In to the Yukon

FIFTH LETTER

SKAGWAY, CARIBOU CROSSING1 AND ATLIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We left Caribou on a little steamer with a big sternwheel – all of which, timber and machinery, had been carried from Skagway over the White Pass on horses’ backs, and sledges, dragged by men and dogs, and put together on Lake Bennett, before the railway was even thought of. How in the name of heaven a ten-ton boiler, and the engines and big timbers, were got over that foot-path trail, is even yet a standing marvel – the boat is as big as the steamer “Calvert” on the Kanawha River – but it was done, and to-day I have talked with the man who bossed and directed the job, Captain Irving, now a gold hunter of Atlin and a member of the British Columbia Parliament.

We first came slowly through a well-marked track on a little lake, Lake Marsh, for about ten miles, then through a short river, and then out into Lake Taggish, a sheet of water larger than Lake Bennett, and one arm of which is famous for its desperate winds from the glaciers – the “hurricane” arm – another arm of which heads toward the White Horse Rapids, and a third arm, “The Taku Arm,” which extends southerly toward Lake Atlin, a lake more than one hundred miles in length, which empties into it through a short, swift, turbulent river. This southerly portion of the lake is eight or ten miles wide and we were all night steaming on it to Taku, where we landed this morning – a distance of forty or fifty miles – when, taking a little, short, two-mile railway, we were pulled over to Atlin Lake, a yet bigger body of water. There embarking on another steamboat, we were ferried ten miles across to Atlin, a town with a courthouse, several churches, a little hospital, a newspaper, a bank, a dozen hotels, a multitude of restaurants, bicycles, numerous livery stables, and which is the center of a gold-mining region from which already several millions of dollars have been taken since the first pay dirt was found in 1898. We dined at a restaurant where a colored French cook presides, and you may have any delicacy New York could afford. At the bars men preside with diamonds the size of hickory nuts in their shirts, drinks are twenty-five cents each and cigars the same. The hotels are full of keen-faced men; well-gowned and refined women are to be seen on the streets; the baby carriages are pulled by great big dogs, and even the water carts and delivery wagons are hauled by teams of eight and ten dogs – Newfoundland or wolfish Esquimaux.

“The Camp,” or city, is now in the midst of a boom, and this morning we were shown several buckets of gold nuggets just brought in last night from a recent “clean up.”

When in the midst of Lake Taggish, yesterday afternoon, we were hailed by a naphtha launch of the Mounted Police, and, on our lying to, three gentlemen climbed in. One face seemed in some way familiar to me, and when I presently heard some one call him Mr. Sutton I recognized one of my old Port Hope schoolmates, who had also been at Cornell, and who had been an especial friend. He was as well pleased as I at the meeting, and is now here with me. He was a brilliant scholar, and is now British Columbia’s most eminent geologist and mining expert. We have been out together to-day, and to have his expert opinion here on what I see is invaluable. We have also met here a Mr. and Mrs. R – , of Philadelphia, to whom I had a letter, a promoter of the largest hydraulic company here, and H – has been off with Mrs. R – to-day and panned her first chunks of real, true, genuine gold, of which performance she is not a little proud. The whole country seems to be more or less full of gold; it is in the gravels and sands everywhere, and a number of very large gold-getting enterprises are under way, mostly hydraulic placer mining, but also some fine quartz veins carrying free gold are being opened up, and I have been off with Sutton all the afternoon looking at one.

We have had three days of outing; at least, I have. Saturday morning I made an early start with Sutton and three other men for a visit to some hydraulic mining operations up on Pine Creek, and to the great dredge now being built. At one of these, an operation called “The Sunrise Gold Co.,” I found in charge a Mr. Ruffner, of Cincinnati, a cousin to the Kanawha family, grandson of one of the original Ruffner brothers, who, hating slavery, had freed his slaves and removed to free soil in Ohio. A bright young fellow, managing a large operation. Then we went on further to Gold Run, where an enormous dredge is being built. An experiment in this country, about the final success of which there is yet much question. Here I dined in a tent, which is warmer, they say, than any timber building, even when the temperature is 50 degrees below zero. The valley is a broad, open one, all of glacial formation. It is very level, with Pine Creek cutting deeply between high gravel banks. A black top soil of a foot or two, eight or ten feet of grey gravel, then as much more yellowish sandy gravel, and often a foot or two of black sand at the bottom, lying upon a bed of serpentine rock; and it is in this lowest ten feet of yellow gravel and black sand that the free gold is found, nuggets of a pound or two down to minute gold dust, a red gold of about 22 to 23 carats in combination with copper or silver. Through this gravel are also immense stones and boulders, and these are the gold diggers’ particular bete noir. Most of the digging is done by getting out this gravel, freeing it of the boulders and washing it. Pine Creek is the overflow of Surprise Lake, a sheet of water twenty miles long and one-half to one mile wide; and although a considerable stream, yet its waters are so much needed in these gold-washing operations that a constant water-war among the diggers and digging companies goes on. There is much waste also in the present methods, and it is to prevent the wars as well as to save the fine gold that now largely escapes that the dredging method is to be applied. Then, too, there are only four, or at most five, months in the year when men can work, so that great energy must be expended during the open season. There is no night up here for these four months, and men work all the twenty-four hours in eight-hour shifts; thus, really, more work is done than one would at first imagine. The life of the ideally successful gold digger is to toil with unflagging vigor for the four or five months of daylight and open weather, then “come out” and blow it in leisurely luxury in some comfortable city. But not all are so able to make their summer pile. They may not strike rich pay dirt, but may find it lean, or even barren, and such must just live on through ice and snow and mighty frost, hoping for more luck another year. Many are the tales of hardship and suffering and dire wreck one hears. The little graveyard out along the Pine Creek pike has many graves in it. One man died a natural death, they say, but all the rest went to their graves stark mad from disappointment, poverty and privation. Every train passing out over the White Pass Railway carries its complement of the hopelessly insane, gone mad in the hunt for gold.

In this little town or “camp,” as it is called, are very many too poor to get away, too broken in health and spirits to more than barely exist. A delicate woman, once the wife of the mayor of an Illinois city, does our washing; her husband, a maimed and frozen cripple, sits penniless and helpless while she earns a pittance at the tub. Our landlady lets rooms to lodgers, her husband’s body lying beneath the deep waters of Teslin Lake.

A Cambridge Senior wrangler passed us yesterday on the road driving two dogs hitched to a little wagon, peddling cabbages and fish. A few strike gold, and, making their piles, depart, but the many toil hopelessly on, working for a wage, or frozen or crippled, weary in spirit and out of heart, sink into penury, or die mad.

After our dinner in the tent I joined another party, some of those interested in the building of the dredge, and drove with them twenty miles up into the interior to Otter Creek, where three of them have just started an operation, sluicing for gold. We passed many cabins and small tents, where live the men who are working claims and washing for gold. Some were quite shut down for lack of water, others were eagerly at work. At one point a Mr. S – and I left the wagon and struck six miles across a great grassy mountain. We must have ascended 2,000 feet or more. An easy ascent over a vast expanse of moss and tufted grass; no trees, no bushes, no hardy herbs, nothing but grass and moss. Only on the south and west was the horizon bounded by jagged peaks and summits of snow-topped mountains. Glacial action has everywhere worn down the surface into rounded rolling domes and slopes, and for hundreds of miles the land is one wide moorland of grass and moss.

Here are many flocks of wild sheep and mountain goats, and here moose and caribou are said to abound. During the day, about the noon hour, a giant bull moose had stalked deliberately through the midst of the camp, neither quickening his pace, nor fearing man. So engrossed were the men in their search for gold, that none dropped pick or shovel to molest him.

On these higher slopes are multitudes of ptarmigan, – the birds breeding close to the permanent snow line, remaining high up during the summer heats, and gradually descending to the valleys as the fresh falling autumnal snows little by little push them down.

In Atlin, the other day, a young Swedish engineer, a graduate of Upsala, showed me a fine pair of ibex horns from one which he had shot high up on the mountains beyond the lake. The animal, though not uncommon, is difficult to get, inhabiting the most inaccessible summits and rarely descending to even the levels where the mountain sheep and goats find pasture.

A superb and seemingly boundless pasture land where great herds of cattle ought also to be feeding, and would be, except for the terror of the winter’s cold. Perhaps the reindeer will some day here find a congenial home.

We sat by fires after nightfall, and when day came icicles a foot long hung all along the drip of the flume, and in the afternoon snow fell, covering every rounded summit with its white mantle.

Returning, I walked another ten miles down the winding valley of Otter Creek. A stretch of open, grassy moorland, where in the winter-time the moose and caribou gather in numbers seeking shelter from the winds, and finding the dried grass through the scraped-off snow.

To-day H – , Sutton and I have driven for hours along the valley of Spruce Creek, visiting another industrious gold-washing section. We picnicked for lunch in an abandoned miner’s camp, and H – saw her first real washing for gold. We took the picture of one old man, a Mr. Alfred Sutton, in whose cabin we had sought shelter from a passing rain squall. He had hoped to return to England for the winter – he left there many years ago – but the gold had not come in as rich as he had hoped, so he must delay his going for one more year. Poor old fellow, his beard was long and white, so, too, his uncombed hair. He had not yet made his yellow pile, but was as hopeful as a boy of twenty. I promised to send him a copy of the photograph and he thanked me joyfully, saying, “And I shall send it to my family at home” – in England.

We are here two days longer, when we move on to Dawson and I mail these lines to you.

This is our last day in Atlin. The morning was cold like late November in Virginia, the air keen and frosty. Ice has formed in the pools, though the aspen and scrub willow and a sort of stunted alder are only turned yellow in spots and patches. The mountain-tops are now all whitened with the delicate early snows, extending like blankets of hoar-frost out beyond the margins of the snow fields that never melt.

We dine sumptuously, and all through the gold fields it is the same. The one thing men will and must have is food, good food and no stint. The most expensive canned goods, the costliest preserves, the most high-priced fresh fruits, oranges, bananas, pears and grapes, the finest beef steaks and meats, the most ample variety of vegetables. Such an average as New York gives only in her best hotels, is what the gold digger demands, will have, and freely spends his nuggets to obtain. We are astonished at such lavish eating. At the diggings where men work for wages, $4.50 and $5.00 per day, board is always included and demanded, and only this high-priced, costly food is accepted. The cooks are connoisseurs. Their wages run from $125.00 to $150.00 per month and free board. At the camp high amidst the desolate moorlands of Otter Creek, the men eat beef steaks, thick, juicy, rare, California fresh fruit and lemon meringue pie; with lemons $1.00 per dozen and eggs ten cents apiece! Dundee marmalade is eaten by the ton; the costliest canned cream is swallowed by the gallon – the one permitted, recognized and established extravagance of the gold fields is the sumptuous eating of every man who finds the gold.

This afternoon Sutton and ourselves with a few friends are going down to see the great glacier at the south end of Lake Atlin.

SIXTH LETTER

THE GREAT LLEWELLYN OR TAKU GLACIER

We have just come in on the steamboat from Atlin, and are waiting for the train which will take us to White Horse this afternoon, where we will take a river boat to Dawson.

Day before yesterday we took the little steamboat that plies across Atlin Lake, having chartered it with Sutton, and having asked a Mr. Knight, of Philadelphia, and Captain Irving, of Victoria, making a party of five, and went to the head of the lake – forty-five miles. A lovely sail. Up the narrow mountain-locked channel on the west of Goat Island (named from the many wild goats on it). The water a clear, deep blue and light green, according to its depth. The mountains chiefly granite, rising sheer up on either hand four and five thousand feet; the fir forest, dense and sombre, clothing their bases, then running out to ground pine and low shrubs, then the grass and mosses, then the bare rocks and jagged crags and the everlasting snows. The lake channel is everywhere narrow, sometimes widening out to five or six miles, then narrowing into a mile or two, but the air is so wonderfully translucent that ten miles look like one, and distant shores seem close at hand. The further we sailed the narrower grew the channel, until we were among islands and cañons, with sheer snow-capped heights hanging above us, at last slowly creeping through a tortuous passageway of still water out into a long, silent arm, at whose head we tied up to the forest for the night. These clear waters are filled with trout and grayling – the latter chiefly, but of birds there were almost none. Only a belated and startled great blue heron flapped lazily away to the west. Using our glasses, we saw two or three wild goats up on the heights above us, and probably many more saw us far down below.

In the morning we breakfasted early, and started for the glacier – the great Llewellen or Taku glacier, said to be the largest in the British possessions of North America, sixty miles long to where it comes to Taku Bay, near Juneau, and is there known as Taku glacier. We clambered over a mile of trail, through dense, close-growing fir, then out into a wide plain of detritus, once covered by the ice, now two miles long by a mile wide. Difficult walking, all glacial drift, and boulders great and small. The distance to the vast slope of dirty ice seemed only a little way; nothing but the walk would convince one that it was over two miles. The glacier projects in a great bow. On its center, like a hog-back mane, are piled masses of earth and rocks. It is there that the moving ice river is. On either side the ice is almost still and white. For five or ten miles the glacier rises toward an apparent summit and stretches toward the coast, fed by a multitude of lesser ice streams issuing from every mountain gorge and valley, while monstrous masses of rock, granite and porphyry, tower into the snows and clouds above it. We had some difficulty in climbing upon the glacier. Chasms opened on either side, the front was a cracking ice cliff, crevasses yawned everywhere. Though the surface was dirty and blackened, yet down in the cracks and crevasses the wonderful blue ice appeared. From the base of the glacier flows a river, and over its surface coursed a thousand rills.

We walked upon the ice and lingered near it till about noon, when our boat took us back to Atlin through the greater lake, along the east shores of Goat Island, a four hours’ sail.

From Atlin we have returned as we went, and are now spending a few hours here. There were very few birds on Atlin Lake, though I saw a superb loon yesterday near the western shore.

Ice formed on the lake last night. Snow is in the air. We may be too late to go down the Yukon from Dawson.

SEVENTH LETTER

VOYAGING DOWN THE MIGHTY YUKON

This letter is headed Dawson, for I shall mail it there, but I begin it at White Horse, a thriving town of over 2,000 people, on the west bank of the Fifty Mile River, just below the famous rapids. The streets are wide, of hard gravel, many large buildings. We are in the “Windsor” Hotel, a three-storied wooden structure, iron bedsteads, wire mattresses, modern American oak furniture – very comfortable, but as all the partitions are of paper – no plaster – you can hear in one room all that is said on six sides of you – above and below, too. The city and hotel are electric-lighted. Many churches, a commodious public school, public hall and reading-room supplied with all current American, Canadian and English magazines. The town is up to date. It is at the head of the Yukon navigation, where those “going out” take the White Pass and Yukon Railway for Skagway, and those “going in” take the boats for “Dawson.” Just now the town is half deserted, many of its inhabitants having stampeded to the new Kluhane gold strike, some one hundred and forty miles away. It is here claimed that a new Eldorado as rich as the Klondike has been found, and White Horse now expects to yet rival Dawson. Extensive finds of copper ore of high grade are also reported in the neighborhood.