LETTER VII.
STEAMING UP THE ICE-PACKED FIORDS AND CHANNELS OF THE ARCTIC COUNTRY OWNED BY UNCLE SAM. SALMON CANNERIES. CANOE BUILDING BY NATIVES. ASCENT OF THE "MUIR" GLACIER, 300 FEET ABOVE WATER. FANTASTIC ICE FORMATIONS AT TAKOU. SUMMER AND WINTER CLIMATES. IMPUDENT CROWS AND ORATORICAL RAVENS.
Steamer Queen,Gulf of Georgia, Aug. 10.
The salmon canneries of Alaska are not all in the neighborhood of the towns at which the excursion steamer calls, but are at or near every considerable stream which flows into the straits, channels and inlets. The instinct of the fish send them at regular seasons into fresh water, where and near which, they are caught in vast numbers. Other steamers, some of them carrying passengers and requiring a week longer to make the trip, call at stated times at several places, to which the Queen does not go, to take on and unload freight. The natives are the principal fishermen using, both nets and hooks from their trim canoes. These are dug out from a single log, some barely holding a man, others carrying with safety fifty or more. A log of two feet diameter will make a canoe nearly twice as large at its waist. When dug out to a thin shell almost as light as birch bark, the frame is filled with water, into which hot stones are thrown until the wooden walls are thoroughly steamed, hot and pliable. Sticks of different lengths, the longest at the canoe waist, are then set into the frame, which is spread out into a fine, cutter-shaped keel. A high prow and somewhat raised stern are cut out of the log or set into it. Some of the crafts present finely modeled keels. The shell of a canoe holding over sixty people, is often less than a half inch thick, and so light that two people can easily pull it high on dry land. The native squats in the bottom of his canoe and paddles it with great speed.
We saw a boat not twenty feet long, the whole filled to the top with light firewood. On this were perched two men, three women, a dog, a small tent, and the cooking utensils of the family. They were sailing from Juneau to another village several miles away. A native gets into his canoe as lightly and carefully as if he were treading on eggs. In this instance, the boat sank until its upper line was not four inches out of water. We expected to see it swamped, for there was a light wind and a few white caps. We watched it with our glasses until safely landed at a village several miles away. The natives, of villages quite distant from the towns at which the steamers call, bring their wives, dogs, and household utensils, together with what they may have to sell in the curio line to these places on the day the steamers are due. They pitch their tents on the shore not far from the steamboat pier, draw their canoes upon the strand above high water mark, and seem as much at home as if regularly domiciled. They remain as long as they see a chance for trade and then fold their tents and silently steal away. They require only a few minutes to get themselves and their worldly possessions aboard their little dugouts. At Juneau there were several of these temporary inhabitants. They all embarked after sundown, and with the long twilight were able to reach their permanent abodes before well-set dark.
The people catch fish at or near their respective villages. The canneries each have a small steambarge, which is sent to several villages daily to pick up the catch. In this way the salmon are landed at the packing-places when perfectly fresh. The Alaskan salmon is as a rule small, averaging only about six pounds, while "sock eye" of the Frazer River run evenly at eight pounds, and the Columbia River furnishes an average of nearly twenty pounds. Large fish, however, were brought to our steward, also magnificent halibut, which the passengers enjoyed greatly. One soon becomes satiated with salmon on the Pacific Coast. It is as thoroughly an every day food, as is the hog and hominy on a southern plantation. Except to the Indian, it does not seem to be as good for a steady diet as the southerner's homely fare. Several other varieties of salt water fish furnish a less surfeiting every day food than this famous beauty. We hailed with pleasure, the change to halibut given us by our steward when we reached Alaska. No where is this solid denizen of the sea, found in better kelter than up here.
A PICTURE OF SITKA.
Our ship on the excursion stops at Seattle and Port-Townsend, in Washington; Victoria and Nanaimo, on Vancouver's Island; and at Fort Wrangle, Juneau, and Sitka, in Alaska; at each long enough to afford passengers full time to satisfy themselves. Juneau is the largest place owing to the rich mines in the vicinity. All have large canneries near by, which employ natives, many of whom have acquired considerable property. A native woman, widow to a white trader, and her daughter were passengers from Juneau to Chilkat. She is a sort of Merchant, continuing the business of her defunct husband. She bore herself most decorously in her half mourning, and seemed quite able to steer her own bark through the remaining voyage of life. She is reputed to be worth several thousand dollars, and manages her affairs shrewdly. Her eligibility was suggested to the late friend of Persia's shah. His eyes rested more fondly upon her plump daughter, who displayed much agility and a trim ankle when she descended the gangway in a high sea out side of Chilkat.
Sitka has one of the prettiest sites and harbors in the world, and its climate just now is simply delicious. It is built on slightly rising ground on a bay running some miles from the sea, with beautiful little islands, clustered in large number in front of the town. These lift with rounded rocky foundations naked and water-washed at low tide, but are clothed in rich green shrubbery above high water mark. They would make an exquisite water park for a large city. Over one edge of this park lifts a few miles away, Mount Edgecumbe, a perfect volcanic cone about 3,000 feet high. Its lower two thirds are clothed in green. Its upper third, beneath its broad extinct crater, is of rich red rock. Long points of the red run down into the green, while points of the green run up into the red. It reminds one much of famous Fuji-yama in Japan. The god-mountain of Japan is over four times as high, but Edgecumbe is seen so close that the contrast does not entirely belittle it.
Around and behind Sitka are lofty foot hills clothed in forests, making a perfect amphitheater, while behind them rear pointed, rocky mountains more or less snow flecked. The town is on the great island of Baranoff, which is a mass of pinnacled mountains, the northern slopes of which are always white with sheets of snow. When we sailed, a few days before, northward through Prince Frederick Sound, these mountains formed a wonderfully beautiful background. Prince Frederick Sound is about twenty by thirty odd miles. All around it lie grand mountains of exceeding ruggedness on their highest peaks, but green below, with stripes, bands and patches of white. Through a break to the south the sound stretches some miles further, backed by the Baranoff range, rising in innumerable sharply pointed pinnacles, and about their shoulders as purely white as loftiest Alpine heights. All the mountains are comparatively uncovered when seen on their southern, western, and eastern exposures, while those seen from the north although not more lofty, are clothed in blankets of white, as if to protect them from the northern blasts.
The entire Alaskan trip presents a constant succession of gorgeous scenery, and if the weather be fine, it is worth the time taken and the cost in money to one who loves the picturesque and enjoys the rugged grandeur of nature, even if they were no grand glaciers. The time is not far distant, when commodious hotels will be maintained in these northern possessions as summer resorts. Many people will then spend weeks in them, and with the aid of small excursion barges will find health and delights.
An intelligent man who has resided for several years in Sitka, assured me he much preferred its winter climate to that of southern Ohio, where he had grown up to mature manhood. The average winter climate is rather milder than that of Washington, but with no extreme of cold. The frequent rainy days during the summer are a great draw back to the pleasure of excursion tourists. The chances are decidedly that he will find everything wet when he arrives. Our party was one of the lucky ones. The air was clear and balmy. The sun made a parasol agreeable to the ladies. I lolled for an hour on the stoop of a deserted house, with my head in shade, but my body and lower limbs warmed by a delicious sun bath, while my eyes feasted upon the glorious picture spread before me of mountain peak and green slopes, and gently rippling water as the tide slowly crept up the soft beach of the little bay behind the town.
Except when sailing across four entrances or broad straits running out to the open sea, the entire voyage to and from Alaska, usually is and always may be through straits, canals, and fiords so thoroughly protected from the ocean's angry waters that the smallest steamer can hardly feel a toss. On this excursion of ours, the briny depths below us were often as smooth as glass, reflecting the mountains, as from a mirror. As the swell from our steamer would roll off in smooth, rounded and diverging lines, they would weave fantastic forms, upon their mirror like surface, of green forest, rugged rocks, or snow caps. Towards the land beyond the effect of the swell, the mountains would often be so perfectly delineated upon the mirror, that a photograph of them would show them as distinctly below as above. The picture could be turned upside down with but little detriment to the view. Near the steamer the rounded crest of the swell would reflect long weird lines of forest, which would spread out behind us as the swell sank to a lower level.
At night millions of small fish, probably herrings, would be disturbed in their schools, and fluttering and hurrying from the ship's prow would make the water blaze in brilliant phosphorescence. Now and then a large fish would dart through these schools, leaving behind him a bright wake of flame. As he dashed through them, the herrings would scatter their flame work into myriads of sparkling diamonds. When our ship would push into the school, the alarm seemed to be given to quite a distance in the mass. The dense pack of little fellows forward the ship's bow, would break the sea into chaotic burning mass, as they sped in haste before the great monster chasing them. The line to the right and left then bent aft, weaving the sea into a waving network of fire. Farther off the brightness was toned down to a glistening shimmer, and then was lost in the distance. The schools we saw were moving in great lines in the direction we were sailing. They were composed of millions of little finny flutterers.
PANORAMA ON LAND AND WATER.
Frequently as we sailed over the placid sea, little diving ducks would flap the waters in a race from the ship's hull, and when a hundred feet off would dive for a score or more feet, perfectly satisfied that by their dive they had hidden their tracks from the mighty monster. Droves of porpoise rolled about us, and now and then one would race with us for a mile or so and seem really to understand and enjoy the contest. Asiatic crows cawed around us when we were ashore most familiarly, and with the cute impudence, so characteristic of his brethren in Eastern Asia. When we landed at Muir Glacier, a young school marm and I wandered along the shore then bare from the receding tide, up to the icy precipice. A couple of crows espied us and flew about us cawing, and finally perched on a rock close by. I told the fair one that these birds instinctively saw that we were to be caught by the incoming tide or under an ice fall, and were awaiting a feast. Their cawing was so constant, that she become superstitious, and declared she could not stand it. I had to shy a pebble at them to allay her timidity. The crow is a familiar bird up here, but the raven is an Alaskan institution. If I be not mistaken he is held by the natives in a sort of veneration. He is twice or more as large as our crow; has a huge roman nosed beak, which occasionally snaps with a report nearly as loud as the snaps of a pelican's bill. His coat is of shiny, burnished bottle green black, and his eye has an expression queerly mixed of vacuous imbecility, and cunning impudent rascality. He is a genuine stump speaker, and as fond of his own orations as a famous eastern after dinner talker is of his pretty speeches.
When we strolled in the deep shade of the dense forest behind Sitka, some of these impudent fellows settled in adjoining trees and held dialogues and debates, possibly upon our human characteristics. They would harange and then seem to crack coarse jokes, when one of them would almost laugh in low gutturals, not unlike the gurgling of water running from a two gallon jug. A wag among us declared they were making ward stump-speeches, and was willing to wager that if ravens language could be understood, we should find that some of the jokes were utterly unfit for polite ears. Those we saw were rather jolly good fellows, and were not of the family of which one appeared to Edgar Poe in his hashish dreams.
I said that the simple, beautiful scenery presented by the Alaskan excursion, well repays the loss of time and money expended upon it. Many of the mountain-flanked channels are wonderfully beautiful. The Linn or Chilkat Canal is surpassed by nothing of the sort we have ever seen. It is about four miles wide and probably 30 long. On either side tower mountains, say 3,000 feet high, rising from the water like great receding buttresses, clothed thickly in forest below, with scattered copses toward the upper slopes, and flecked with openings of low shrubbery in pale green, artistically contrasting with the dark tone of firs and spruce. All are topped by rocks, those near us gray, and the most distant ones of an undertone of purple, while in the far distance, the mountains on either shore become first blue-gray, and then blend off into sweet opalescent tints. Over and above all, towered at no great distance mighty snow fields and glaciered heights. Crillon, Fairweather, and La Peronse to the west cut the clear blue sky with their points 15,000 and nearly 16,000 feet above us; mantels of clouds here and there fell about their titanic shoulders, and light veils of mist wound and unwound about them just under their snowy pinnacles. Into this glorious fiord we steamed to its head at Chilkat, and then back to enter Glacier Bay, the acme of Alaska's wonderful exhibitions.
Fully nine Alaskan tourists out of ten go for its glaciers, which are seen in a magnitude and grandeur inducing one to pass as scarcely worthy of notice, the best of any other country which is possible of approach. They are seen in icy hardness on distant summits shortly after passing the boundary of British Columbia. They increase in frequency as one goes further north, until on a clear and cloudless day one is scarcely ever out of sight. The first visited by us was that at the head of Takou inlet south of Juneau. It is comparatively small, less than a mile wide at its foot, but running back several miles. Its foot presents a perpendicular wall of ice 150 to 200 feet high, rising out of water several hundred feet deep. Its face is irregular; here supported by icy buttresses, and there sinking back into icy recesses; now with irregular pilasters and projections of soft snowy appearance and then with broken columns, recesses, and caves of every tint of blue from the flitting opalescent to transparent ultra-marine and deep indigo.
FANTASTIC GRANDEUR OF THE GLACIERS.
Now is seen a mass of closely welded crystals of diamond whiteness glistening under the kiss of the sun, like monster piles of precious gems; then a huge broken and fissured wall compactly studded with turquoise and amethysts and gems so green as to be almost emeralds forming the icy cliffs. Loud reports as of rifle guns would fill the ear, coming from the cracking behind of the solid moving mass as it pushed onward in its descent. Hark! A rattle of musketry! You look and see a mere hat full of snowy ice tumbling from the upper edge. As it falls it becomes a cart full, a house full, and then with a report as loud as that of a heavy cannon, a section of the wall's face separates from the mass behind and tumbles into the deep water with a splash which scatters spray one or two hundred feet around, and the air is filled as with the bellowing of thunder echoed from projecting ice walls and from the lofty mountains hemming in the narrow inlet. The fallen mass disappears below the surface. But look! See that monster lifting from the water a half hundred feet away from where the tumbling ice fell! It is a dome-like pinnacle of ice. Up it rises slowly, revealing the most exquisite tints as its shoulders broaden; ten feet, twenty, fifty, aye, nearly a hundred feet! For a moment it poses a solidified mass of ultramarine. Sparkling waters pour in cascades from its uplifted dome. But see! It leans a little; it leans a little more; and tumbles with a mighty noise and sends geysers up to the brink of the icy precipice and wide around for several hundred feet. As its upper member or crest topples over, a huge section many times more bulky than the part we had seen above water, lifts, and then lies stretched three or more hundred feet, and exposed above the surface nearly thirty feet. The huge mass of possibly a hundred thousand tons weight came only to a small extent from the icy wall standing before and above us; but the fissure above extended—three or more hundred feet down into the glacier below water, and rested on the ground. For one end was covered with mud and for many feet was deeply stained.
An officer of the ship declared this was the finest exhibition of the sort he had ever seen, and that the iceberg thus made and now slowly floated out by the receding tide weighed far more than a hundred thousand tons. Our ship was lying with its bow toward the glacier not a thousand feet away. The vessel rocked and reeled from stem to stern as the great waves made by the glacier avalanche rolled under her. We lay there two hours listening to constant reports and seeing a succession of ice slides. While so resting for the enjoyment of passengers, the captain was laying in ice enough for his next round trip. Icebergs of all sizes, from those weighing only a ton up to others half as big as the steamer, were floating all about us. Some of crystal whiteness and as clear as the lens of a telescope. Others were of every tone of blue, deepening sometimes into translucent olive. The most of the bergs were of delicious purity, but a few were full of mud brought from the bed hundreds of feet under water. In some were seen good sized cobble stones; in one a boulder weighing probably a quarter of a ton. Sailors in a boat picked from these masses chunks of perfect clearness, passed grappling ropes under them, and then hoisted them by the steam derrick upon the main deck. Sometimes the piece seen above water was not larger than a barrel, but when lifted into full view it weighed one, two or more tons. For every foot of ice seen in an iceberg above water eight lie below. Thus when a berg floated close to us showing thirty feet above water, it had, if of even form, 240 feet below.
CLIMBING THE FAMOUS "MUIR."
Some of the passengers felt uneasy, fearing another mighty tumble might occur immediately in front of us, and that the mass might shoot outward below water, and might come up beneath, or uncomfortably close to us. The captain, however, stood upon the bridge ready to send his ship rapidly backward should anything look untoward. The engines were kept in gentle motion holding our bow steadily toward the glacier precipice. The captain, by the way, thinks the Takou the most interesting of the approachable glaciers. The ice gathered was of great solidity. It did not break under an ice pick in straight cleavage, but irregularly, showing its peculiar characteristic of being formed, not from water simply freezing, but from snow compacted under irresistible pressure. Two chunks of perhaps each two tons weight lay between decks supplying the entire ship's wants for four or five days. It may have been imagination, but I thought this ice more agreeable for eating than that made by ordinary process. It was more friable and broke and crumbled in the mouth in shorter pieces and not in long spiculae as ordinary ice does.
We passed on our run close to several other huge glaciers, some of them running quite down to the water; among them the "Stephens" which though very large, reaches the sea in a slope and not with a perpendicular precipice. We, however, stopped only at the celebrated "Muir." We lay in front of it from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.—a half hour in rather dangerous proximity, and then anchored a mile off for passengers to land and climb its banks. The Muir presents a precipice to the head of the inlet nearly 300 feet high and over a mile long. Two years ago it bent outward with a very decided convex front; last year it was nearly straight. Now it is a very open horseshoe. We took soundings when the Queen lay a thousand feet from the front and found under us 720 feet. It possibly shallows considerably close to the wall, say to 400 feet. The glacier is certainly over 200 feet high; this makes, with what is under water, 600 feet. But give it the low estimate of an average across the inlet of 400 feet. It moves steadily downward forty feet a day, and gradually recedes. Thus it will be found that it tumbles into the sea a mass of ice, 40 x 5280 x 400 feet, or of at least 84,000,000 cubic feet a day.
After wandering for several hours over the surface of the glacier, along a sort of granite road way varying in depth from a few inches up to very many feet thick lying upon it; among blocks of granite weighing tons brought down upon the solid frozen river; across narrow crevices, into whose depths we could look a hundred feet down, into pure ice of all tints of blue from the pearl blue of a southern sky to ultramarine and indigo—tints so beautiful that one involuntarily groaned in pleased admiration; along chasms where our iron-pointed alpenstocks were necessary to prevent a slip, which would have sent us down into glacial graves; looking over pinnacles, domes and valleys of ice in confused profusion; over grotesque forms, over which no one person could safely go, but a dozen attached to each other by ropes, with shoes iron-nailed, might with hazard venture. Then up and before us spread the mighty glacier, 25 miles by 30, fed by many smaller ones. Morains of rock lifted above the surface in long even lines running back for miles, showing the edge of each of the frozen rivers, which have united to make the mighty single one.
The theory explaining the medial moraines of glaciers, is that two or more glaciers come down the gorges and upper valleys of the mountain. Each of these gather up broken rock and mountain debris on their two sides. When two such glaciers meet and run into and form one, then the inner lateral moraines unite and are borne along by the enlarged glacier. As it flows these two morains, now become "medial," are apparently pressed upward to and upon the surface. This, however, is probably only apparent, for the ice melting under the summer sun's heat, simply leaves the rock debris on the surface.
The Muir is the result of several upper feeding glaciers. Each two uniting formed from their inner lateral moraines, one medial. Several medial ones are observable on the surface of the great glacier, some of them uniting lower down, when the bed of the icy stream becomes contracted—where the valley becomes narrow. Several medial moraines retain their individual line until the great precipice is reached. The mass of the debris forming a moraine is of comparatively small broken granite; not broken and rounded by glacial action, but simply irregular pieces thrown off from granite precipices high in the mountains by frost forces. Now and then a few rounded pebbles, and small boulders are seen, worn on the under surface of upper glacier streams. Quite a number of very large masses of granite are being borne down by the Muir moraines. One I estimated to weigh several tons. Its cleavage sides and edges were fresh and sharp as if it were just broken from its parent rock.
The medial morains on some of the glaciers seen at a distance, have a singular effect. They can be seen in long apparently parallel lines and seemingly close enough together, to be the walls of a long smooth road. A wag declared that one of them was the road from an Indian village to the little red school house in an upper valley.
After exploring the surface of the glacier, we found that the tide having reached its ebb, we could approach the foot of the ice-precipice. Three of us had approached it somewhat nearly before when the tide was but half out. We walked up the shingly shore through stranded icebergs of all sizes, and hundreds in number. Some were not larger than a barrel, others larger than a railroad car, and of all intermediate sizes. Now we threaded our way through a cordon of huge blocks as clear as crystal, from which we chipped with the spikes of our alpenstocks, chunks delicious to eat. Then we were among others of various tints, colored by the earthy matter caught by them when flowing near to or upon the valley bed. One mass weighing probably a thousand tons was resting upon a point so small as to be a mere pivot. I cut from it a smooth rounded cobble stone for a paper weight, and was glad when my task was finished, for I was somewhat uneasy lest the slight hammering might topple over the bulky mass.
We reached the foot of the glacier. Here the picture was wonderfully fine. The ice-precipice from which so many newly broken bergs had tumbled, was far more beautiful than when seen from several hundred yards away. We looked into grottoes many yards recessed into the frozen cliff. Here in one was every shade of blue; all tints of green were resplendent in another; and then the sun would discolor these shades, and weave them into the sweet tones which paint an opal's cheek. Now an upper member of a newly broken recess under the sun rays sparkled as a million diamonds, and then another looked like a mass of crystalized olive tints. From out of a deep grotto at the base of the cliff flowed a strong river, which had been pent within its icy house, and now reaching the free air bounded and rushed to join the mighty sea.
Since our arrival in the morning the tide had fallen fully twenty feet, taking away considerable support from the hanging mass, so that the fall of icebergs was almost continuous. The thunder while so close to a tumbling mass was terrific and sublime. The inlet was full of bergs, so that the ship in turning out had to pick its way carefully. How exquisitely beautiful they were as they glistened in the sun's rays, displaying their iridescent crystals! As we steamed out of the inlet among a scattered ice floe we thought we had seen all that a grand glacier could present. Imagine our surprise when we had gone about ten miles to find ourselves at the entrance to another inlet which was packed almost solidly with icebergs. With our glasses we could see the huge "Pacific glacier," about thirty miles away, with a precipice of ice 600 to 800 feet high and five miles long. Although it was quite three times as far from us as the "Muir", yet its icy front showed to us higher out of water. The inlet running up to it was literally packed with ice, into which no steamer, unless armored for Arctic seas, would dare to venture.
A passenger lately taken on, who had spent a season prospecting in this immediate neighborhood, assured us that the fall of ice from this glacier was absolutely continuous, and that masses would tumble a half mile long. He had seen one floating three miles long. He admitted he had no means of measuring it, and gave us the result of a rather hasty guess. He said it stranded at each low tide, but would be lifted at each flood and was by degrees broken up sufficiently to get out of the inlet. "Why," said this passenger, "the Muir is a baby by the side of the Pacific. For every iceberg coming from the one five hundred come from the other." The statement was credible, for while just above this inlet the strait had only scattered bergs, below it was almost a pack of ice. The majority of the icebergs, which had fallen from the Muir, were melted away before reaching the mouth of the Pacific inlet. Looking up this, the icebergs seemed almost in solid mass; of all sizes from a few feet broad, to others covering a quarter of an acre; and from a few feet in height up to twenty, thirty and forty. Out side of the inlet and below its mouth, monster masses were all about us, some of them hundreds of feet across and several fully fifty feet above water.
The George W. Elder, which sailed from Tacoma the night we did, reached the Muir while we were there and sailed out with us. We thus had a genuine Arctic picture. The two ships picked their way slowly, less than a mile apart. The Elder was frequently hidden from us entirely by mighty icebergs. For miles we stole our way through the floe, delighted with the novel scene. Two fine ships in this icy sea gave us a realization of the pictures we had seen of the Thetis and her comrade in the frozen pack beyond the Arctic circle. Mighty Crillon, Fairweather, and La Perouse the sources of the great fields of frozen snow around us here pour their icy floods into the sea. The last is 14,000 feet high; the others respectively 15,900 and 15,500. They present the same amount of white above the snow line as does Mount Everest. That is about 12,000 feet on its southern slope. In Alaska the snow line toward the south is reached at 3,000 feet, while in the Himalayas the tree line mounts to 17,000 feet.
When I looked upon these great icebergs which had tumbled from the huge ice-cliffs we had lately seen, and then recalled the fact that they were but snow balls when compared to some which have been sighted in far northern and in southern seas—some which were from two to three miles square and seven to eight hundred feet high above water, and nearly if not quite a mile deep below the water line—when I recalled these facts I was lost in trying to speculate upon the vastness of the glaciers existing in Greenland and in Antarctic continents. Judging from what we know of those about us, we have to suppose there are glaciers in the world two or three aye six or seven miles high above water, sinking miles below the surface, and stretching in awful grandeur their frozen cliffs for many miles along the sea.
The Pacific glacier is from six to eight hundred feet high at its brink, and five miles long, yet among the bergs we saw—and the captain said he had never seen a finer display in the locality—there were none which were a half acre in size and none over sixty feet high. Icebergs are said to have been seen covering an area of from 2,500 to 4,000 acres, and twelve times as high as the highest about us. The glacier from which such monsters fell, was to the "Muir" as Niagara is to a mill dam. Are the mighty snow and ice mountains of the far south growing, or are they melting and breaking away from their moorings? If growing, when will they tumble through the crust of the earth, and send a raging sea over the habitable part of the globe? A guaranteed ticket for a berth in the coming Noah's ark may be a handy thing to have about the house. With one, the possessor could be quite content to let the other fellow do the swimming.
What a grand mind picture is presented to us, when we realize that glaciers once covered the northern half of this continent—glaciers whose sources were about Baffins Bay and within the Arctic circle, and whose feet stretched from the Alleghanies to the Rocky mountains—from Pennsylvania to Colorado! glaciers so vast that they built up moraines over a thousand feet deep! It is these thoughts which show us man's littleness and his vanity in boasting himself fashioned in God's image.
A good clergyman we met in the National Park, in all seriousness expressed a fear that the enormous sky scrapers our people are erecting in Chicago might destroy the equilibrium of the earth, and cause it to oscillate eccentrically upon its axis. A conscientious Chicagoan informed his reverence, that we were building our city of such weight that it would counterbalance the undue growth of ice mountains about the southern pole.
CLIMATE OF THE FROZEN REGION.
We have a pleasant company aboard—several being from Chicago. There is less of stiffness than is generally found on ocean steamers. There is an amusing party of over twenty from the city of brotherly love. They are all nice—very nice, and evidently have made a vow to hold themselves aloof from all others. They sit on deck in rows four deep, and follow the lead of one lady as a sort of bell-wether. When she smiles all laugh; when she feels a cold in her head all sneeze.
Perhaps I should say something further about the climate of our frozen territory. Few things are less understood. The Sitka winters are not unlike those of Norfolk, Va., rarely getting much below freezing. The nights there are very long, as the days are in summer. The sun was hot while we were there, but the shades were delicious. Three blankets were quite comfortable at night. In the straits and inlets the weather is not quite so mild as on the open seashore, but nowhere are there severe winters until the coast mountain range is crossed. There the sun in the summer days is piercing hot and mosquitoes are so thick that they are almost unbearable. There the long winters lock everything up in thick ribbed ice.
We know that nothing can be more delightful than what we found for summer. However, we have been fortunate. The rainfall is great and rains and fogs frequent. We have escaped both. Warm clothing, umbrellas, waterproofs, and water-tight shoes are recommended by those who advise how to go to Alaska. We have needed neither except the shoes when climbing the glacier. We have worn overcoats aboard ship when the wind was against us, for a slight breeze and the wind made by the speed of the ship causes a decided chilliness when on deck. When the ship is lying still we have required no extra clothing.
We expect to reach Nanaimo early to-morrow morning where the ship will coal. I hope we will be in early enough for myself and daughter to catch the little steamer running to Vancouver.
Before closing, however, permit me to give one of the most valuable points in the art of traveling. When you leave home drop its cares entirely and trustfully. Let your friends write nothing about your business unless it be such as they know should hurry you back and for that intended. Look on the bright side of everything before you, and do not complain because you have not the comforts of your home. Profitable travel is often laborious, and like all well applied labor, pays. As a young man I spent two years abroad and heard not a word as to my affairs. Since then I have made three trips to Europe and a long one around the world. Not a word on either of them did I hear of my business. Once a month during a Globe Circuit we received a cablegram telling us of the health of the loved ones at home.
To this policy I have ascribed the happiness and much of the benefits received. People we met in various quarters of the world looked regularly for and got advices on their affairs and were often uneasy and miserable, but were powerless to correct anything going wrong. Passengers on this ship are fretting about letters they expect to get at Victoria. I have heard nothing for a month and expect nothing until I wire home. If one keeps himself hopeful he can adopt as his traveling motto, "No news is good news." Try this and you will confess you owe me a good fee for sound advice.
LETTER VIII.
VANCOUVER. A PICTURESQUE, GROWING CITY. A RUN OVER THE CANADIAN PACIFIC. MAGNIFICENT SCENERY MET WITH FROM THE START. A GLORIOUS RIDE. FRASER RIVER GLUTTED WITH SALMON. A NEVER-TIRING VIEW FROM GLACIER HOUSE, FOUR THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE SEA. RUGGED, PRECIPITOUS GRANDEUR OF THE SELKIRKS AND ROCKIES. NATURAL BEAUTIES OF BANFF. REFLECTIONS AT THE "SOO."
Canadian Pacific Steamer Alberta,at Sault Ste. Marie, Aug. 23, '90.
Three years ago I wrote quite largely on a trip over the Canadian Pacific Railway, running from east to west. Perhaps by now writing of it beginning at the western terminus, an appearance of plagiarism upon myself may be avoided. It is so grand a road, however, and the magnificence and variety of scenery offered by it to the traveler are so great, that considerable repetition may be permissible, especially as the probabilities are that only a few ever read or now remembers what I said before.
My Alaskan letter was ended at Nanaimo. A sail of three hours on a little steamer owned in New Zealand and lately brought from Bombay brought us to Vancouver. It seemed somewhat singular that we should be voyaging on a short local run in North-west America on a small steamer owned and lately doing service in a land so far away, and that land, too, one which we are prone to regard as our ultima thule, whose inhabitants are but one degree removed from the ragged edge of savagery. The world has so rapidly progressed since many of us studied geography, that we have scarcely been able to keep pace with its strides. We have to pause and think to be able to realize that New Zealand is no longer the land of savages, but is populated by a highly cultivated and energetic people, and abounds in splendid cities.
Before reaching Vancouver we saw high on the rocks the hull of the old steamer "Beaver". It was the first steamer to cross the broad Pacific brought here long ago by the Hudson Bay company from Bombay. It was wrecked only last year, but is already in this humid climate green with moss and ocean weed.
Vancouver has grown marvelously. Five years since its site was covered by a forest of enormous cedars and firs. Three years ago when I visited there, it had only seven or eight hundred population. Now it boasts having about 15,000. It has well graded streets, a few of them paved and several well planked; fine water brought in from a distance; blocks of handsome stone houses and office buildings; commodious and elegant hotels, and many handsome residences. If I be not mistaken I suggested it three years ago as a good place for safe speculation. Had it not been for the long voyage then before me I should have dropped a thousand or two into its lots, and would have been considerably richer by the venture.
High mountains of picturesque contours almost surround the city. It is a sad fact that at this season of the year a dense shroud of smoke usually envelopes the bulk of the uplands. Fortunately a copious rain cleared up the atmosphere just before our arrival. We passed through the town three years ago twice, and afterwards lay at its pier three days, while our ship was getting ready to sail for Japan; and all the while supposed the place was a great forest plain, until the morning of our departure, when a rain washed down the smoke and revealed magnificent mountain scenery close about us.
To one taking the train at Vancouver for the East, fine scenery faces him as he emerges from the station and then continues to greet the eye, varying and growing for the next 600 miles, never once tame, often beautiful or grand and sublime, and frequently terrible. It changes rapidly and as unexpectedly as the pictures presented by a revolving kaleidoscope. Lofty mountains, lifted up in rounded forms of granite, gneiss and other igneous rocks, massive and grand, like mighty boulders welded together, with monster trees in the valley below, and tall and straight ones high above wherever a ledge or a fissure affords their hardy roots chance to take hold, flank the road for the first ninety miles. On the north side of the Frazer River, whose broad white stream is soon reached, and which for the first 90 miles runs from East to West, these mountains arise immediately from the road. Across the river to the south more or less removed, from one to several miles, they show themselves in all their solid grandeur.
Rounded boulder shaped mountains of granite or igneous rocks are to me far more impressive than much taller ones of other formations. One feels that they are solid, and are welded to the central foundations of earth; that they were the offsprings of primal overpowering heat, while the others are made up of tiny particles of disintegrated igneous stone, loosely thrown together by glacial moraines or dropped at ocean's bottom, and after eons of time compressed into hardness. Their walls were uplifted by the pressure from below of belching granite, or were crumbled together by the cramped earth, and their points, pinnacles, and needles were fashioned by rains and slow chemical processes. They are the offspring of other than their own power and are shaped by puny causes acting through untold ages. The rounded granite mountains, however, lifted themselves and rushed forth from the seat of earth's central fires, moved by their own inherent forces.
One feels that mountains of secondary rocks are a mass of tiny things thrown aloft as the creation of other than their own powers. They may tower far above the snow line, and may pierce the vaulted sky with their sharp needles and tooth like pinnacles in the silent regions of eternal ice; but we know that their loftiest horns once lay beneath the ocean's wave, and after being hoisted as an impotent mass, have been cut and fashioned into sharpness by the gnawing tooth of frost. We know that they were borne up upon the breast of boiling, seething primitive rocks, and that they now rest upon the shoulders of granite titans. We know that they are crumbling day by day, and are being borne away upon pigmy streams into ocean depths. They are perishable and are perishing.
But yonder rounded form whose smooth head barely reaches the clouds, has its foundations welded by inconceivably fierce fires; fires kindled when this earth was rounded by the will of God from a formless void—welded to the very base and heart of the globe. It rose upon the crest of a molten sea, rending and tearing away everything its way, and now in adamantine coldness, seems the fit emblem of eternal duration.
One may be terrified by the pinnacled monster, but I am awed by the rounded giant.
The Canadian Pacific road furnishes observation cars through its grand mountain scenery, from a point some sixty miles from Vancouver to and into the plains east of the Rockies or for six hundred miles. This thoughtful provision should be imitated by all railroads traversing fine scenery.
A GRAND CANYON.
About ninety miles from Vancouver the milky Fraser rushes from the canyon which has held it in a close embrace for a hundred miles; from a chasm where the mountains have been split asunder, and now tower two or more thousand feet high, their feet washed in the turbulent stream, their heads cutting the sky in picturesque lines. The mountains along the canyon are all of metamorphic rock, splintered and shivered by too rapid cooling. In the course of some millions of years they have been washed down, so that what were once perpendicular walls have become precipitous heights, with every ledge and projection and all slopes which can hold soil, covered by dark green conifirae, and now and then by light green patches of deciduous shrubbery and small hardwood trees. Down toward the water the rocks are harder, and through it the river cuts its way between walls from fifty to one or more hundred feet high. These walls have defied the flood, and the river bends and winds through narrow fissures fifty to eighty feet wide, along which the white fluid rushes, almost with cascade force. Many of the projecting points and buttresses are grotesque and picturesque in the extreme.
For many miles along the canyon an old government stage road hangs on escarped walls or dips down to the waters. At one point, at a height of a thousand feet, it almost hangs over the gorge, serving now but one purpose, to make lady tourists exclaim upon the cruelty of making even gold seekers so risk themselves as did the passengers of stage coaches a score or so years ago. I said the old road almost hangs over the gorge. In fact it does frequently entirely hang. For it was timbered out so that while one wheel might be over solid rock, the other would be upon wooden sills from which a pebble could be dropped a hundred feet or more below. The stage road cost a vast sum, and is now among the many exhibitions of the destructiveness of capital as it works out new improvements. Every valuable creation of capital wrecks all others whose place it takes. The older ones have performed their tasks, and now become comparatively useless.
A RIVER BLACK WITH FISH.
We had remarkably visible evidences of the strange and irresistible instinct of the salmon to climb steep waters from the sea. For many miles the Fraser runs or rather rushes with great speed. Below every projecting rock there is an eddy more or less large. In these eddies salmon were congregated by the thousands, showing their black backs and fins an inch or two above the surface. These little swirling pools are generally many feet deep, and the finny voyagers must have been piled several deep one on the other. Over one crystal stream running into the river the road passes on a short bridge. In a pool in this creek, say twenty by fifty feet, the fish were so thickly packed that a man could almost have walked dry shod across the stream on salmon backs. In the ascent of the fish they fail often to overcome the rapid current and stop to rest in the eddies. I do not think I exaggerate in saying we saw hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, in a part of our run not exceeding thirty or forty miles. The fish looked small to us, for only a few inches of their backs could be seen. A fellow passenger, however, assured us that such as we saw ran from six to nine pounds. They were the sock-eye salmon, the fattest and best variety for canning. We saw no Indians fishing as there were three years ago. Their stock is already laid in and stored away in caches built upon high posts or up among the branches of spreading trees.
A hundred and eighty thousand fish averaging about eight pounds weight were caught in one day last week at New Westminster. A gentleman of the locality told us that now was but the beginning of the running season, and in three weeks there would be a hundred thousand where there was one now. A scientist was probably not mistaken when he asserted that the water of the world could produce more food for man, acre for acre, than the land. I fear the canneries are causing too many to be killed now.
An uninitiated person would have thought that great sport could be had just now on the Fraser with rod and line. In this, had he made the experiment, he would have been grievously mistaken. The salmon when on the run never rise to the fly or takes any food. They start from the ocean very fat and live on their fat until the spawning season is over, by which time they become so lean as to be scarcely edible. Indeed, the great bulk of them die of injuries suffered on their upward run or of starvation. Thousands are seen floating later in the season down the upper streams, bruised, torn and emaciated. The people out here have the impression that a salmon never feeds again after leaving the sea in its spawning journey, and that none of the vast millions which commence the voyage ever return. They spawn and die. This fish will spawn in a few weeks in the clear brooks and streams high up among the mountains. The eggs lie dormant until the warmth of next years' sun hatches them out. The small fry has then the clear water to commence its life in. It feeds, grows and runs down to the sea thereafter to do and die as its progenitors have been doing since the race began.
Nature's ways are very queer, and it seems to permit more inconceivable things to be done by its creatures beneath the water than upon the land. A fish disporting itself in a limpid stream or gently propelling itself deep down in the transparent sea, appears to be absolutely enjoying existence—to be reveling in his "dolce far niente," and yet it would seem that the whole finny family is spawned to bear the whips and spurs of most cruel fate. From the instant a little fellow emerges from the egg up to his fullest growth, he is always on the ragged edge of some bigger fish's maw. He climbs with intensest labor the rushing stream from the instinct of procreation, and then begins to die from slow inanition—the cruelest of deaths. Experiment has shown that the fish learns nothing by study—everything is from instinct; that he has no sense whatever. Lucky fish: for surely to him ignoranceisbliss.
TWO HUNDRED MILES ON A COWCATCHER.
Three years ago I rode along a part of Thompson Canyon and down the whole of Fraser into Vancouver, some 200 miles, on the cowcatcher. It is the most delightful of all railroad running. We are ahead of the train. We seem not to be on wheels, but simply to be gliding along the iron way, propelled by an invisible impulse. There is no jar, no dust nor cinders. Over trestles a hundred feet high of frail and creaking timbers we rush without the least uneasiness or anxiety, for the machine and train being behind us and unseen we do not realize that hundreds of tons are being whirled over the frail bridge-work, and forget that there is anything heavier upon them than our own weight; onward we slide; a turn brings us face to face with a mighty precipice; we are rushing headlong against the rocky barrier when a sudden bend around a jutting point, reveals before us a hole in the rocky mass; into it we are shot—into the dark; a roar is heard behind us as if a thousand demons are after us in full chase; a glimmer of light steals along the iron ribbons before us, and then we burst into the broad day with a new and beautiful scene pictured for our delight; down below us rushes the river through deep fissures between the rocky walls; high above us lift mountains cutting the sky with bands of snow along the upper heights; past Indian hamlets, near which sits a squaw or two and lounges a lazy buck, while their children look at us as we fly along in indolent carelessness. Tunnel after tunnel, about thirty in all, swallow and then throw us forth. Once on the Thompson, the iron ribbons ahead rest one on the ground, the other on timbers projecting over a precipice. Over it we glide. Fifteen hundred feet below runs the silvery stream, so nearly under us that we think we could pitch a penny into it. But so lightly do we skim along that we feel no tremor. Ah! mine was a beautiful ride. It was three years ago, but as I looked at the same road as we passed along it a few days ago, the whole picture came back to me, and I feel sure the memory of it will live with me while I live.
Up the Thompson we came now, and saw some beautiful valley farms early at daybreak, with bright wheat fields, cozy homes, and sleek-looking stock. The mountains above were mighty uplifted long mounds, not rocky, broken nor peaked. Pines were scattered over them as if they were planted in upland parks—isolated trees, just enough to make parks bright, while over the ground was spread a carpet of velvet of a brownish drab. This effect was from the low bunch grass, now dried into hay. This grass is short, but sustains all winter through cattle in oily fat. The Thompson finally came up to a level with us, and was a clear and dignified river, making the meadows green. After a while it broadened into a great lake—the "Shuswap"—along whose pebbly shore, under great sloping mountains, we ran for over a third of a hundred miles. The Shuswap is an irregular sheet with long arms. No where is it much if any over a mile wide. High mountains lift from the water and mount upward in gentle slopes, well wooded. In a few places there are tiny plains at their feet. On these are the wig-wams of the Shuswap tribe of Indians.
Leaving this beautiful sheet we entered a range of mountains lofty and grand, with now and then a shoulder mantled with snow. Three years ago this range was all green with noble trees; now, as far as we could see, the fire fiend has done its work, leaving forests of tall trunks in gray, with a fresh undergrowth beginning to spring. Even yet, however, the Gold Mountains are a noble range.
It would seem we had seen enough of the grand. But wait. We reach a broad flowing river coming from the north. It is white with detritus ground from the eternal ribs of earth by the irresistible march of glaciers. It is our own Columbia, which has been paying her Majesty's American land a short visit before it sweeps with majesty towards the Pacific. We cross this and enter upon a wealth of mountain scenery, which belittles what we have passed through, though we thought it so fine. High to the right lifts a monarch capped with snow. High to our left is a huge pair of twins, the double head of a monster.
Our iron horse pants along a rushing river cutting with foaming torrent through chasms so narrow that the father of our land could have leaped across them in the spring-tide of his manhood. Up, up we climb, twenty-eight hundred feet in less than fifty miles. The river along which we climb is always lashing itself into creamy foam; now in rushing rapids, then in a succession of leaps one after the other, as if in mad frolic; now almost throwing its spray into our faces; then two or three hundred feet down in rocky canyons, and at one place through a notched and jagged cleft in the rock, over two hundred feet deep, and only twenty-five feet wide at the top. This is the Albert Canyon. Mountains tower over us, pile upon pile, thickly tree clad below, but to a larger extent gray with lofty trunks all dead and bare from forest fires. I do not know but these fires have been a friend to the tourist. For his vision is widened.
When I was there three years since, there had been in the Selkirks but few destructive fires. The forests were so dense that we often lost fine bits of view, which are now free to us. We look aloft and see great snow-fields, glimmering through openings between the mountains nearest us. We put our glasses up and catch the green tints in furrowed snow masses which tell us we are looking at glaciers. Up! up! The mountains become higher and the precipices bolder and the torrent at our feet more fierce and foaming. We halt for a moment at Illecillewact, said to be a rich mining camp. Far over us thousands of feet, on the side of the mountain, so steep that it seems to us a sheer precipice, we see what looks like a mere burrow for a wild animal. Men are delving through it in quest of silver ore.
After a while we see what appears to be another railroad coming down the mountain side parallel to ours, and a couple of hundred feet above us. A wise one smiles and tells us it is our own road which here makes a letter "S"—a loop almost doubling upon itself, and a large part of it on winding trestles. The trestles creak and groan beneath us, but we bend around and back upon them, and soon our whistle screams. A quick turn around a spur reveals a frozen stream bending over a lofty mountain brow, like a curtain of white with irregular streaks of pale green, and sending its foot almost down to our level. But bend your head back. Far up over us is Sir Donald piercing the sky; a sharp pointed three-faced rock lifting over 11,500 feet, under whose shadow we will halt at Glacier House, over 4,000 feet above the sea, while the pointed peak above us, all rock, stands about a mile and a half higher and so close that one would think a man on its pinnacle could almost throw a stone to the platform on which stands the pretty hotel.
We stop a day here. I spent three or four days there three years ago and would never pass it without a few hours' pause. Few spots on earth afford a sublimer picture than is seen from Glacier House in the Selkirks. It is a vast auditorium; stage and audience-hall, not a half mile wide, with lofty mountains stretching along either side six or seven miles—all covered by noble trees below and snow sheeted above. Sir Donald cold and rocky, is on one side, glaciered heights on the other.
HEMMED IN BY ROCKY HEIGHTS.
A mighty glacier hangs down like a snowy drop curtain over the rear of the auditorium, while a straight line of mountain heights encloses the stage. This line is jagged and toothed on its crest, with lofty glaciers glistening under the pinnacles. Sitting on the platform in front of the pretty station hotel just before sunset, watching the sunlight climb the rocky heights eastward, while those to the west were sinking into grayness, and then a little later as the daylight dodges into twilight and all becomes first a mellow gray, cold and repellent, except over the snow, which seems to emit a light all its own—sitting thus one sees a picture equaled in few spots of the world.
The entire scene is enclosed by mountains, as in a great oblong pit with corners rounded off, no outlet being apparent. The mountains seem to close in upon the glorious picture. It should be seen just before and after sunset and until the lessening twilight is swallowed up, and then in the morning, when the grayness high above seems crystallized. The very light encircling the peaks seem frozen until a sun ray kisses Sir Donald's peak. The cold rocks then catch a yellow glow and the snows below ere long are tinted with pink. Three years ago I looked at it morning and evening for three or four days, and on this trip one morning and evening.
A short run brings the Eastward bound traveler to Rogers pass, one of the ruggedest ever traversed by railroad. Lofty rocky mountains are all around with cold glaciers hanging near their crests.
The drop down to the eastward from the summit of the Selkirk Mountains to the western edge of the Rockies is all the way grand. We again cross the Columbia, which runs north skirting the Selkirk range, and flows again southward past the point crossed by us two days before and seventy miles back but a hundred and twenty five around. Then for some miles we look upon these two mighty ranges, one on our right and the other on our left. Both are lofty, broken, and pinnacled, and snow clothes many summits of each, yet they are strangely unlike each other—as much so as if belonging to widely distant regions.
As we ran up the Columbia the day grew hot, until at Golden it was absolutely sweltering. We had felt nothing like it for nearly a month. We were glad to quit the Columbia and enter a mighty gorge cooled by the sprays from the Kicking Horse, a wildly rushing river coming down from the summit of the Rockies. Up this foaming torrent, between lofty mountains, along gorges barely wide enough to permit the river to leap between, the road cuts its way in galleries of rocks; through tunnels now on one side of the river, then on the other, and enters and winds high up a broad valley between great mountains stretching north and south. It would seem the climb was ended, but not so. We have to take some fifteen or more miles among the loftiest mountains of the great backbone of the continent, looking up ever at gray rocks piercing the sky 6,000 to 8,000 feet almost sheer over us; looking down into narrow valleys or rather gorges 1,000 and 2,000 feet below us. Almost overwhelmed by nature's grandeur, we climb, while a great engine puffs and groans before us, and another pants and wheezes pushing behind. Even with these two great iron horses, tugging behind and before, we make not much more speed than a rapid pedestrian could walk were he on the level. We are climbing a grade of about 200 feet in the mile.
SILVER LADEN MT. STEPHEN.
But see that line of timbering hugging the face of Mt. Stephen. A prospector from across the mighty gorge saw with his glass a quartz vein on Stephen. By perilous climbing along ledges he visited it, to find a rich ledge of silver ore. Yonder long gallery carved out of the rock's face is for miners to go to the vein to bore into the mountain's heart or wherever the vein leads them. They would tunnel through the fiery walls of Hades if pure free silver were floating on the top of the Devil's soup boiler.
I wonder if those fellows up in yonder gallery ever pause to take in the grandeur of the scenery thrown about them. The mighty Giver of Good heaped up those piles of grandeur and beauty. The preachers intimate that the imp of darkness tempts us poor mortals with gold and silver. Believing as they do in the existence of a personal devil outside of man's nature, they should bow down and beg him to be good natured until their race be safe. They are powerless to hurt him. Luther's bible hit empty air; to abuse the devil only makes one's throat sore, and some people really grow savage in their denunciation of Old Nick. I once met a really good, pious woman who hated bad words, but did not disdain to utter real cuss words when denouncing his Satanic Majesty. The Arab tribe call Satan the nameless one. Some preachers should follow suit. Abusing the devil has been done for countless ages, and to all appearances the old knave has as much power as when he poured sweet poison into Mother Eve's too willing ears. Poor thing! She was not used to apples, and a golden pippin was tempting. In these latter days it takes apples of real gold to win a woman, at least among the "four hundred." But my eye! a shower of such fruit can twine her plump arms about the devil's neck even when blue blazes are pouring from his benzine distilling lungs. But, pshaw! What a disposition a pious man has to preach. I must quit it.
It is hard to determine which affords the grandest scenery, the Selkirks or the Rockies. On a first run on this road probably nine out of ten would say the former, but the second or the third trip would put the latter fully up. They are of as different types as if separated by a continent. Both are broken, notched and peaked, yet they affect the beholder differently. The Selkirks are grand and terrible, the Rockies majestic and gloomy.
The Illiclliwact (Indian for rapid water) and the Kicking Horse, the two rivers which rush from the two ranges westward—the former into the Columbia at Revelstoke, the other into the same river a hundred and odd miles above at Golden—are somewhat different types of torrent rivers. The Kicking Horse on the summit at Hector, springs from a deep, dark, but calm lake a mile above the sea. A mile or so eastward, and a half a dozen feet higher at the actual summit, is a shallow little lake, or rather a system of short, deep morasses. A mild wind from the west would take their waters into the Bow River, which flows into the Saskatchewan, then through Lake Winnipeg and on to Hudson Bay, while a breeze from the East carries a part of their currents into the grand Columbia and then into the mighty Pacific.
How like the fate of men! A shower or a cloud of dust sent a mighty one to pine on a bleak isle in a far-off sea, and made another moderate man the idol of a nation and its chosen Nestor. An invisible line with a name separated the birthplaces of two men, and this simple separation made one of them the leader of a lost cause but the idol of millions, and the other the victorious hero whom history may call the savior of a nation. In our every-day life in modest places, we see the most trivial circumstances, mere straws, turning the fortunes of nearly all whom we have known intimately. It would probably amaze most people to find how small the thing was which sent them to high fortune, or led their feet into paths of mediocrity or on the road to adversity.
A run from nine to ten hours from Glacier, always through grand and majestic scenery and often among terrible and gloomy heights and gorges, brought us to Banff, near the western slope of the Rockies. Shortly after leaving Vancouver, we had mounted the observation car, and continued on one of them except at night, until well into the great plains east of the mountains. This system adds greatly to the pleasure of passing through fine scenery.
PANORAMIC BEAUTIES OF BANFF.
Banff is by many considered the gem of this great road, because of its beautiful location and also because of its warm and hot mineral springs. The Canadian Pacific company has erected here the most elegant and best appointed hotel which can be found in a wild mountainous region probably in the world. Indeed it will compare favorably with the best hostelries in the neighborhood of large cities.
Here in a wild basin of the mighty backbone of the continent, 2,300 miles from Montreal, nearly 1,000 from Winnipeg, and 600 from Vancouver, with no populous or productive lands contiguous, but surrounded by nature's boldest and roughest works, in which are the haunts of wild beasts—here one finds all the elegances and comforts of a city's suburbs; all of the delicacies and luxuries of a city hotel, coupled with the hygiene of a sanitarium, the ozone and bracing atmosphere of a lofty altitude, and the glorious scenery of a mountain fastness. The house is architecturally very fine and all its appointments are first class. It has a French Chef presiding over the kitchen, who sends to the table dishes to satisfy an epicure. The house and grounds are lighted by electricity which adds greatly to the beauty of the place at night. In the drawing rooms, surrounded by costly furniture, one can listen to music from a superb piano, and in the dining saloon can satisfy the most voracious or the most epicurean taste.
One can loiter lazily around the broad piazzas girdling the great hotel, and let vision lose itself among lofty, rocky, grotesque mountains, or sit in graceful Kiosk observatories overlooking a bold river tumbling near by in a furious cascade. One can watch the limpid, green waters of a large mountain stream meeting and unwillingly mingling with those of a milk-white, glacier-fed river, just below the vortex under the cascade. One can wander in pretty pine woods on gentle slopes; can drive or ride along well-graveled roads through the National Park, now along limpid streams, then on winding curves or mounting by zig-zag bold rocky heights; can bathe in porcelain tubs filled by hot mineral waters just from plutonic laboratories far below the mountain's foundations, and then sweat in soft blankets almost as white as snow, or can by a tunnel through lava rocks reach a grotto or cave scooped out by agencies of hot water—a veritable gothic room in the rock, lighted dimly from a small aperture in the apex. Here in this gem of a natatorium one can swim in water above blood heat, five feet deep and twenty-five from rim to rim. When satiated with his warm bath in this glorious pool, he can mount a great stalagmite on one side—a stalagmite resembling a huge mushroom—and a shower of cool water from a natural spring tumbles from above upon him, or he can stand waist deep in the warm embrace of the fluid while the cool sprays fall upon his head and shoulders.
If one prefers an outdoor swim he can splash in a sulphur spring forty feet across, of Nature's fashioning, while bubbling through sands at his feet water heated to 95 degrees rises and lures him to swimming depth. If he prefer a real genuine swim he finds it near the back door of the hotel in a tank a hundred feet long, in fresh cold water with the air barely taken off. In his room he has a soft bed to sleep upon, surrounded by tasty furniture, and eats in a large dining room attended by silent waiters, and provided with fruits, wines and viands fit to satisfy the most fastidious.
Close under the hotel an angler now and then catches a trout of over a pound weight, and in a lake a few miles off in the park is rewarded with speckled fellows of fine size, and with lake trout not infrequently running up to forty pounds. I met at Glacier Mr. E. S. P., of Chicago, with his family going west. He caught a fine lot of fish in Devil's Lake near Banff, one a lake trout weighing thirty-six pounds. There are few mountain resorts offering so many natural attractions as this Rocky Mountain hot spring.
The mountains around are nearly all built of horizontal stratified rocks. Some of them present curious resemblances. One is a mighty palace of several stories—each upper one receding back from the one below. It reminds me much of old oriental palaces visited when we were making our race with the sun. This palace-like appearance is, however, lost upon the majority of tourists, because one end of the mountain presents the likeness of a huge templar warrior reclining in miles of stature. This picture is so grotesque, that the other passes unobserved.
I cannot recall anywhere else in the world, a group of mountains, whose rocks are so distinctly horizontal in their beds, as those in this part of the Rockies. They look as if there had once been a vast upland plateau, which had been partly abraded and washed away, leaving lofty mountains more or less snow covered throughout the year, and many of them always clothed in mantles of white. The wear of countless eons of rains and frosts have made deep valleys and gorges and the beds of beautiful rivers, and rushing torrents, leaving the slopes of the mountains generally not too steep to afford footing for thick forests or for bands and copses of firs and pines. Now and then the mountains are so broken down as to present mighty precipices—clean cut cleavages, as if a single mountain had been split and sundered in two.
NORTHWESTERN PLAINS FRUITFUL.
My friend, the late visitor from Chicago to the Shah of Persia, whom we left, with his daughters, aboard ship at Nanaimo, overtook us at Banff, where we spent two days. He rarely enthuses over scenery and has little love of Nature or its beauties. Switzerland is to him worth one visit, but no more, and Tyrol is a bore. He loves travel, but to travel among the haunts of men and women, not of Nature. Berlin and London are pleasant places, but Paris is his paradise. He had been filled with ennui on the whole Alaskan journey, and had uttered but once an exclamation of pleasure, and that was when we sailed out of Glacier Bay. He then cried out, "Thank heaven our ship is turned homeward." Even he is really somewhat enthusiastic over the beauties of the Canadian road and is charmed by Banff. I suspect, however, all because of getting through quickly. He could enjoy the rush through towering mountains, because he was getting where he could revel in rising stocks.
The plains east of the mountains on this road are beautiful. Great sweeps of land in more or less lifting benches stretch north and south as far as the eye can reach; not bleak or parched or covered with the dead ash color of sage brush, as the same plains are south of our boundary, but fairly green and restful to the eye. We tried to go back in fancy to long ago years, when countless thousands buffalo marched in single file along the trails which they cut down into the hard soil, and which are yet seen crossing our road nearly north and south. We tried to count the deep buffalo wallows, bored by horns and scooped out by hoofs, where the shaggy bulls tossed the dust and sent up clouds which made the air thick for many a mile around. We saw in fancy the heavy maned bulls and heard their bellowings, which won the gaze and admiration of the mild eyed cows. We recalled how these thousands of wallows would be filled by the next rains, and how succeeding herds would bathe in the mud, and then march onward a moving mass ofthick mortar. Thousands of these wallows are seen, and for several hundred miles the furrowed trails are rarely out of sight for many miles. They generally run in nearly parallel lines from north to south; now and then deflected to get around an Alkali lake or pool: or where old leaders had scented pure water ahead and bent their way toward it, and all of the mighty hosts following the lead. What countless thousands there must have been! The Indians killed them, but killed them for food or for raiment. The white man came; he who was fashioned in the image of his God; he who claims to be a follower of Him who taught charity to all things and gentleness of spirit—he came in his boasted civilization—born of families whose pedigrees run back a thousand years—and killed and slew in the mere love of killing—killed and slew simply because he could kill and slay. One of the cruelest wars ever waged, was the insane crusade against the bison of the plains. Now these plains will know no more forever their old tenants.
Occasionally troops of horses and herds of cattle are seen, but for nearly a day's ride there are only scattered farms, and they are as yet not prosperous; but in Eastern Assiniboia and in Manitoba farms became more frequent and crops looked well, until finally in the latter province broad fields of fine wheat and oats and farmhouses covered the prairie as far as we could see. The improvement in the prairie land, running some 200 miles on our line, has wonderfully grown since I was there three years ago. The breadth of grain standing or being harvested is great. I am told there will be a yield this year of twenty million bushels. These people boast that their hard-shell wheat is decidedly superior to that of Dakota and Minnesota. It is now very cold and frosts are feared. The wheat is largely out of danger, but oats need some two or more weeks of good weather yet. Root crops seem good on the plains where wheat is not yet a success. The plains are in Assiniboia, the prairies in Manitoba.
At Winnipeg my friends went south. I continued on the rail to Port Arthur. There is not much worth seeing east of Winnipeg. Thin pine land of small trees are seen, generally flat, with rounded rising ground back from the road; all more or less covered with bowlders of granite, many of great size. Lakes and lakelets abound. My daughter remarked that in Yellowstone Park there was a fearful waste of hot water, in Alaska of ice, and here of gray granite. The country back of Port Arthur is said to be rich in mines. I can believe it. Nothing is made in vain, and this county is evidently fit for nothing else except mines. The public rooms of the hotels seem to be frequented by only two classes of men—miners and fishers. Here a knot talked of minerals and claims, there of three or four and six pounders. The Nipigon, near by, is said to be the finest of trout streams. Mr. Higinbotham, of Chicago, and sons left the day before our arrival after having made fine catches. The people seemed much amused at their anxiety to save a pailful. They chartered a steamer to take them and their fry, quickly to Duluth.
PORT ARTHUR AND LAKE SUPERIOR.
Port Arthur has a beautiful site on a gentle slope, with an elevated bench behind for residences. If it were in the States it would be boomed. It is Canada's only port on Lake Superior, and in Thunder Bay has a grand harbor. The weather is so cool, throughout the summer, that evening fires are rarely dispensed with. This should be considered a terminus for the C.P.R.R., at least for all heavy freights and grain. The road has now two or three 1,200,000 bushel capacity elevators, and I am informed intends immediately to build several more. These will enable it to move the grain from Manitoba, and hold it during the winter and until the opening of navigation.
We had intended continuing by rail to Sudbury, north of Lake Huron, but finding that we should pass all the interesting country by night we halted a day and then boarded the Alberta, the Canadian Pacific railroad steamer, a Clyde-built vessel of some 2,000 tonnage, with clean and comfortable rooms, polite officers and servants, and in every way first-class. The break on the great run from ocean to ocean on this longest of the world's trunk lines, by taking steamer between Owen Sound on Georgian Bay and Port Arthur, is a most agreeable one.