In to the Yukon
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No blizzards here, such as freeze and destroy in Montana. No lack of water here the year round. No drouths like those of Texas. Nor is the still, quiet, steady cold of these plains more fatal, not as much so, as the more variable temperatures of the States. Not much snow over these northern plains, rarely more than a foot. The buffalo grass may be always reached through it. The mercury rarely more than fifty below zero, and so dry is the air and so still that no one minds that temperature.
So we have it, that this entire rich wheat-yielding land of the far, far north, that the bulk of these grazing lands, tempered as the winter is by the warm Pacific climate, which here climbs over the rather low barrier of the Rockies, are falling into alert American hands. Even the storekeepers, they tell me, would rather trade with the American – he buys more freely, buys higher-priced machinery and goods; he is better pay in the end. “The Englishman brings out money, but after the first year or two it is gone.” “The American brings some and then keeps making more.” So my Canadian drummer friend tells me, and he gathers his information from the storekeepers in all these northwest towns with whom he deals. “Some even tell me,” he said, “that if it wouldn’t make any disturbance, why they would do better if all this country was part of the States.” So the American is popular here, and he is growing rich, richer than the Canadian and Englishman, and in course of time, I take it, he will even yet the more completely dominate the land. It is strange how the American spirit seems to have an energy and force that tells everywhere, in Canada as well as in Mexico. The information I give you here comes to me from the intelligent fellow-travelers I have chanced to meet, and, I take it, is probably a fair statement.
We are some 4,500 feet above the sea, and the highest summits near us rise to about 10,000 or 11,000 feet. There is none of the somber blackness of the Norwegian rocks, nor the greenness of the Swiss slopes, while the contour of the summits and ridges is much like that of the volcanic, serrated summits of the mountains I saw in Mexico.
THIRD LETTER
BANFF TO VANCOUVER ACROSS THE ROCKIES AND SELKIRKS
Our day crossing the Rockies was delightful. We left Banff about 2 P. M., following up the valley of the Silver Bow River to its very head. A deep valley, shut in on either hand by gigantic granite mountains, rising to 10,000 and 12,000 feet, their lower slopes covered with small fir, aspen, birch, then a sparse grass, and lichens, and then rising up into the clouds and eternal snows. Snow fields everywhere, and many glaciers quite unexplored and unnamed. The rise was so easy, however, that we were surprised when we actually attained the summit of the divide, where a mountain stream forks and sends its waters, part to Hudson’s Bay, part to the Pacific. But the descent toward the west was precipitous. Since leaving Winnipeg, two days and nights across plains and prairie, and a night and day up the valley of the Silver Bow River, we had steadily risen, but so gradually that we were almost unconscious of the ascending grade, but now we were to come down the 5,000 feet from the height of land and reach the Pacific in little more than a single day. Not so sheer a ride as down the Dal of the Laera River in Norway, 3,000 feet in three hours behind the ponies, but yet so steep that the iron horse crept at a snail’s pace, holding back the heavy train almost painfully, and descending into gorges and cañons and shadowy valleys until one’s hair nearly stood on end. How on earth they ever manage to pull and push the long passenger and short freight trains up these grades for the east-bound traffic, is a matter of amazement; that is, shove them up and make the business pay.
At once, so soon as the divide was crossed, the influence of the warm, moist air of the Pacific was apparent. No longer the bare, bleak, naked masses of granite, no longer the puny firs and dwarf aspen and birches, but instead, the entire vast slopes of these gigantic mountain masses were covered with a dense forest. The tall Douglas firs stood almost trunk to trunk, so close together that the distant slopes looked as though covered with gigantic coverlets of green fur. The trees seemed all about of one height and size. And the slopes were green right up to the snow field’s very edge. Our way wound down the profound cañon of the Kicking Horse River, sometimes sheer precipices below and also above us, the road blasted out of the granite sides, then we swept out into the beautiful Wapta Valley, green as emerald, the white snow waters of the river – not white foam, but a muddy white like the snow-fed waters of the streams of Switzerland – roaring and plunging, and spreading out into placid pools. At last we emerged through a gorge and came into the great wide, verdant valley of the British Columbia, from which the province takes its name. A river, even there on its upper reaches, as wide as the Ohio, but wild and turbulent, and muddy white from the melting snows. Behind us the towering granite masses of the Rocky Mountains – a name whose meaning I never comprehended before – their peaks lost in clouds, their flanks and summits buried in verdure. The valley of the Columbia is wide and fertile. Many villages and farms and saw-mills already prospering along it. Here and there were indications of a developing mine upon the mountain slopes. We followed the great river until we passed through a narrow gorge where the Selkirk Mountain range jams its rock masses hard against the western flanks of the Rockies and the river thrusts itself between, to begin its long journey southward through Washington and Oregon to the Pacific; and then turning up a wild creek called Six Mile, we began again to climb the second and last mountain chain before we should reach the sea. These grades are very heavy. Too heavy, I should say, for a railroad built for business and traffic and not subsidized by a government, as in practical effect the Canadian Pacific is. The pass at the divide is almost as high as that at the source of the Silver Bow, and much more impeded in winter with snowfalls and avalanches, which require many miles of snow-sheds to save the road.
We dined about 8 P. M., in a fine large hotel owned by the railroad company at a station called “Glacier,” for it is right at the foot of one of the most gigantic glaciers of the Selkirks, and many tourists tarry here to see it and climb upon it; Swiss guides being provided by the railway company for these adventures. And then we came down again, all night and half the next day, following the valley of the Fraser River until it debouched into level tidal reaches a few miles from Puget Sound.
The Fraser River is a magnificent stream; as great as the Columbia, as wild as New River of West Virginia. We stood upon the platform of the rear car and snapped the kodak at the flying gorges, tempestuous rapids and cascades. All along, wherever the water grew angry and spume spun, were Indians fishing for salmon, sometimes standing alert, intent, spear in hand poised and ready, or, more often, watching their nets or drawing them in. And every rocky point held its poles for drying the fish, belonging to some individual Indian or tribe, safe from trespass or molestation by immemorial usage. The sands of the river are said to also have been recently discovered to hide many grains of gold, and we saw in several places Chinamen industriously panning by the water-side. Near Vancouver we passed several extensive salmon canneries, and their catch this year is said to be unusually large.
As we came nearer to the sea the air grew warmer, the vegetation more luxuriant, the flowers more prolific, and the Douglas fir more lofty and imposing. A single shaft, with sparse, ill-feathered limbs, down-bent and twisted, these marvelous trees lift their ungainly trunks above every other living thing about. The flowers, too, would have delighted you. Zinnias as tall as dahlias, dahlias as tall as hollyhocks, nasturtiums growing like grape vines, roses as big as peonies, geraniums and heliotropes small trees. Great was the delight of our trainload of Australians. They had never seen such luxuriance of foliage, such wealth of flowers, except under the care of a gardener and incessant laying on of water. We came across with a car full of these our antipodean kin. Most have been “home,” to England, and had come across to Canada to avoid the frightful heats of the voyage by Suez and the Red Sea. And they marveled at the vigor and the activity of both Canada and the States. Some had lingered at the fine hotels up in the mountains now maintained by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. All were sorry to go back to the heats of the Australian continent.
The building and maintaining of this railway has been accomplished by the giving of millions of dollars in hard cash, and millions of acres in land grants, to the railway company by the government of the Dominion. Fortunes were made and pocketed by the promoters and builders, and the Canadian people now hold the bag – but although as a mere investment it can never pay, yet as a national enterprise it has made a Canadian Dominion possible. It owns its terminals on the Atlantic and on the Pacific. It owns its own telegraph lines, its own cars, sleeping-cars, and rolling stock; it owns and runs ten, a dozen, a score of fine hotels; it is a vast land-owner. Its stock can never be bought up and owned out of Canadian hands. A Morgan or a Gould can never seize it, manipulate it, or wreck it. It is a good thing for Canada to have it so. It is a good thing for the people of the United States that it is so.
The Canadian Rockies are the most beautiful and picturesque of any section of the mountain chain from Mexico north. The air is cooler in the far northern latitude, keener, more bracing, and the hustling American has begun to find this out. The great hotels of the Canadian Pacific are already best patronized by the American visitor, and this year the sun-baked Californians have come up in swarms and promise another year even greater numbers. And the Canadian Pacific Railroad welcomes them all – all who can pay. At Banff, too, were the advance guard of the English Colony from China, brought over from Shanghai by the sumptuous steamships of the Canadian Pacific Railway, taken to and kept at their great hotels, and carried home again, at so low a round-trip rate that these Rocky Mountain resorts promise to become the summering-place of the Oriental Englishmen as well as Australian and Californian! How these things bring the world together!
Our journey from Kanawha, across Ohio, from Cleveland through the Great Lakes, across the wheatfields of Minnesota and Dakota and Manitoba, and over the wonderful prairies and plains of the opening far Northwest, has had a fit ending in the last few days climbing and plunging over and down the wildest, most picturesque, most stupendous valleys and passes of the Rocky Mountain and Selkirk Mountain ranges. How vast and varied and splendid is the continent we live on, and which one of these days the people of the United States will inevitably wholly possess!
And now the wonders of these Pacific slopes and waters! All the afternoon we have been wandering through Vancouver’s superb Natural Park, among its gigantic trees, and gazing westward over and across the waters of Puget Sound, the most mighty fjord of the Pacific seas, the most capacious land-locked harbor of the world. I must not say more about this now. I have not yet seen enough. I am only beginning dimly to comprehend what is the future power of our race and people in the development of this side of the earth.
VICTORIA A SLEEPY ENGLISH TOWN
The Driard Hotel, Victoria, B. C.,August 21, 1903.We came over here yesterday, leaving Vancouver by a fine new 1,800-ton steamer “Princess Victoria,” and making the voyage in four hours, – all the way in and out among the islands and straits and inlets. The shores of the mainland high, lofty; – the mountain summits rising right up till snow-capped, six or seven thousand feet in the air, their flanks green with the dense forests of fir that here everywhere abound. The islands all fir-clad, the trees often leaning out over the deep blue waters. Many fishing-boats were hovering about the points and shoals below the mouth of the Fraser River, awaiting the autumnal rush of salmon into the death-traps of that stream. I hope to see one of these salmon stampedes – they often pushing each other high and dry on the shores in their mad eagerness to go on.
Tuesday we reached Vancouver. Wednesday we consumed seeing the lusty little city.
Yesterday we spent the morning in picking up the few extra things needed for the Yukon – among others a bottle of tar and carbolic – a mixture to rub on to offend the yet active mosquito.
Vancouver is a city of some 30,000 people, full of solid buildings, asphalted streets, electric car lines, bustle and activity. Much of the outfitting for the Canadian Yukon is done there, though Seattle gets the bulk of even this trade.
To-day we are in Victoria, a town of twelve or fifteen thousand, a fine harbor, and near it the British naval and military station of Esquimault, the seat of its North Pacific war power. The town is sleepy, the buildings low and solid, the air of the whole place very English. The capitol building is an imposing structure of granite, surmounted by a successful dome.
FOURTH LETTER
VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY; FJORDS AND FORESTS
First and Second Day Out,August 23, 1903.We arrived in Vancouver by the steamer “Charmer” from Victoria about ten o’clock A. M. – two hours late – a small boat, packed with passengers. We could not get a state-room to ourselves, so were glad of berths, while many people lay on mattresses in the cabin and many sat up. Tourist travel surprises the slow-going Canadian, and he does not catch up with it.
We went to the Hotel Vancouver, where we had been staying, and there breakfasted.
Our boat, “City of Seattle,” is roomy and comfortable. We have a large upper state-room on the starboard side, plenty of fresh air and sunlight. It is loaded down with an immense cargo of miscellaneous freight, from piles of boxes of Iowa butter and fresh eggs, to sheep and live stock, chickens and pigs, vegetables and canned goods, most of it billed to Dawson and even to points below. The Yukon has been so low this year – less snow than usual falling last winter – that the bulk of the freight “going in” has had to be shipped via these Skagway boats and the White Pass Railway, despite the exorbitant freight rates they are charging for everything.
The travellers are of two sorts. A good many making the round trip from Seattle to Skagway, and the Yukoner “going in” for the winter. The former are not of much concern to us, but among the latter I have found a number of interesting acquaintances. One, a man who hunts for a business, and is full of forest lore and hunting tales. He is also something of a naturalist and taxidermist, and I have been showing him our volumes of the report of the Harriman Expedition, to his delight. He has also explored along the Kamtschatka coasts of Siberia, and describes it as a land stocked with salmon and fur animals. He says, too, that I have done right to bring along my gun, for there are lots of ptarmigan as well as mountain sheep and goats in the Yukon Valley, and caribou and moose are also plentiful.
Another man has spent a year or more on the Yukon – our chief engineer – and thinks we will have no difficulty in getting a boat down from Dawson, and the scenery he says is grand. Another is a lumber-man of Wrangel – from Pennsylvania – and tells me they have some fine timber there, though most of that of these far northern latitudes is too small to now profitably compete with the big logs of Washington.
Our vis-a-vis at table is going up to the Porcupine Placer district to try his luck with finding gold, and several men are going into Atlin – whither we are bound – to find work at big pay.
The atmosphere of the company is buoyant and hopeful, even the women have a dash of prosperity about them – gold chains and diamonds – of which there are not a few.
From all I can pick up, an immense trade is already developed with Alaska and is still growing with bounds. The United States Government statisticians give thirty-seven millions as the figure for the trade of the past year. Already three or four lines of steamers ply between Skagway alone and Puget Sound ports, and several more run to St. Michaels and Nome.
The sail from Vancouver is most delightful. You come out of a narrow channel through which the tides foam and churn, and then turn north through the “Gulf of Georgia,” twenty or thirty miles wide. Vancouver Island stretches for three hundred miles along the west, fir-clad, backboned by a chain of mountains rising up into the snows. On the east a coast indented with multitudinous bays and deep channels, sharp promontories and islands; the forest coming to the water’s edge, the mountains rising sharply six and seven thousand feet into the snows and clouds, as lofty as the fjelde of Norway, but not so bare and naked, the dense, deep green fir forests growing from water to snow line.
We were crossing Queen Charlotte Sound when we awoke this morning, and all day long have been threading our way among islands, through narrow channels, across seemingly shut-in lakes, ten and twelve miles wide, and then no wider than the Kanawha River or even narrower. As we come north the mountains grow higher and come closer to the water we sail upon, and there is more snow on their summits.
You might imagine yourself with Henrik Hudson on his first voyage, when the Hudson valley was covered with primeval forests.
Last evening we saw a number of humpbacked whales, and to-day more. This morning saw my first sea lions and also fur and hair seals. To-morrow, they say, we shall see yet more. Only gulls, a few terns and ducks to-day. No larger birds as yet.
Monday, August 24, 1903.The greyness of yesterday is vanished. The sky is cloudless, the atmosphere translucent. The mountains are more lofty, the snow patches grown into wide fields, and the air has taken on a certain added keenness, telling of distant snow and ice. To-morrow we shall see more snow and even glaciers. All day we have been going from one broad sound or channel through narrow straits into others as broad. We crossed Dixon’s Channel at breakfast-time, through which the commerce of the Orient will come to Port Simpson, the Canadians hope, when the Grand Trunk Pacific shall have been built.
About noon we came around a wooded island and made our first port of Ketchikan, where there are salmon canneries, and hard by quartz mines yielding gold, and saloons and stores. Here we had our first view of near-by totem poles, and our first sight of the shoals of salmon that make alive these waters. From a foot-bridge crossing a little creek that debouched near our steamer wharf, we looked down into the clear water and saw it fairly swarming with salmon, fish from ten to fifteen pounds, “small ones,” they said. But the waters were choked with them. Dipping a net down, you might haul up a wagon load as easily as one. Yet no one was catching them. So plentiful are the fish that no one wants to eat salmon except as a last resort – “food fit only for dogs,” they say, and the distant tenderfeet whom the canneries supply. And these swarming fish below us shoved each other upon the shallow shore continually, when there would be a great splashing to get back.
From Ketchikan we have come out into the great Clarence Strait, with Belim and Ernest Sounds stretching away into the snow-covered mountains toward the east. The strait is as wide as the Hudson at the Palisades, the shores fir clad, the mountains six to seven thousand feet, up into clouds and snow. The water to-day is like a mirror, and many porpoises are playing about. I have just seen three big blue herons, and awhile ago we passed a loon. Last night just at dusk, we saw several flocks of snipe or plover, small, brown, swift in flight, close above the water.
We have just looked upon the most superb panorama we have yet beheld. The last four hours the mountains both east and west of us have come closer to the shores, and risen higher, the fir mantle enveloping them has grown a darker green, larger timber than for the last few hundred miles, and then we came round a bend in our great strait – about six to ten miles wide – forty or fifty miles long – and there in front of us, bounding the horizon on the north, stretched an immense mass of jagged, serrated mountain chain, glittering like silver in the slanting sun rays. Not mere snow patches, not mere fields of snow, but vast “fjellen” of snow, snow hiding all but the most ragged rock peaks, and even sometimes enveloping these. Valleys all snow-filled and from which descend mighty glaciers. Below the miles of snow lay the deep green forests of the lesser mountain summits and sloping flanks, and then the dark blue waters of the giant fjord, dotted with many fir-clad islands. We agree that we have seen nothing in our lives so sublimely beautiful. Never yet nature on so stupendous a scale.
The quiet waters of the last two days are now alive with gulls and ducks and grebes and divers, many loons. More bird life than we have yet seen. Just as is told by the Harriman naturalist. Only at Wrangel does the real bird life of the north begin. Curving around another wooded promontory, we beheld the town of Wrangel, at Fort Wrangel, on Wrangel Island, ten miles away, nestling at the mouth of a little valley, below the firs and snow summits behind. We are now tied up to the pier at this port, and shall lie here till 2 A. M., when flood tide will allow us to continue the voyage, and at daylight pass through the narrowest and most hazardous strait of the trip. We mean to be waked at four o’clock so as to see the pass.
In the village, which claims to be the second town in Alaska, we have walked about and seen some of the totem poles which stand before many of the Indian cabins. Grotesque things, surely.
It is now near nine o’clock and yet the lingering twilight permits one to read. At Dawson, they tell me, there is in June no night, and baseball matches are played at 10 P. M.
August 25, 1903.We did not leave Wrangel till 2 A. M., lying there waiting for the flood of the tide. We were to pass through the very tortuous, narrow and difficult straits and passages between Wrangel Bay and Frederick Sound, through which the tides rush with terrific fury – the tides rise twenty or thirty feet along these shores – and the ship would only venture at flood tide and after dawn. In order to see these picturesque passages, I climbed out between three and four o’clock this morning, wrapped in a blanket shawl above my overcoat, and stood in the ice-chilled air while we threaded slowly our dangerous way. Along sheer mountain-sides, between low wooded islands (all fir), a channel carefully marked with many buoys and white beacons, with many sharp turns, finally entering the great Frederick Sound, where many whales were blowing, and we saw our first real icebergs – masses of ice, blue and green, translucent, with deep, clear coloring.
All day we have sailed up this great land-locked sheet of blue water, the icebergs and floes increasing in number as we approached Taku Inlet, from whose great live glaciers they are incessantly shed off.
4 P. M. – We have landed at the Treadwell Mines on Douglas Island, where the largest stamp mill in the world crushes a low grade quartz night and day the year around, and where is gathered a mining population of several thousand. Then we crossed the fjord to the bustling port of Juneau, the would-be capital of Alaska, the rival of Sitka. A curious little town of wooden buildings, wooden streets, wooden sidewalks, nestling under a mighty snow-capped mountain, and, like those other towns, largely built on piles, on account of the tides.
Now we are off for Skagway, a twelve hours’ run with our thirteen-knot speed.
To-day we have fallen in with two more fellow-travelers. One a young fellow named Baldwin, attached to the U. S. Fish Commission, who tells me much about the fishing on these coasts, and the efforts now being made to stay the indiscriminate slaughter. Another, a grave-faced, sturdy man from Maine who is panning free gold near Circle City, and has endured much of hardship and suffering. He hopes to win enough this winter and coming summer from his claim to go back to California and make a home for his old mother who waits for him there.