soot and seal oil and drawn through the flesh. He was quite willing to wear his name when he learned that Seward was the great Tyee, or chief, who bought the country of the Russians and thereby raised the price of furs so greatly.

In advance of the eclipse, Professor Davidson told his host what would happen; that the sun would be hidden at midday, and darkness fall upon the land on the 7th of August, and that it would come as a great shadow sweeping down the valley of the Chilkat. The Indians had always gathered and silently watched the white men when they pointed their strange instruments at the sun each day, but they fled in terror when the great darkness began to come, and did not return until the eclipse was over. They regarded Professor Davidson with the greatest awe, as a wonderful medicine-man who could perform such great miracles at will; and Kloh-Kutz, delighted with the great trick of his friend, made a serious offer of all his canoes, blankets, and wives, if the astronomer would tell him “how he did it,” and divulge the secret confidentially to a brother conjurer.

The evening before the eclipse, word reached Professor Davidson that Secretary Seward and his party were at the mouth of the Chilkat River, to convey him back to Portland on their steamer, as soon as his observations were completed. Kloh-Kutz was invited to come down and meet the great Tyee, and hold a council with Gen. Jeff. C. Davis, the military commandant, who had gone up from Sitka with the Seward party. Kloh-Kutz chose the flower of Chilkat chivalry to go below with his great war canoe and carry a letter from Professor Davidson to Mr. Seward, urging him to “come up hither” and see the territory he had bought; and luring on the ex-premier by saying that he had discovered an iron mountain, the ore of which was seventy per cent iron. Referring to this fact in a speech made at a public meeting in Sitka afterwards, Mr. Seward said:

“When I came there I found very properly he had been studying the heavens so busily that he had but cursorily examined the earth under his feet; that it was not a single iron mountain he had discovered, but a range of hills, the very dust of which adheres to the magnet, while the range itself, 2,000 feet high, extends along the east bank of the river thirty miles.”

Mr. Seward and his son, and General Davis, with two staff officers, and others of the party, left the ship in three canoes early on the morning of the day of the eclipse. They were half way up to Klu-Kwan village,[village,] when the shadow began to cross the sun, and the weird, unearthly light fell upon the land. The Indians in the canoe said the sun “was very sick and wanted to go to sleep,” and they refused to paddle any further. The canoes were beached quickly, and the visitors made a sociable camp-fire for themselves, and cooked their dinner by its blaze. Late in the afternoon they reached the village, and that evening Kloh-Kutz made a call of ceremony upon the guests in the council-house. There was an array of Chilkat chiefs and Chilkat women to witness the meeting of the Tyees, and after a speech of welcome, Kloh-Kutz drew up his sleeve dramatically and showed the “Seward” tattoed with his totems on his arm. The great diplomat was quite astonished and bewildered, and the handwriting on the wall hardly made a greater sensation in Belshazzar’s court.

The next morning the wa-wa, or official council, was held with the aid of two interpreters, one to translate English into Russian, and the other to translate Russian into Chilkat. Believing that if Mr. Seward bought Alaska, he must still own it in person, Kloh-Kutz ignored Gen. Davis, as being only the great Tyee’s servant, and addressed himself directly to the supposed ruler of the whole country. His grievance was that, ten years before, three Chilkats had been killed at Sitka, and now, “What is the great Tyee going to do about it?” Kloh-Kutz was not to be put off by the diplomatic answer that the murder had happened during Russian days. He said that “the Tyee of the Russians was so poor that he could not keep his land and had to sell it,” but for all that he must have reparation for the loss of his three Chilkats. To his mind one Chilkat was worth three Sitkans, and if the Tyee would let him kill nine Sitkans, the account would be squared. With a finesse worthy of a diplomat who had dealt with all the great nations of the earth, Mr. Seward finally brought Kloh-Kutz down to accepting forty blankets as an indemnity, and he and his sub-chief Colchica and their wives led the guard of honor that escorted the great Tyee back to his ship. Captain C. C. Dall, who commanded the steamer Active during that memorable cruise, gave a great entertainment to the chiefs on board, and fireworks rounded off that memorable evening. Mr. Seward presented a flag to the Chilkat chief, and at the banquet in the cabin, he and Professor Davidson gave astronomy by easy lessons to their Chilkat visitors, and disclaimed any agency in the eclipse as an accompaniment of the Tyee’s visit.

Kloh-Kutz is delighted yet to show his Seward tattoo mark to any one, and to tell of the visit of the great Tyee. He is a chief of advanced and liberal notions, a high-strung, imperious old fellow, and has a fine countenance, marred only by the wound in his cheek, which was received at the hands of one of his own tribe during some internecine troubles. His assailant held a revolver close to Kloh-Kutz’s head, and when the chief looked scornfully at it, the trigger was snapped. Weak powder prevented the ball from inflicting any more serious injuries than to enter his cheek and tear away a few teeth. Kloh-Kutz swallowed his teeth and handed the bullet back to his assailant with a fine gesture, saying: “You cannot hurt me. See!”

A few years since a young German was sent up to establish the trading post at Pyramid Harbor, and was introduced to Kloh-Kutz as a great Tyee. When the agent failed to recognize, or understand the meaning of the “Seward” on his arm, Kloh-Kutz was disgusted, and refused to treat with him as anything but a mere trader.

“How can he be a Tyee, if he does not know the chief of all the Tyees?” scornfully said Kloh-Kutz[Kloh-Kutz].

On the east shore of Chilkat Inlet, opposite Pyramid Harbor, is the rival trading station of Chilkat, where Kinney, the Astoria salmon packer, has another cannery. In the rivalry and competition of the first year (1883) between[between] the Pyramid Harbor and Chilkat canneries, the price of salmon rose from two to fifteen cents for a single fish, and the Indians, once demoralized by opposition prices, refused to listen to reason when the canneries had to, and Chinese cheap labor was imported. There has been wrath in the Chilkat heart ever since the Chinese cousins went there, and old Kloh-Kutz indignantly said: “If Indian know how to make hoochinoo (whiskey) out of an oil can and a piece of seaweed, he knows enough to can salmon.”

During its first year the Kinney cannery shipped sixty barrels of salt salmon and 2,890 cases of canned salmon, working at a great disadvantage for want of proper nets. In 1884 the amount of salmon shipped was doubled.

Chilkat and Pyramid Harbor are rivals also in the fur trade, and at Chilkat especially, the skins and furs shown were finer than had been seen at any of the other trading places. The shrewd Chilkats are as hard bargainers as the old Hudson Bay Company people ever were, and they get the furs from the interior tribes for a mere trifle in comparison to what they demand for the same pelts from the traders. In Hudson Bay Company trades, the cheap flint-lock muskets used to be sold to the Indians, by standing the gun on the ground and piling up marten skins beside it, until they were even with the top of the gun-barrel. That hoax is equalled now by the tricks of the Chilkats, who sell gunpowder to the unsophisticated men of the interior tribes at an average rate of twenty-five dollars a pound, and boast of their smartness at this kind of bargaining which brings a profit of one hundred and even two thousand per cent. Only one tourist was ever known to get the better of a Chilkat at a bargain, and that was when a common red felt tennis hat, bought for half a dollar at Victoria, was exchanged for a silver bracelet by a Chicago man, who regretted for the rest of his trip that he had not bought a box of hats to trade for curios.

Back of the Chilkat cannery a few miles, and facing on Chilkoot Inlet, is the mission station of Haines, named for a benevolent lady of Brooklyn, N. Y., who supports the establishment, presided over by the Rev. E. S. Willard and his wife.

Either the Chilkat, or the Chilkoot Inlet gives entrance to a chain of rivers and lakes, that, leading through gorges and mountain passes, conducts the prospector by a final portage to Lewis River, one of the head tributaries of the Yukon. The Chilkat Indians, with a fine sense of the importance of their position, have always closely guarded these approaches to the interior, and prevented the Indians of the back country from ever coming down to the coast and the white traders. They have thus held the monopoly of the fur trade of the region, and, while keeping the interior Indians back, have been quite as careful not to let any white men across.

On account of this guard, Vancouver’s men experienced some of the hospitable attentions of the Chilkats when they were exploring the channel in 1794. A canoe-load of natives bore down upon Whidby’s boat, and urged the Englishmen to accompany them on up the Chilkat River to the great villages, where eight chiefs of consequence resided. Vancouver’s men declined the invitation, and the chief, commanding the first canoe, made hostile flourishes with the brass speaking-trumpet and other nautical insignia that he carried. They followed the boats out to the mouth of the channel, and alarmed the Englishmen greatly, as they feared an attack by the whole tribe at any moment.

The Russian and Hudson Bay Company’s ships traded with the Chilkats for a half century without ever dealing directly with one of the natives of the interior, from whom came the vast stores of furs that were exchanged each year. The Chilkats met the men of the Tinneh (interior) tribes at an established place many miles from the mouth of the river, and occasionally, as a matter of diplomacy, they would bring a great Tinneh chief down under escort, and allow him to look at the “fire ship” of the traders.

The first man to run the gauntlet of the Chilkoot Pass was a red-headed Scotchman in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company, who left Fort Selkirk in 1864 and forced his way alone through the unknown country to Chilkoot Inlet. The Indians seized the adventurer and held him prisoner until Captain Swanson, with the Hudson Bay Company steamer Labouchere, came up and took him away. In 1872 one George Holt dodged through the Chilkoot Pass, and went down the Lewis River to the Yukon. In 1874 Holt again crossed the Chilkoot Pass, followed the Lewis River to the Yukon, and then down that mighty stream to a place near its mouth, where he crossed by a portage to the Kuskokquin River, and thence to the sea.

In 1877 a party of miners set out from Sitka under the leadership of Edmund Bean, and attempted to cross by the Chilkoot Pass, but the Indians obliged them to turn back.

In 1878 and in 1880, prospecting parties left Sitka for the head waters of the Yukon, and the latter company, through the clever diplomacy and active interest of Captain Beardslee, commanding the U. S. S. Jamestown, were hospitably received by the Chilkats and guided through their country, when convinced that they would not interfere with their fur trade. They found indications of gold all the way, and large gravel deposits. This party descended the Lewis River to Fort Selkirk and there divided, one set of prospectors going down to Fort Yukon, and the others up the Pelly River and thence to the head waters of the Stikine River and the Cassiar region of British Columbia.

In the spring of 1882 a party of forty-five miners, all old Arizona prospectors, left Juneau for the head waters of the Yukon. They returned in the fall, and reported discoveries of gold, silver, copper, nickel, and bituminous coal in the region between the Copper and Lewis Rivers.

In the spring of 1883 one Dugan led a party from Juneau over the divide. In September they sent back by Indians for an additional supply of provisions, intending to remain in the interior all winter. They reported placer mines yielding one hundred and fifty dollars a day to the man, but another party, that left Juneau soon after Dugan, returned in September without having found any placers that yielded more than twenty-five dollars a day.

Altogether more than two hundred prospectors crossed from Lynn Canal to the Yukon country during the first three years after the Chilkats raised their blockade. The Chilkats kept control of the travel, and charged six and ten dollars for each hundred pounds of goods that they packed across the twenty-four-mile portage intervening between the river and the chain of lakes.

In May, 1883, Lieut. Schwatka and party crossed this same divide, and made a quick journey of more than two thousand miles by raft down the Lewis River to the Yukon, and down the Yukon to St. Michael’s Island in Behring Sea, and thence to San Francisco by the revenue cutter Corwin.

In April, 1884, Dr. Everette, U. S. A., and two companions went over the Chilkat Pass to work their way westward to Copper River and descend it to its mouth. In June, Lieut. Abercrombie, U. S. A., and three companions were landed at the mouth of Copper River, with orders to ascend that stream and descend the Chilkat to Lynn Canal. These expeditions were sent out by order of General Miles, commanding the Department of the Columbia, who visited Alaska in 1882, and has since manifested a great interest in the Territory.

The present maps of this upper region of the Yukon give only the general courses of the rivers, and have not changed in any important details the Russian charts. A unique map of the country is one drawn by Kloh-Kutz and his wife for Professor Davidson, and which was made the basis and authority for one official chart, the original remaining in Professor Davidson’s possession at San Francisco. Kloh-Kutz has known the Yukon route from childhood, and, lying face downward, he and his wife drew on the back of an old chart all the rivers, with the profile of the mountains as they appear on either side of the watercourses. The one great glacier in which the Chilkat and the Lewis branch of the Yukon River head, is indicated by snow-shoe tracks to show the mode of progress, and the limit of each of the fourteen days’ journey across to Fort Selkirk is marked by cross lines on this original Chilkat map. The father of Kloh-Kutz was a great chief and fur-trader before him, and was one of the party of Chilkats that went across and burned Fort Selkirk in 1851, in retaliation for the Hudson Bay Company’s interference with their fur trade with the Tinnehs.

The Doctors Krause, of the Geographical Society of Bremen, who spent a year at the mouth of the Chilkat lately, made some explorations of the region about the portages of the Yukon, and their maps and publications have been of great value to the Coast Survey. There are dangerous rapids and cañons on the watercourses leading to the Yukon, and none but miners and the most adventurous traders will probably ever avail themselves of this route; although by going some six hundred miles up to Fort Yukon, which is just within the Arctic Circle, the land of the midnight sun is reached. Professor Dall, who spent two years on the Yukon, has fully described the country below Fort Yukon in his “Resources of Alaska;” and the Schiefflin Brothers, of Tombstone, Arizona, who followed his path on an elaborately planned prospecting expedition in 1882, added little and almost nothing more to the general knowledge of the region. The Schiefflins found gold, but considered the remoteness from the sources of supplies, and the long winters, too great obstacles for any mines to be ever successfully worked there. There are fur-traders’ stations all along the two thousand miles of the great stream, and within the United States boundaries, the Alaska Commercial Company, and the Western Fur Company of San Francisco, buy the pelts from the Indians, and divide the great fur trade of this interior region.

CHAPTER IX.
BARTLETT BAY AND THE HOONIAHS.

From Pyramid Harbor the ship went south to Icy Straits and up the other side of the long peninsula to Glacier Bay, so named by Captain Beardslee in 1880. At the mouth of it, in unknown and unsurveyed waters, began the search for a new trading station in a cove, since known as Bartlett Bay, in honor of the owner of the fishery, a merchant of Port Townsend.

Vancouver’s boats passed by Glacier Bay during his third cruise on this coast, and his men saw only frozen mountains and an expanse of ice as far as the eye could reach. It is only within a decade that anything has been known of the extent of the great bay at the foot of the Fairweather Alps, and no surveys have been made of its shores to correct the imperfect charts now in use. Revenue cutters, men-of-war, and traders’ ships had gone as far as the entrance, but were prevented from advancing by adverse winds and currents, floating ice, and shoaling waters. The old moraine left by the ice-sheet that once covered the whole bay forms a bar and barrier at its mouth, and the channel has to be sought cautiously.

Skirting the wooded shores and sailing through ice floes, every glass was brought into requisition for signs of life on land. Towards noon a white man and two Indians were sighted signalling from a canoe, and the steamer waited while they paddled towards it. They had been off on an unsuccessful[unsuccessful] hunt for the sea otter, and gladly consented to have their canoe hauled up on deck and to impart all their knowledge of Bartlett Cove. At three o’clock a resounding bang from the cannon announced to the Hooniah natives on shore, that the first ship that had ever entered that harbor was at hand. A canoe came rapidly paddling towards us, and a wild figure rose in the stern and shouted to the captain to “go close up to the new house and anchor in thirteen fathoms of water.” This was Dick Willoughby, the first American pioneer in Alaska, a local genius, and a far-away, polar variety of “Colonel Sellers,” most interesting to encounter in this last region of No-Man’s Land. Dick Willoughby came to this northwest coast in 1858, emigrating from Virginia by way of Missouri. Since that time he has ranged the Alaskan shores from the boundary line to Behring’s Straits, trading with the Indians, and prospecting for all the known minerals. Willoughby’s mines and possessions are scattered all up and down the coast, and there is not a new scheme or enterprise in the territory in which he has not a share. His mines, if once developed to the extent he claims possible, would make him greater than all the bonanza men, and in crude and well-stored gold, silver, iron, coal, copper, lead, and marble he is fabulously rich. In all the twenty-five years he has spent here, Dick Willoughby has gone down to San Francisco but once, and then was in haste to get back to his cool northern home.

A little Indian camp edged the beach below Willoughby’s log house and store, and the natives came out to look at us, with quite as much interest as we went on shore to see them. A small iceberg, drifted near shore, was the point of attack for the amateur photographers, and the Indian children marvelled with open eyes at the “long-legged gun” that was pointed at the young men, who posed on the perilous and picturesque points of the berg. Icebergs drifting down the bay, and small cakes of ice washing in shore with the rising tide, secured that luxury of the summer larder to the Indians, and in every tent and bark house on shore there was to be found a pail or basket of ice-water. In Willoughby’s store there were curios and baskets galore, and after his long and quiet life in the wilderness the poor man was nearly distracted, when seven ladies began talking to him at once, and mixed up the new style nickel pieces with the money they offered him.

The packing-house had just been built, and the ship unloaded more lumber, nets, salt, barrel-staves and hoops, and general merchandise and provisions for the new station. The small lighters and canoes in which the freight was taken ashore made unloading a slow process, although the whole native population assisted. The small boys joined in the carnival, and little Indians of not more than six years trooped over the rocky beach barefooted, and carried bundles of barrel-staves and shingles on their heads.

We roamed the beach, hunting for the round, cuplike barnacles that the whales rub off their tormented sides, and the children, quick to see what we were looking for, trooped up the beach ahead of us, and soon returned with dozens of them that they sold for a good price. Back in the little valley and natural clearing, the ground was covered with wild flowers and running strawberry vines, and the botanist was up to his shoulders in strange bushes, up to his ankles in mire, and in wild ecstacy at his finds. When we complimented Dick Willoughby upon the promising appearance of his little vegetable garden, and the great crop of strawberries coming on, he assured us that in a few weeks the ground would be red with fruit, and that he did not know but that he would be canning the wild strawberries by another year.

In one tent the best Indian hunter lay dying from the wounds received in an encounter with a bear, his face being stripped of flesh by the clawing of the fierce animal, and his body frightfully mangled. The Indians, to whom remnants of their superstition cling, viewed him sadly as one punished by the spirits. Their old shamans taught them that the spirit of a man resided in the black bear, and it was sacrilege to slay this animal, representing their great totem. The old men mutter prayers whenever they find the tracks of a bear, and cannot be induced to bring in the skin entire. It is rare to find an Alaska bear skin with the nose on, the Indians believing that they have appeased the spirit if they leave that sacred particle untouched. The black, the grizzly, and the rare St. Elias silver bear are found in this Hooniah country, and their skins at the trader’s store ranged in price from eight to twenty dollars.

The mountain goat—Aplocerus Montana by his full name—disports himself on all the crags around Glacier Bay, and leaps through the glacial regions of the Fairweather Alps. He has a long, silvery white hair, that is not particularly fine, but his sharp, little black horns are great trophies for the hunter, and are carved into spoon handles by the expert craftsmen of all the Thlinket tribes.

THLINKET BIRD-PIPE (SIDE AND BOTTOM).

The cool waters of Glacier Bay, filled with floating ice, are the great summer resort for the wary sea otter and the hair seal. The fur seal is occasionally found, but not in such numbers as to make it a feature of the hunting season; and as the pelts are stretched and dried before being brought in by the Indians, they are valueless to the furrier. The Hooniahs inhabiting this bay and the shores of Cross Sound and Icy Straits claim the monopoly of the seal and otter fisheries, and have had great wars with the other tribes who ventured into their hunting grounds. Indians even came up from British Columbia, and a few years ago the Hooniahs invoked the aid of the man-of-war to drive away the trespassing “King George men.”

The seal is food, fuel, and raiment to them, and square wooden boxes of seal oil stand in every Hooniah tent. Age increases its qualities for them, and rancid seal oil and dried salmon, salmon eggs, or herring roe, mixed with oil, and a salad of seaweed dressed with oil, are the national dishes of all the Thlinket tribes. Boiled seal flippers are a great dainty, and in one Hooniah tent we peered into the family kettle, and saw the black flippers waving in the simmering waters like human hands. It looked like cannibalism, but the old man who was superintending the stew said: “Seal! Seal all same as hog.” The Chinook term for seal is cocho Siwash, or, literally, “Indian hog,” and it quite corresponds to American pork in its universal use.

In one smoky tent, a native silversmith was hard at work, pounding from half dollar pieces the silver bracelets which are the chief and valued ornaments of the Thlinket women. This Tiffany of the Hooniah tribe nodded to us amiably, carefully examined the workmanship of the bracelets we wore, and then went on to show us how they were made. We sat fascinated for nearly an hour in the thick smoke that blew in every direction from the fire, to watch this artist make bracelets with only the rudest implements. He first put the coin in an iron spoon and set it on the coals for some minutes, and when he drew out the spoon, and took the silver disk between a pair of old pincers, he nodded his head to us and muttered Klimmin—the Chinook word for soft. Holding it with the pincers, he hammered it on an old piece of iron, and heating it, turning it, and pounding away vigorously, he soon laid a long slender strip of silver before us. Another heating, a deft hammering and polishing, and the bracelet was ready to be engraved with a clumsy steel point in simple geometrical designs, or with the conventionalized dog-fish, salmon, seals, and whales of Hooniah art. After that it was heated and bent into shape to fit the wrist.

For these Klickwillies, or bracelets, the white visitors were asked three dollars a pair, while the native rule is to pay the silversmith just twice the value of the coins used. He was an amiable old fellow, this Hooniah silversmith, and he kept no secrets of his art from us, bringing out finger rings, nose rings, long silver lip pins, and earrings to show us. The Indian women in his tent were well bedecked with silver ornaments, and if all three of them were his wives, the silversmith’s trade must be a profitable one. Each woman[woman] had her wrists covered with rows of closely fitting bracelets, always in odd numbers, and double rows of rings were on their fingers. The men of these tribes sport the nose ring as well as the women, and are not satisfied with wearing one pair of earrings at a time, but pierce the rim of the ear with a succession of holes, and wear in each one a silver hoop, a bead, or a charm, in memory of some particular deed.

The Hooniahs are next to the Haidas in skill and intelligence, and in the graves of their medicine men are found carvings on bone, and fossil ivory, mountain goat horns, and shells, that prove that they once possessed even greater skill in these things. On the grave cloth of one shaman buried near a village on Cross Sound, were lately found some flat pieces of ivory and bone, four and six inches long, carved with faces and totemic symbols. Age had turned them to a deep rich yellow and brown, and a slight rubbing restored the brilliant polish, that enhanced them when they were first sewed to the blankets and wrappings of the dead shaman. His rattles, masks, drums, and implements of his profession, buried with him, were of the finest workmanship, and proved the superiority of the ancient carvers.

The Hooniah women weave baskets from the fine bark of the cedar and from split spruce roots, and ornament them with geometrical patterns in brilliant colors, but the weaving that we saw was not as fine as that of some of the more southern tribes.

CHAPTER X.
MUIR GLACIER AND IDAHO INLET.

When Dick Willoughby told of the great glacier thirty miles up the bay, the thud of whose falling ice could be heard and felt at his house, and declared that it once rattled the tea-cups on his table, and sent a wave washing high up on his shore, the captain of the Idaho said he would go there, and took this Dick Willoughby along to find the place and prove the tale. Away we went coursing up Glacier Bay, a fleet of one hundred and twelve little icebergs gayly sailing out to meet us, as we left our anchorage the next morning. Entering into these unknown and unsurveyed waters, the lead was cast through miles of bottomless channels, and when the ship neared a green and mountainous island at the mouth of the bay, the captain and the pilot made me an unconditional present of the domain, and duly entered it on the ship’s log by name. It is just off Garden Point, and for a summer resort Scidmore Island possesses unusual advantages. Heated and suffering humanity is invited to visit that emerald spot in latitude 58° 29´ north, and longitude 135° 52´ west from Greenwich, and enjoy the July temperature of 45°, the seal and salmon fishing, the fine hunting, and the sight of one of the grandest of the many great glaciers that break directly into the sea along the Alaska coast.

The gray-green water, filled with sediment, told that glaciers were near, and icebergs, from the size of a house down to the merest lumps, circled around us, showing the ineffable shades of pale greens and blues, and clinking together musically as the steamer passed by. The tides rush fiercely in and out of Glacier Bay, and heavy fogs add to the dangers of navigation, and Captain Beardslee and Major Morris, who entered it in the little steamer Favorite in 1880, were obliged to put back without making any explorations. The charts as they now appear are very faulty, the sketches having been made from information given by Mr. Willoughby and Indian seal hunters, and from brief notes furnished by Professor Muir. At the head of every inlet around the great bay there are glaciers, and Mr. Willoughby said that in five of these fiords there are glaciers a mile and a half wide, with vertical fronts of seamed ice rising two hundred and four hundred feet from the water. In one of them a small island divides the ice cataract, and Niagara itself is repeated in this glacial corner of the north. At low tide, bergs and great sections of the fronts fall off into the water, and Glacier Bay is filled with this debris of the glaciers, that floats out from every inlet and is swept to and fro with the tides.

Dick Willoughby stood on the bridge with the navigators, and gave them the benefit of his experience. After a while he came back to the group of ladies on deck, and, sitting down, shook his head seriously and said:—

“You ladies are very brave to venture up in such a place. If you only knew the risks you are running—the dangers you are in!” And the pioneer’s voice had a tone of the deepest concern as he said it.

We received this with some laughter, and expressed entire confidence in the captain and pilot, who had penetrated glacial fastnesses and unknown waters before. A naval officer on board echoed the Willoughby strain, and declared that a commander would never attempt to take a man-of-war into such a dangerous place, and deprecated Captain Carroll’s daring and rashness. The merchant marine was able to retaliate when this naval comment was repeated, and Glacier Bay was suggested as the safest place for a government vessel’s cruise, on account of the entire absence of schooners.

DIAGRAM OF THE MUIR GLACIER.

The lead was cast constantly, and the Idaho veered gracefully from right to left, went slowly, and stopped at times, to avoid the ice floes that bore down upon it with the outgoing tide. Feeling the way along carefully, the anchor was cast beside a grounded iceberg, and the photographers were rowed off to a small island to take the view of the ship in the midst of that Arctic scenery. Mount Crillon showed his hoary head to us in glimpses between the clouds, and then, rounding Willoughby Island, which the owner declares is solid marble of a quality to rival that of Pentelicus and Carrara, we saw the full front of the great Muir Glacier, where it dips down and breaks into the sea, at the end of an inlet five miles long.

The inlet and the glacier were named for Professor John Muir, the Pacific coast geologist, who, as far as known, was the first white man to visit and explore the glaciers of the bay. Professor Muir went up Glacier Bay, with the Rev. S. Hall Young, of Fort Wrangell, as a companion, in 1879. They travelled by canoe, and Professor Muir, strapping a blanket on his back, and filling his pockets with hard tack, started off unarmed, and spent days of glacial delight in the region. These were the only white men who had preceded us, when Captain Carroll took the Idaho up the bay in 1883, on what was quite as good as a real voyage of exploration.

Of all scenes and natural objects, nothing could be grander and more impressive than the first view up the inlet, with the front of the great glacier, the slope of the glacial field, and the background of lofty mountains united in one picture. Mount Crillon and Mount Fairweather stood as sentries across the bay, showing their summits fifteen thousand feet in air, clear cut as silhouettes against the sky, and the stillness of the air was broken only by faint, metallic, tinkling sounds, as the ice floes ground together, and the waters washed up under the honeycombed edges of the floating bergs. Steaming slowly up the inlet, the bold, cliff-like front of the glacier grew in height as we approached it, and there was a sense of awe as the ship drew near enough for us to hear the strange, continual rumbling of the subterranean or subglacial waters, and see the avalanches of ice that, breaking from the front, rushed down into the sea with tremendous crashes and roars. Estimates of the height of the ice cliff increased with nearness, and from a first guess of fifty feet, there succeeded those of two hundred and four hundred feet, which the authority of angles has since proven as correct.

The Idaho was but an eighth of a mile from the front of the glacier, when the anchor was cast in eighty-four fathoms of water at low tide, and near us, in the midst of these deep soundings, icebergs loaded with boulders lay grounded, with forty feet of their summits above water. Words and dry figures can give one little idea of the grandeur of this glacial torrent flowing steadily and solidly into the sea, and the beauty of the fantastic ice front, shimmering with all the prismatic hues, is beyond imagery or description.

According to Professor Muir, the glacier measures three miles across the snout, or front, where it breaks off into the sea. Ten miles back it is ten miles wide, and sixteen tributary glaciers unite to form this one great ice-river. Professor Muir ascended to the glacier field from the north side, and, following its edges for six miles, climbed the high mountain around which the first tributary debouches from that side. He gives the distance from the snout of the glacier to its furthest source in the great nève, or snow-fields, as forty miles. Detailed accounts of Professor Muir’s canoe journeys in glacier land were given in his letters to the San Francisco Bulletin, and they abound in the most beautiful and poetic descriptions of the scenery. His paper on “The Glaciation of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Regions, visited by the U. S. S. Corwin in the year 1881,” accompanies the report of Captain C. L. Hooper, U. S. R. M., published by the government printing office at Washington in 1885, and contains Professor Muir’s observations and deductions upon the glaciation of the whole Pacific coast from California to the Arctic.

No attempt has yet been made to measure the rate of progress of the Muir glacier, although Captain Carroll has several times promised himself to stake off and mark points on the main trunk, and note their positions from month to month during the summer. Mr. Willoughby said that the Indians told him that two years previously the line of the ice wall was a half mile further down the inlet, and that in their grandfathers’ time it extended as far as Willoughby Island, five miles below. The old moraine that forms the bar at the mouth of the bay is sufficient evidence to scientists that the ice sheet covered the whole bay within what Professor Muir calls “a very short geological time ago.” The Hooniah goat-hunters told Mr. Willoughby that the first tributary glacier connected with the Davidson glacier in Lynn Canal, and that they often made the journey across it to the Chilkat country. Kloh-Kutz told Professor Davidson that it was a one day’s journey on snowshoes—about thirty miles—over to this bay of great glaciers, and thirty days’ journey thence, through a region of high mountains and snow fields, to the ocean at the foot of the Mount St. Elias Alps.

RIVER ON NORTH SIDE OF THE MUIR GLACIER.

The vast, desolate stretch of gray ice visible across the top of the serrated wall of ice that faced us had a strange fascination, and the crack of the rending ice, the crash of the falling fragments, and a steady undertone like the boom of the great Yosemite Fall, added to the inspiration and excitement. There was something, too, in the consciousness that so few had ever gazed upon the scene before us, and there were neither guides nor guide books to tell us which way to go, and what emotions to feel.

We left the stewards cutting ice from the grounded bergs near the ship, and, putting off in the lifeboats, landed in the ravine on the north side of the glacier. We scrambled over two miles of sand and boulders, along the steep, crumbling banks of a roaring river, until we reached the arch under the side of the glacier from which the muddy torrent poured. Near that point, on the loose moraine at the side, there was the remnant of a buried forest, with the stumps of old cedar-trees standing upright in groups. They were stripped of their bark, and cut off six and ten feet above the surface, and pieces of wood were scattered all through the debris of this moraine. The disforesting of the shores of Glacier Bay is the mystery that baffles Professor Muir, as on all this densely wooded coast, this one bay lacks the thick carpet of moss and the forests that elsewhere conceal the evidences of glacial action. Patches of crimson epilobium covered the ground in spots, and flourished among the boulders at the edge of the ice sheet, where only a thin layer of dirt covers buried ice.

Reaching the sloping side of the ice-field, we mounted, and went down a mile over the seamed and ragged surface towards the broken ice of the water front. The ice was a dirty gray underfoot, but it crackled with a pleasant mid-winter sound, and the wind blew keen and sharp from over the untrodden miles of the glacier field. The gurgle and hollow roar of the subterranean waters came from deep rifts in the broken surface, and in the centre and towards the front of the glacier, the ice was tossed and broken like the waves of an angry sea. The amateur photographers turned their cameras to right and left, risked their necks in the deep ravines and hollows in the ice, and climbed the surrounding points to get satisfactory views. Every one gathered a pocketful of rounded rocks and pebbles, and shreds of ancient cedar trees carried down by the ice flood, and then, having worn rubber shoes and boots to tatters on the sharp ice, and sunk many times in the treacherous glacier mud, we reluctantly obeyed the steamer’s whistle and cannon-shot, and started back to the boats.

A nearer sweep towards the long ice-cliff showed that the line of the front was broken into bays and points, the middle of the glacier jutting far out into the water, and the sides sweeping back in curves, as the cliffs decreased in height, and finally sloped down to the level of the side moraines. At points along the front, subterranean rivers boiled up, and, in the deep blue crevasses, cascades ran down over icy beds. In the full sunlight the front of the glacier was a dazzling wall of silver and snowy ice, gleaming with all the rainbow colors, and disclosing fresh beauties as each new crevasse or hollow came in sight.

GLACIER BAY. FRONT OF MUIR GLACIER.

A magnificent sunset flooded the sky that night, and filled every icy ravine with rose and orange lights. At the last view of the glacier, as we steamed away from it, the whole brow was glorified and transfigured with the fires of sunset; the blue and silvery pinnacles, the white and shining front floating dreamlike on a roseate and amber sea, and the range and circle of dull violet mountains lifting their glowing summits into a sky flecked with crimson and gold.

It was a chill, misty morning, a year later, when the watch again sighted “Scidmore Island, one mile off the starboard beam,” and its long, green undulating shore was visible through the rain. Entering Muir Inlet, the Ancon went cautiously through the floating ice and anchored in the curve of the south end of the glacier’s front, but a few hundred yards from a long shelving beach that would have shone with its golden sand in sunlight. There were the same deep soundings near the front, as on the other side of the inlet, but the Ancon’s anchor was dropped nearer the moraine shore, where the lead gave only twenty-five fathoms.

Under the dull gray sky all dazzling effects of prismatic light were lost, but the fretted and fantastic front showed lines and masses of the purest white and an infinite range of blues. Avalanches of crumbling ice and great pieces of the front were continually falling with the roar and crash of artillery, revealing new caverns and rifts of deeper blue light, while the spray dashed high and the great waves rolled along the icy wall, and, widening in their sweep, washed the blocks of floating ice up on the beaches at either side. The ship’s cannon was loaded and fired twice point blank at the front of the glacier. The report was followed by a second of silence, and then an echo came back that intensified the first ring many times, and was followed by a long, sharp roll as the echo was flung from cavern to cavern in the ice.

SECTION OF THE MUIR GLACIER (TOP.)

The small boats landed us on a beach strewn with ice cakes, and lines of stranded shrimps marked the wash of the waves raised by the falling ice. Some shrimps two and three inches long were found, but the most of them were delicate little pink things not an inch in length. The crimson epilobium blossoms nodded to us from every slope and hollow of the long lateral moraine that lay between the water and the high mountain walls. Over sand and boulders, and across a roaring stream that issued from the side of the glacier, the pilgrims crept to the foot of the slope, and then up a long incline of boulders and dirty ice to a first level where they could look out over the frozen waste and across the broken front. Deep crevasses seamed the ice plain in every direction, as on the north side of the frozen river; but, although the view is not so extended as on the other side, the level of the ice field is reached more easily, and it is a steep but only a short climb up over the buried ice to the top of the glacier. The treacherous gray glacier mud—“the mineral paste, and mountain meal“ of Prof. Muir—engulfed one at every careless step, and rocks would sink under one, and land even the high-booted pilgrims knee-deep in the fine, sticky compound. A half-mile from what appeared to be the bank of the frozen river, there was clear solid ice underlying the rocks and mud, and occasionally caves in this side wall enticed the breathless ones to rest themselves in the pale shadows of the glacier ice. Fragments and rounded pebbles of red and gray granite, limestone, marble, schistose slate, porphyry and quartz were picked up on the way, and many of the bits of quartz and marble were deeply stained with iron. The Polish mining engineer with the party assured us that all Glacier Bay was rich in the indications of a great silver-belt, and held up carbonates, sulphates, and sulphurets to prove his assertion.

From this south-side landing we easily approached the base of the ice cliffs by following up the beach to the ravine that cut into the ice at the edge of the moraine. We got a far better idea of the height and solidity of the walls by standing like pigmies in the shadow of the lofty front, and looking up to the grottoes and clefts in the cobalt and indigo cliff. It was dry and firm on the beach, and the golden sand was strewn with dripping bergs of sapphire and aquamarine that had been swept ashore by the spreading waves. These huge blocks of ice on the beach, that had looked like dice from the ship, were found to be thirty and forty feet long and twenty feet high.

The nearer one approached, the higher the ice walls seemed, and all along the front there were pinnacles and spires weighing several tons, that seemed on the point of toppling every moment. The great buttresses of ice that rose first from the water and touched the moraine were as solidly white as marble, veined and streaked with rocks and mud, but further on, as the pressure was greater, the color slowly deepened to turquoise and sapphire blues. The crashes of falling ice were magnificent at that point, and in the face of a keen wind that blew over the ice-field we sat on the rocks and watched the wondrous scene. The gloomy sky seemed to heighten the grandeur, and the billows of gray mist, pouring over the mountains on either side, intensified the sense of awe and mystery. The tide was running out all of the afternoon hours that we spent there, and the avalanches of ice were larger and more frequent all of the time. When the anchor was lifted, the ship took a great sweep up nearer to the glacier’s front, and as we steamed away there were two grand crashes, and great sections of the front fell off with deafening roars into the water. We steamed slowly down the inlet, and out into Glacier Bay, stopping, backing, and going at half speed to avoid the floating ice all around us, that occasionally was ground and crunched up by the paddle-wheels with a most uncomfortable sound. With each thump from the ice, and the recurrence of the noise in the paddle-box, and then the sight of some red slats floating off on the water, Dick Willoughby’s concern was remembered; and the advantages of the screw propeller, and the merits of the favorite and original Idaho, were appreciated.

SECTION OF THE MUIR GLACIER (FRONT.)

While we cruised away in the mist and twilight, the children, who never could be made to keep ordinary bedtime in that latitude, celebrated the birthday of one of their number with high revel. While they danced around the cake on the cabin table, and blew out the eight candles one by one with an accompanying wish, the last boy wished that the happy youngster might “celebrate many more birthdays in Glacier Bay,” and the elders applauded him.

After the Idaho had made its first visit to the Muir Glacier, and returned Dick Willoughby to his Hooniah home and his strawberry farm, we had a seven hours’ enforced anchorage, on the succeeding day, in a narrow fiord on the north end of Chicagoff Island, which that same Willoughby had described as an unknown channel, “a hole in the mountain,” and a short cut to the open ocean, that he had travelled many times himself. Following up his forty-fathom channel, the lead marked shoaling waters, and before we knew it the Idaho ran her nose on a sloping bank, and stayed there until the returning tide floated her off.