Copyright by F. H. Nowell, Seattle Four Beauties of Cape Prince of Wales with Sled Reindeer of the American Missionary HerdCopyright by F. H. Nowell, SeattleFour Beauties of Cape Prince of Wales with Sled Reindeer of the American Missionary Herd
The interior of the Bristol Bay country has not been explored. It is sparsely populated by Innuit, or Eskimo, who live in primitive fashion in small settlements,—usually on high bluffs near a river. They make a poor living by hunting and fishing. Their food is largely salmon, fresh and dried; game, seal, and walrus are delicacies. The "higher" the food the greater delicacy is it considered. Decayed salmon-heads and the decaying carcass of a whale that has been cast upon the beach, by their own abominable odors summon the natives for miles to a feast. Their food is all cooked with rancid oil.
Their dwellings are more primitive than those of the island natives, for they have clung to the barabaras and other ancient structures that were in use among the Aleutians when the Russians first discovered them. Near these dwellings are the drying-frames—so familiar along the Yukon—from which hang thousands of red-fleshed salmon drying in the sun. Little houses are erected on rude pole scaffoldings, high out of the reach of dogs, for the storing of this fish when it has become "ukala" and for other provisions. These are everywhere known as "caches."
The Innuit's summer home is very different from his winter home. It is erected above ground, of small pole frames, roofed with skins and open in front—somewhat like an Indian tepee. There is no opening in the roof, all cooking being done in the open air in summer.
These natives were once thrifty hunters and trappers of wild animals, from the reindeer down to the beaver and marten, but the cannery life has so debauched them that they have no strength left for this energetic work.
Formerly every Innuit settlement contained a "kashga," or town hall, which was built after the fashion of all winter houses, only larger. There the men gathered to talk and manage the affairs of their small world. It was a kind of "corner grocery" or "back-room" of a village drug store. The men usually slept there, and in themornings their wives arose, cooked their breakfast, and carried it to them in the kashga, turning their backs while their husbands ate—it being considered exceedingly bad form for a woman to look at a man when he is eating in public, although they think nothing of bathing together. The habits of the people are nauseatingly filthy, and the interiors of their dwellings must be seen to be appreciated.
Near the canneries the natives obtain work during the summer, but soon squander their wages in debauches and are left, when winter arrives, in a starving condition.
The season is very short in Bristol Bay, but the "run" of salmon is enormous. When this district is operating thirteen canneries, it packs each day two hundred and fifty thousand fish. In Nushagak Bay the fish frequently run so heavily that they catch in the propellers of launches and stop the engines.
Bristol Bay has always been a dangerous locality to navigate. It is only by the greatest vigilance and the most careful use of the lead, upon approaching the shore, that disaster can be averted.
Nearly all the canneries in this region are operated by the Alaska Packers Association, which also operates the greater number of canneries in Alaska.
In 1907 the value of food fishes taken from Alaskan waters was nearly ten millions of dollars; in the forty years since the purchase of that country, one hundred millions, although up to 1885 the pack was insignificant. At the present time it exceeds by more than half a million cases the entire pack of British Columbia, Puget Sound, Columbia River, and the Oregon and Washington coasts.
In 1907 forty-four canneries packed salmon in Alaska, and those on Bristol Bay were of the most importance.
The Nushagak River rivals the Karluk as a salmon stream, but not in picturesque beauty. The Nushagakand Wood rivers were both closed during the past season by order of the President, to protect the salmon industry of the future.
Cod is abundant in Behring Sea, Bristol Bay, and south of the Aleutian, Shumagin, and Kadiak islands, covering an area of thirty thousand miles. Halibut is plentiful in all the waters of southeastern Alaska. This stupid-looking fish is wiser than it appears, and declines to swim into the parlor of a net. It is still caught by hook and line, is packed in ice, and sent, by regular steamer, to Seattle—whence it goes in refrigerator cars to the markets of the east.
Herring, black cod, candle-fish, smelt, tom-cod, whitefish, black bass, flounders, clams, crabs, mussels, shrimp, and five species of trout—steelhead, Dolly Varden, cutthroat, rainbow, and lake—are all found in abundance in Alaska.
Cook, entering Bristol Bay in 1778, named it for the Earl of Bristol, with difficulty avoiding its shoals. He saw the shoaled entrance to a river which he called Bristol River, but which must have been the Nushagak. He saw many salmon leaping, and found them in the maws of cod.
The following day, seeing a high promontory, he sent Lieutenant Williamson ashore. Possession of the country in his Majesty's name was taken, and a bottle was left containing the names of Cook's ships and the date of discovery. To the promontory was given the name which it retains of Cape Newenham.
Proceeding up the coast Cook met natives who were of a friendly disposition, but who seemed unfamiliar with the sight of white men and vessels; they were dressed somewhat like Aleutians, wearing, also, skin hoods and wooden bonnets.
The ships were caught in the shoals of Kuskokwim Bay, but Cook does not appear to have discovered this greatriver, which is the second in size of Alaskan rivers and whose length is nine hundred miles. In the bay the tides have a fifty-foot rise and fall, entering in a tremendous bore. This vicinity formerly furnished exceedingly fine black bear skins.
Cook's surgeon died of consumption and was buried on an island which was named Anderson, in his memory. Upon an island about four leagues in circuit a rude sledge was found, and the name of Sledge Island was bestowed upon it. He entered Norton Sound, but only "suspected" the existence of a mighty river, completely missing the Yukon.
He named the extreme western point of North America, which plunges out into Behring Sea, almost meeting the East Cape of Siberia, Cape Prince of Wales. In the centre of the strait are the two Diomede Islands, between which the boundary line runs, one belonging to Russia, the other to the United States.
Cook sailed up into the Frozen Ocean and named Icy Cape, narrowly missing disaster in the ice pack. There he saw many herds of sea-horses, or walrus, lying upon the ice in companies numbering many hundreds. They huddled over one another like swine, roaring and braying; so that in the night or in a fog they gave warning of the nearness of ice. Some members of the herd kept watch; they aroused those nearest to them and warned them of the approach of enemies. Those, in turn, warned others, and so the word was passed along in a kind of ripple until the entire herd was awake. When fired upon, they tumbled one over another into the sea, in the utmost confusion. The female defends her young to the very last, and at the sacrifice of her own life, if necessary, fighting ferociously.
The walrus does not in the least resemble a horse, and it is difficult to understand whence the name arose. It issomewhat like a seal, only much larger. Those found by Cook in the Arctic were from nine to twelve feet in length and weighed about a thousand pounds. Their tusks have always been valuable, and have greatly increased in value of recent years, as the walrus diminish in number.
Cook named Cape Denbigh and Cape Darby on either side of Norton Bay; and Besborough Island south of Cape Denbigh.
Going ashore, he encountered a family of natives which he and Captain King describe in such wise that no one, having read the description, can ever enter Norton Sound without recalling it. The family consisted of a man, his wife, and a child; and a fourth person who bore the human shape, and that was all, for he was the most horribly, the most pitiably, deformed cripple ever seen, heard of, or imagined. The husband was blind; and all were extremely unpleasant in appearance. The underlips were bored.
These natives would have evidently sold their souls for iron. For four knives made out of old iron hoop, they traded four hundred pounds of fish—and Cook must have lost his conscience overboard with his anchor in Kuskokwim Bay. He recovered the anchor!
He gave the girl-child a few beads, "whereupon the mother burst into tears, then the father, then the cripple, and, at last, the girl herself."
Many different passages, or sentences, have been called "the most pathetic ever written"; but, myself, I confess that I have never been so powerfully or so lastingly moved by any sentence as I was when I first read that one of Cook's. Almost equalling it, however, in pathos is the simple account of Captain King's of his meeting with the same family. He was on shore with a party obtaining wood when these people approached in a canoe. He beckoned to them to land, and the husband and wife came ashore. He gave the woman a knife, saying that he wouldgive her a larger one for some fish. She made signs for him to follow them.
"I had proceeded with them about a mile, when the man, in crossing a stony beach, fell down and cut his foot very much. This made me stop, upon which the woman pointed to the man's eyes, which, I observed, were covered with a thick, white film. He afterward kept close to his wife, who apprised him of the obstacles in his way. The woman had a little child on her back, covered with a hood, and which I took for a bundle until I heard it cry. At about two miles distant we came upon their open skin-boat, which was turned on its side, the convex part toward the wind, and served for their house. I was now made to perform a singular operation upon the man's eyes. First, I was directed to hold my breath; afterward, to breathe on the diseased eyes; and next, to spit on them. The woman then took both my hands and, pressing them to his stomach, held them there while she related some calamitous history of her family, pointing sometimes to her husband, sometimes to a frightful cripple belonging to the family, and sometimes to her child."
Berries, birch, willow, alders, broom, and spruce were found. Beer was brewed of the spruce.
Cook now sailed past that divinely beautiful shore upon which St. Michael's is situated, and named Stuart Island and Cape Stephens, but did not hear the Yukon calling him. He did find shoal water, very much discolored and muddy, and "inferred that a considerable river runs into the sea." If he had only guessedhowconsiderable! Passing south, he named Clerk's, Gore's, and Pinnacle Islands, and returned to Unalaska.
A famous engineering feat was the building of the White Pass and Yukon Railway from Skaguay to White Horse. Work was commenced on this road in May, 1898, and finished in January, 1900.
Its completion opened the interior of Alaska and the Klondike to the world, and brought enduring fame to Mr. M. J. Heney, the builder, and Mr. E. C. Hawkins, the engineer.
In 1897 Mr. Heney went North to look for a pass through the Coast Range. Up to that time travel to the Klondike had been about equally divided between the Dyea, Skaguay, and Jack Dalton trails; the route by way of the Stikine and Hootalinqua rivers; and the one to St. Michael's by ocean steamers and thence up the Yukon by small and, at that time, inferior steamers.
Mr. Heney and his engineers at once grasped the possibilities of the "Skaguay Trail." This pass was first explored and surveyed by Captain Moore, of Mr. Ogilvie's survey of June, 1887, who named it White Pass, for Honorable Thomas White, Canadian Minister of the Interior. It could not have been more appropriately named, even though named for a man, as there is never a day in the warmest weather that snow-peaks are not in view to the traveller over this pass; while from September to June the trains wind through sparkling and unbroken whiteness.
Mr. Heney, coming out to finance the road, faced seriousdifficulties and discouragements in America. Owing to the enormous cost of this short piece of road, as planned, as well as the daring nature of its conception, the boldest financiers of this country, upon investigation, declined to entertain the proposition.
Mr. Heney was a young man who, up to that time, although possessed of great ability, had made no marked success—his opportunity not having as yet presented itself.
Recovering from his first disappointment, he undauntedly voyaged to England, where some of the most conservative capitalists, moved and convinced by his enthusiasm and his clear descriptions of the northern country and its future, freely financed the railroad whose successful building was to become one of the most brilliant achievements of the century.
They were entirely unacquainted with Mr. Heney, and after this proof of confidence in him and his project, the word "fail" dropped out of the English language, so far as the intrepid young builder was concerned.
"After that," he said, "Icould notfail."
He returned and work was at once begun. A man big of body, mind, and heart, he was specially fitted for the perilous and daring work. Calm, low-voiced, compelling in repressed power and unswerving courage and will, he was a harder worker than any of his men.
Associated with him was a man equally large and equally gifted. Mr. Hawkins is one of the most famous engineers of this country, if not of any country.
The difficult miles that these two men tramped; the long, long hours of each day that they worked; the hardships that they endured, unflinching; the appalling obstacles that they overcame—are a part of Alaskan history.
The first twenty miles of this road from Skaguay costtwo millions of dollars; the average cost to the summit was a hundred thousand dollars a mile, and now and then a single mile cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
The road is built on mountainsides so precipitous that men were suspended from the heights above by ropes, to prevent disaster while cutting grades. At one point a cliff a hundred and twenty feet high, eighty feet deep, and twenty feet in width was blasted entirely away for the road-bed.
Thirty-five hundred men in all were employed in constructing the road, but thirty of whom died, of accident and disease, during the construction. Taking into consideration the perilous nature of the work, the rigors of the winter climate, and the fact that work did not cease during the worst weather, this is a remarkably small proportion.
A force of finer men never built a railroad. Many were prospectors, eager to work their way into the land of gold; others were graduates of eastern colleges; all were self-respecting, energetic men.
Skaguay is a thousand miles from Seattle; and from the latter city and Vancouver, men, supplies, and all materials were shipped. This was not one of the least of the hindrances to a rapid completion of the road. Rich strikes were common occurrences at that time. In one day, after the report of a new discovery in the Atlin country had reached headquarters, fifteen hundred men drew their pay and stampeded for the new gold fields.
But all obstacles to the building of the road were surmounted. Within eighteen months from the date of beginning work it was completed to White Horse, a distance of one hundred and eleven miles, and trains were running regularly.
A legend tells us that an old Indian chief saw the canoeof his son upset in the waves lashed by the terrific winds that blow down between the mountains. The lad was drowned before the helpless father's eyes, and in his sorrow the old chief named the place Shkag-ua, or "Home of the North Wind." It has been abbreviated to Skaguay; and has been even further disfigured by aw, in place of theu.
Between salt water and the foot of White Pass Trail, two miles up the canyon, in the winter of 1897-1898, ten thousand men were camped. Some were trying to get their outfits packed over the trail; others were impatiently waiting for the completion of the wagon road which George A. Brackett was building. This road was completed almost to the summit when the railroad overtook it and bought its right of way. It is not ten years old; yet it is always called "theoldBrackett road."
At half-past nine of a July morning our train left Skaguay for White Horse. We traversed the entire length of the town before entering the canyon. There are low, brown flats at the mouth of the river, which spreads over them in shallow streams fringed with alders and cottonwoods.
Above, on both sides, rose the gray, stony cliffs. Here and there were wooded slopes; others were rosy with fireweed that moved softly, like clouds.
We soon passed the ruined bridge of the Brackett road, the water brawling noisily, gray-white, over the stones.
Our train was a long one drawn by four engines. There were a baggage-car, two passenger-cars, and twenty flat and freight cars loaded with boilers, machinery, cattle, chickens, merchandise, and food-stuffs of all kinds.
After crossing Skaguay River the train turns back, climbing rapidly, and Skaguay and Lynn Canal are seen shining in the distance.... We turn again. The river foams between mountains of stone, hundreds of feet below—sofar below that the trees growing sparsely along its banks seem as the tiniest shrubs.
The Brackett road winds along the bed of the river, while the old White Pass, or Heartbreak, Trail climbs and falls along the stone and crumbling shale of the opposite mountain—in many places rising to an altitude of several hundred feet, in others sinking to a level with the river.
The Brackett road ends at White Pass City, where, ten years ago, was the largest tent-city in the world; and where now are only the crumbling ruins of a couple of log cabins, silence, and loneliness.
At White Pass City that was, the old Trail of Heartbreak leads up the canyon of the north fork of the Skaguay, directly away from the railroad. The latter makes a loop of many miles and returns to the canyon hundreds of feet above its bed. The scenery is of constantly increasing grandeur. Cascades, snow-peaks, glaciers, and overhanging cliffs of stone make the way one of austere beauty. In two hours and a half we climb leisurely, with frequent stops, from the level of the sea to the summit of the pass; and although skirting peaks from five to eight thousand feet in height, we pass through only one short tunnel.
It is a thrilling experience. The rocking train clings to the leaning wall of solid stone. A gulf of purple ether sinks sheer on the other side—so sheer, so deep, that one dare not look too long or too intently into its depth. Hundreds of feet below, the river roars through its narrow banks, and in many places the train overhangs it. In others, solid rock cliffs jut out boldly over the train.
After passing through the tunnel, the train creeps across the steel cantilever bridge which seems to have been flung, as a spider flings his glistening threads, from cliff to cliff, two hundred and fifteen feet above the river, foaming white over the immense boulders that here barricade its headlong race to the sea.
Beautiful and impressive though this trip is in the green time and the bloom time of the year, it remains for the winter to make it sublime.
The mountains are covered deeply with snow, which drifts to a tremendous depth in canyons and cuts. Through these drifts the powerful rotary snow-plough cleaves a white and glistening tunnel, along which the train slowly makes its way. The fascinating element of momentary peril—of snow-slides burying the train—enters into the winter trip.
Near Clifton one looks down upon an immense block of stone, the size of a house but perfectly flat, beneath which three men were buried by a blast during the building of the road. The stone is covered with grass and flowers and is marked with a white cross.
At the summit, twenty miles from Skaguay, is a red station named White Pass. A monument marks the boundary between the United States and Yukon Territory. The American flag floats on one side, the Canadian on the other. A cone of rocks on the crest of the hill leading away from the sea marks the direction the boundary takes.
The White Pass Railway has an average grade of three per cent, and it ascends with gradual, splendid sweeps around mountainsides and projecting cliffs.
The old trail is frequently called "Dead Horse Trail." Thousands of horses and mules were employed by the stampeders. The poor beasts were overloaded, overworked, and, in many instances, treated with unspeakable cruelty. It was one of the shames of the century, and no humane person can ever remember it without horror.
At one time in 1897 more than five thousand dead horses were counted on the trail. Some had lost their footing and were dashed to death on the rocks below; others had sunken under their cruel burdens in utter exhaustion;others had been shot; and still others had been brutally abandoned and had slowly starved to death.
"What became of the horses," I asked an old stampeder, "when you reached Lake Bennett? Did you sell them?"
"Lord, no, ma'am," returned he, politely; "there wa'n't nothing left of 'em to sell. You see, they was dead."
"But I mean the ones that did not die."
"There wa'n't any of that kind, ma'am."
"Do you mean," I asked, in dismay, "that they all died?—that none survived that awful experience?"
"That's about it, ma'am. When we got to Lake Bennett there wa'n't any more use for horses. Nobody was goin' the other way—and if they had been, the horses that reached Lake Bennett wa'n't fit to stand alone, let alone pack. The ones that wa'n't shot, died of starvation. Yes, ma'am, it made a man's soul sick."
Boundary lines are interesting in all parts of the world; but the one at the summit of the White Pass is of unusual historic interest. Side by side float the flags of America and Canada. They are about twenty yards from the little station, and every passenger left the train and walked to them, solely to experience a big patriotic American, or Canadian, thrill; to strut, glow, and walk back to the train again. Myself, I gave thanks to God, silently and alone, that those two flags were floating side by side there on that mountain, beside the little sapphire lake, instead of at the head of Chilkoot Inlet.
There are Canadian and United States inspectors of customs at the summit; also a railway agent. Their families live there with them, and there is no one else and nothing else, save the little sapphire lake lying in the bare hills.
Its blue waves lipped the porch whereon sat the young, sweet-faced wife of the Canadian inspector, with her baby in its carriage at her side.
This bit of liquid sapphire, scarcely larger than an artificial pond in a park, is really one of the chief sources of the Yukon—which, had these clear waters turned toward Lynn Canal, instead of away from it, might have never been. It seems so marvellous. The merest breath, in the beginning, might have toppled their liquid bulk over into the canyon through which we had so slowly and so enchantingly mounted, and in an hour or two they might have forced their foaming, furious way to the ocean. But some power turned the blue waters to the north and set them singing down through the beautiful chain of lakes—Lindeman, Bennett, Tagish, Marsh, Labarge—winding, widening, past ramparts and mountains, through canyons and plains, to Behring Sea, twenty-three hundred miles from this lonely spot.
This beginning of the Yukon is called the Lewes River. Far away, in the Pelly Mountains, the Pelly River rises and flows down to its confluence with the Lewes at old Fort Selkirk, and the Yukon is born of their union.
The Lewes has many tributaries, the most important of which is the Hootalinqua—or, as the Indians named it, Teslin—having its source in Teslin Lake, near the source of the Stikine River.
After leaving the summit the railway follows the shores of the river and the lakes, and the way is one of loveliness rather than grandeur. The saltish atmosphere is left behind, and the air tings with the sweetness of mountain and lake.
We had eaten an early breakfast, and we did not reach an eating station until we arrived at the head of Lake Bennett at half after one o'clock; and then we were given fifteen minutes in which to eat our lunch and get back to the train.
I do not think I have ever been so hungry in my life—andfifteen minutes! The dining room was clean and attractive; two long, narrow tables, or counters, extended the entire length of the room. They were decorated with great bouquets of wild flowers; the sweet air from the lake blew in through open windows and shook the white curtains out into the room.
The tables were provided with good food, all ready to be eaten. There were ham sandwiches made of lean ham. It was not edged with fat and embittered with mustard; it must have been baked, too, because no boiled ham could be so sweet. There were big brown lima beans, also baked, not boiled, and dill-pickles—no insipid pin-moneys, but good, sour, delicious dills! There were salads, home-made bread, "salt-rising" bread and butter, cakes and cookies and fruit—and huckleberry pie. Blueberries, they are called in Alaska, but they are our own mountain huckleberries.
No twelve-course luncheon, with a different wine for each course, could impress itself upon my memory as did that lunch-counter meal. We ate as children eat; with their pure, animal enjoyment and satisfaction. For fifteen minutes we had not a desire in the world save to gratify our appetites with plain, wholesome food. There was no crowding, no selfishness and rudeness,—as there had been in that wild scene on the excursion-boat, where the struggle had been for place rather than for food,—but a polite consideration for one another. And outside the sun shone, the blue waves sparkled and rippled along the shore, and their music came in through the open windows.
Here, in 1897, was a city of tents. Several thousand men and women camped here, waiting for the completion of boats and rafts to convey themselves and their outfits down the lakes and the river to the golden land of their dreams.
Standing between cars, clinging to a rattling brake, Imade the acquaintance of Cyanide Bill, and he told me about it.
"Tents!" said he. "Did you say tents? Hunh! Why, lady, tents was as thick here in '97 and '98 as seeds on a strawberry. They was so thick it took a man an hour to find his own. Hunh! You tripped up every other step on a tent-peg. I guess nobody knows anything about tents unless he was mushin' around Lake Bennett in the summer of '97. From five to ten thousand men and women was camped here off an' on. Fresh ones by the hundred come strugglin', sweatin', dyin', in over the trail every day, and every day hundreds got their rafts finished, bundled their things and theirselves on to 'em, and went tearin' and yellin' down the lake, gloatin' over the poor tired-out wretches that just got in. Often as not they come sneakin' back afoot without any raft and without any outfit and worked their way back to the states to get another. Them that went slow, went sure, and got in ahead of the rushers.
"I wisht you could of seen the tent town!—young fellows right out of college flauntin' around as if they knew somethin'; old men, stooped and gray-headed; gamblers, tin horns, cut-throats, and thieves; honest women, workin' their way in with their husbands or sons, their noses bent to the earth, with heavy packs on their backs, like men; and gay, painted dance-hall girls, sailin' past 'em on horseback and dressed to kill and livin' on the fat of the land. I bet more good women went to the bad on this here layout than you could shake a stick at. It seemed to get on to their nerves to struggle along, week after week, packin' like animals, sufferin' like dogs, et up by mosquitoes and gnats, pushed and crowded out by men—and then to see them gay girls go singin' by, livin' on luxuries, men fallin' all over theirselves to wait on 'em, champagne to drink—it sure did get on to their nerves!
Copyright by F. H. Nowell, Seattle Council City and Solomon River Railroad—A Characteristic Landscape of Seward PeninsulaCopyright by F. H. Nowell, SeattleCouncil City and Solomon River Railroad—A Characteristic Landscape of Seward Peninsula
"You see, somehow, up here, in them days, things didn't seem the way they do down below. Nature kind of gets in her work ahead of custom up here. Wrong don't look so terrible different from right to a woman a thousand miles from civilization. When she sees women all around her walkin' on flowers, and her own feet blistered and bleedin' on stones and thorns, she's pretty apt to ask herself whether bein' good and workin' like a horse pays. And up here on the trail in '97 the minute a woman begun to ask herself that question, it was all up with her. The end was in plain sight, like the nose on a man's face. The dance hall on in Dawson answered the question practical.
"Of course, lots of 'em went in straight and stayed straight; and they're the ones that made Dawson and saved Dawson. You get a handful of good women located in a minin'-camp and you can build up a town, and you can't do it before, mounted police or no mounted police."
I had heard these hard truths of the Trail of Heartbreak before; but having been worded more vaguely, they had not impressed me as they did now, spoken with the plain, honest directness of the old trail days.
"If you want straight facts about '97," the collector had said to me, "I'll introduce you to Cyanide Bill, out there. He was all through here time and again. He will tell you everything you want to know. But be careful what you ask him; he'll answer anything—and he doesn't talk parlor."
"The hardships such women went through," continued Cyanide Bill, "the insults and humiliations they faced and lived down, ought to of set 'em on a pe-des-tal when all was said and done and decency had the upper hand. The time come when the other'ns got their come-upin's; when they found out whether it paid to live straight.
"The world'll never see such a rush for gold again," went on Cyanide Bill, after a pause. "I tell you it takesa lot to make any impress on me, I've been toughenin' up in this country so many years; but when I arrives and sees the orgy goin' on along this trail, my heart up and stood still a spell. The strong ones was all a-trompin' the weak ones down. The weak ones went down and out, and the strong ones never looked behind. Men just went crazy. Men that had always been kind-hearted went plumb locoed and 'u'd trample down their best friend, to get ahead of him. They got just like brutes and didn't know their own selves. It's no wonder the best women give up. Did you ever hear the story of Lady Belle?"
I remembered Lady Belle, probably because of the name, but I had never heard the details of her tragic story, and I frankly confessed that I would like to hear them—"parlor" language or "trail," it mattered not.
"Well,"—he half closed his eyes and stared down the blue lake,—"she come along this trail the first of July, the prettiest woman you ever laid eyes on. Her husband was with her. He seemed to be kind to her at first, but the horrors of the trail worked on him, and he went kind of locoed. He took to abusin' her and blamin' her for everything. She worked like a dog and he treated her about like one; but she never lost her beauty nor her sweetness. She had the sweetest smile I ever saw on any human bein's face; and she was the only one that thought about others.
"'Don't crowd!' she used to cry, with that smile of her'n. 'We're all havin' a hard time together.'
"Well, they lost their outfit in White Horse Rapids; her husband cursed her and said it wouldn't of happened if she hadn't been hell-bent to come along; he took to drinkin' and up and left her there at the rapids. He went back to the states, sayin' he didn't ever want to see her again.
"She was left there without an ounce of grub or a centof money. Yakataga Pete had been workin' along the trail with a big outfit, and had gone on in ahead. He'd fell in love with her before he knew she was married. He went on up into the cricks, and when he come down to Dawson six months later, she was in a dance hall. Dawson was wild about her. They called her Lady Belle because she was always such a lady.
"Yakataga went straight to her and asked her to marry him. She burst out into the most terrible cryin' you ever hear. 'As if I could ever marry anybody!' she cries out; and that's all the answer he ever got. We found out she had a little blind sister down in the states. She had to send money to keep her in a blind school. She danced and acted cheerful; but her face was as white as chalk, and her big dark eyes looked like a fawn's eyes when you've shot it and not quite killed it, so's it can't get away from you, nor die, nor anything; but she was always just as sweet as ever.
"Two months after that she—she—killed herself. Yakataga was up in the cricks. He come down and buried her."
It was told, the simple and tragic tale of Lady Belle, and presently Cyanide Bill went away and left me.
The breeze grew cooler; it crested the waves with silver. Pearly clouds floated slowly overhead and were reflected in the depths below.
The mountains surrounding Lake Bennett are of an unusual color. It is a soft old-rose in the distance. The color is not caused by light and shade; nor by the sun; nor by flowers. It is the color of the mountains themselves. They are said to be almost solid mountains of iron, which gives them their name of "Iron-Crowned," I believe; but to me they will always be the Rose-colored Mountains. They soften and enrich the sparkling, almost dazzling, blue atmosphere, and give the horizon alook of sunset even at midday. The color reminded me of the dull old-rose of Columbia Glacier.
Lake Bennett dashes its foam-crested blue waves along the pebbly beaches and stone terraces for a distance of twenty-seven miles. At its widest it is not more than two miles, and it narrows in places to less than half a mile. It winds and curves like a river.
The railway runs along the eastern shore of the lake, and mountains slope abruptly from the opposite shore to a height of five thousand feet. The scenery is never monotonous. It charms constantly, and the air keeps the traveller as fresh and sparkling in spirit as champagne.
For many miles a solid road-bed, four or five feet above the water, is hewn out of the base of the mountains; the terrace from the railway to the water is a solid blaze of bloom; white sails, blown full, drift up and down the blue water avenue; cloud-fragments move silently over the nearer rose-colored mountains; while in the distance, in every direction that the eye may turn, the enchanted traveller is saluted by some lonely and beautiful peak of snow. It is an exquisitely lovely lake.
We had passed Lake Lindeman—named by Lieutenant Schwatka for Dr. Lindeman of the Breman Geographical Society—before reaching Bennett.
Lake Lindeman is a clear and lovely lake seven miles long, half a mile wide, and of a good depth for any navigation required here. A mountain stream pours tumultuously into it, adding to its picturesque beauty.
Sea birds haunt these lakes, drift on to the Yukon, and follow the voyager until they meet their silvery fellows coming up from Behring Sea.
Between Lakes Lindeman and Bennett the river connecting link is only three quarters of a mile long, about thirty yards wide, and only two or three feet deep. It is filled with shoals, rapids, cascades, boulders, and bars;and navigation is rendered so difficult and so dangerous that in the old "raft" days outfits were usually portaged to Lake Bennett.
During the rush to the Klondike a saw-mill was established at the head of Lake Bennett, and lumber for boat building was sold for one hundred dollars a thousand feet.
The air in these lake valleys on a warm day is indescribably soft and balmy. It is scented with pine, balm, cottonwood, and flowers. The lower slopes are covered with fireweed, larkspur, dandelions, monk's-hood, purple asters, marguerites, wild roses, dwarf goldenrod, and many other varieties of wild flowers. The fireweed is of special beauty. Its blooms are larger and of a richer red than along the coast. Blooms covering acres of hillside seem to float like a rosy mist suspended in the atmosphere. The grasses are also very beautiful, some having the rich, changeable tints of a humming-bird.
The short stream a couple of hundred yards in width connecting Lake Bennett with the next lake—a very small, but pretty one which Schwatka named Nares—was called by the natives "the place where the caribou cross," and now bears the name of Caribou Crossing. At certain seasons the caribou were supposed to cross this part of the river in vast herds on their way to different feeding-grounds, the current being very shallow at this point.
There is a small settlement here now, and boats were waiting to carry passengers to the Atlin mining district. The caribou have now found less populous territories in which to range. In the winter of 1907-1908 they ranged in droves of many thousands—some reports said hundreds of thousands—through the hills and valleys of the Stewart, Klondike, and Sixty-Mile rivers, in the Upper Yukon country.
Miners killed them by the hundreds, dressed them, and stored them in the shafts and tunnels of their mines, down in the eternally frozen caverns of the earth—thus supplying themselves with the most delicious meat for a year. The trek of caribou from the Tanana River valley to the head of White River consumed more than ninety days in passing the head of the Forty-Mile valley—at least a thousand a day passing during that period. They covered from one to five miles in width, and trod the snow down as solidly as it is trodden in a city street. A great wolf-pack clung to the flank of the herd. The wolves easily cut out the weak or tired-out caribou and devoured them.
Caribou Crossing is a lonely and desolate cluster of tents and cabins huddling in the sand on the water's edge. Considerable business is transacted here, and many passengers transfer here in summer to Atlin. In winter they leave the train at Log-Cabin, which we passed during the forenoon, and make the journey overland in sleighs.
The voyage from Caribou Crossing to Atlin is by way of a chain of blue lakes, pearled by snow mountains. It is a popular round-trip tourist trip, which may be taken with but little extra expense from Skaguay.
Tagish Lake, as it was named by Dr. Dawson,—the distinguished British explorer and chief director of the natural history and geological survey of the Dominion of Canada,—was also known as Bove Lake. Ten miles from its head it is joined by Taku Arm—Tahk-o Lake, it was called by Schwatka.
The shores of Tagish Lake are terraced beautifully to the water, the terraces rising evenly one above another. They were probably formed by the regular movement of ice in other ages, when the waters in these valleys were deeper and wider. There are some striking points oflimestone in this vicinity, their pearl-white shoulders gleaming brilliantly in the sunshine, with sparkling blue waves dashing against them.
Marsh Lake, and another with a name so distasteful that I will not write it, are further links in the brilliant sapphire water chain by which the courageous voyagers of the Heartbreak days used to drift hopefully, yet fearfully, down to the Klondike. The bed of a lake which was unintentionally drained completely dry by the builders of the railroad is passed just before reaching Grand Canyon.
The train pauses at the canyon and again at White Horse Rapids, to give passengers a glimpse of these famed and dreaded places of navigation of a decade ago.
At six o'clock in the evening of the day we left Skaguay we reached White Horse.
This is a new, clean, wooden town, the first of any importance in Yukon Territory. It has about fifteen hundred inhabitants, is the terminus of the railroad, and is growing rapidly. The town is on the banks of Lewes River, or, as they call it here, the Yukon.
There is an air of tidiness, order, and thrift about this town which is never found in a frontier town in "the states." There are no old newspapers huddled into gutters, nor blowing up and down the street. Men do not stand on corners with their hands in their pockets, or whittling out toothpicks, and waiting for a railroad to be built or a mine to be discovered. They walk the streets with the manner of men who have work to do and who feel that life is worth while, even on the outposts of civilization.
All passengers, freight, and supplies for the interior now pass through White Horse. The river bank is lined with vast warehouses which, by the time the river opens in June, are piled to the roofs with freight. The shipments of heavy machinery are large. From the river one can see little besides these warehouses, the shipyards to the south, and the hills.
Passing through the depot one is confronted by the largest hotel, the White Pass, directly across the street. To this we walked; and from an upstairs window had a good view of the town. The streets are wide and level; the whole town site is as level as aparade-ground. The buildings are frame and log; merchandise is fair in quality and style, and in price, high. Mounted police strut stiffly and importantly up and down the streets to and from their picturesque log barracks. One unconsciously holds one's chin level and one's shoulders high the instant one enters a Yukon town. It is in the air.
Excellent grounds are provided for all outdoor sports; and in the evening every man one meets has a tennis racket or a golf stick in his hand, and on his face that look of enthusiastic anticipation which is seen only on a British sportsman's face. No American, however enthusiastic or "keen" he may be on outdoor sports, ever quite gets that look.
There was no key to our door. Furthermore, the door would not even close securely, but remained a few hair breadths ajar. There was no bell; but on our way down to dinner, having left some valuables in our room, we reported the matter to a porter whom we met in the hall, and asked him to lock our door.
"It doesn't lock," he replied politely. "It doesn't even latch, and the key is lost."
Observing our amazed faces, he added, smiling:—
"You don't need it, ladies. You will be as safe as you would be at home. We never lock doors in White Horse."
This was my first Yukon shock, but not my last. My faith in mounted police has always been strong, but it went down before that unlocked door.
"Possibly the people of White Horse never take what does not belong to them," I said; "but a hundred strangers came in on that train. Might notonebe afflicted with kleptomania?"
"He wouldn't steal here," said the boy, confidently. "Nobody ever does."
There seemed to be nothing more to say. We left our door ajar and, with lingering backward glances, went down to the dining room.
Never shall I forget that dinner. It was as bad as our lunch had been good. The room was hot; the table-cloth was far from being immaculate; the waitress was untidy and ill-bred; and there was nothing that we could eat.
Nor were we fastidious. We neither expected, nor desired, luxuries; we asked only well-cooked, clean, wholesome food; but if this is to be obtained in White Horse, we found it not—although we did not cease trying while we were there.
We went out and walked the clean streets and looked into restaurants, and tried to see something good to eat, or at least a clean table-cloth; but in the end we went hungry to bed. We had wine and graham wafers in our bags, and they consoled; but we craved something substantial, notwithstanding our hearty lunch. It was the air—the light, fresh, sparkling air of mountain, river, and lake—that gave us our appetites.
When we had walked until our feet could no longer support us, we returned to the hotel. On the way, we saw a sign announcing ice-cream soda. We went in and asked for some, but the ice-cream was "all out."
"But we have plain soda," said the man, looking so wistful that we at once decided to have some, although we both detested it.
He fizzed it elaborately into two very small glasses and led us back into a little dark room, where were chairs and tables, and he gave us spoons with which to eat our plain soda. "Let me pay," said my friend, airily; and she put ten cents on the table.
The man looked at it and grinned. He did not smile; he grinned. Then he went away and left it lying there.
We tried to drink the soda-water; then we tried tocoax it through straws; finally we tried to eat it with spoons—as others about us were doing; but we could not. It looked like soap-bubbles and it tasted like soap-bubbles.
"He didn't see his ten cents," said my friend, gathering it up. "I suppose one pays at the counter out there. I would cheerfully pay him an extra ten if I had not gotten the taste of the abominable stuff in my mouth."
She laid the ten cents on the counter grudgingly.
The man looked at it and grinned again.
"Them things don't go here," said he. "It's fifty cents."
There was a silence. I found my handkerchief and laughed into it, wishing I had taken a second glass.
"Oh, I see," said she, slowly and sweetly, as a half-dollar slid lingering down her fingers to the counter. "For the spoons. They were worth it."
It was two o'clock before we could leave our windows that night. It was not dark, not even dusk. A kind of blue-white light lay over the town and valley, deepening toward the hills. In the air was that delicious quality which charms the senses like perfumes. Only to breathe it in was a drowsy, languorous joy. At White Horse one opens the magic, invisible gate and passes into the enchanted land of Forgetfulness—and the gate swings shut behind one.
Home and friends seem far away. If every soul that one loves were at death's door, one could not get home in time to say farewell—so why not banish care and enjoy each hour as it comes?
This is the same reckless spirit which, greatly intensified, possessed desperate men when they went to the Klondike ten years ago. There was no telegraph, then, and mails were carried in only once or twice a year. Letters were lost. Men did not hear from their wives,and, discouraged and disheartened, decided that the women had died or had forgotten; so they went the way of the country, and it often came to pass that Heartbreak Trail led to the Land of Heartbreak.
In the morning we learned that the boat for Dawson was not yet "in," and, even if it should arrive during the day,—which seemed to be as uncertain as the opening of the river in spring,—would not leave until some time during the night; so at nine o'clock we took the Skaguay train for the Grand Canyon.
One "oldest" resident of White Horse told us that it was only a mile to the canyon; another oldest one, that it was four miles; still another, that it was five; all agreed that we should take the train out and walk back.
"There's a tram," they told us, "an old, abandoned tram, and you can't get lost. You've only to follow the tram. Why, agoosecouldn't get lost. Norman McCauley built the tram, and outfits were portaged around the canyon and the rapids two seasons; then the railroad come in and the tram went out of business."
We took our bundles of mosquito netting and boarded the train. In summer the travel is all "in," and we were the only passengers. When the White Pass Railway Company was organized, stock was worth ten dollars a share; now it is worth six hundred and fifty dollars, and it is not for sale. Freight rates are five cents a pound, one hundred dollars a ton, or fifty in car-load lots, from Skaguay to White Horse. Passenger rates are supposed to be twenty cents a mile. We paid seventy-five cents to return to the canyon which we passed the previous day. This rate should make the distance four miles, and we barely had time to arrange our mosquito veils, according to the instructions of the conductor, when the train stopped.
We were told that we might not see a mosquito; and again, that we might not be able to see anything else.
We were put off and left standing ankle-deep in sand, on the brink of a precipice, four miles from any human being—in the wilds of Alaska. At that moment the trainmen looked like old and dear friends.
"The path down is right in front of you," the collector called, as the train started. "Don't be afraid of the bears! They will not harm you at this time of the year."
Bears!
We had considered heat, mosquitoes, losing our way, hunger, exhaustion,—everything, it appeared, except bears. We looked at one another.
"I had not thought of bears."
"Nor had I."
We looked down at the bushes growing along the canyon; little heat-worms glimmered in the still atmosphere.
"Perhaps it is an Alaskan joke," I suggested feebly.
We stood for some time trying to decide whether we should make the descent or return to White Horse, when suddenly the matter was decided for us. I was standing on the brink of the sandy precipice, down which a path went, almost perpendicularly, without bend or pause, to the bank of the river several hundred yards below.
The sandy soil upon which I stood suddenly caved and went down into the path. I went with it. I landed several yards below the brink, gave one cry, and then—by no will of my own—was off for the canyon.
The caving of the brink had started a sand and gravel slide; and I, knee-deep in it, was going down with it—slowly, but oh, most surely. There was no pausing, no looking back. I could hear my companion calling to me to "stop"; to "wait"; to "be careful"—and all her entreaties were the bitterest irony by the time they floated down to me. So long as the slide did not stop, it wasuseless to tell me to do so; for I was embedded in it halfway to my waist. We kept going, slowly and hesitatingly; but never slowly enough for me to get out.
It was eighty in the shade, and the sand was hot. I was wearing a white waist, a dark blue cheviot skirt, and patent-leather shoes; and my appearance, when I finally reached level ground and cool alder trees, may be imagined. Furthermore, our trunks had been bonded to Dawson, and I had no extra skirts or shoes with me.
My companion, profiting by my misfortune, had armed herself with an alpenstock and was "tacking" down the slope. It was half an hour before she arrived.
I have never forgiven her for the way she laughed.
We soon forgot the bears in the beauty of the scene before us. We even forgot the comedy of my unwilling descent.
The Lewes River gradually narrows from a width of three or four hundred yards to one of about fifty yards at the mouth of the Grand Canyon, which it enters in a great bore.
The walls of the canyon are perpendicular columns and palisades of basalt. They rise without bend to a height of from one to two hundred feet, and then, set thickly with dark and gloomy spruce trees, slope gradually into mountains of considerable height. The canyon is five-eighths of a mile long, and in that interval the water drops thirty feet. Halfway through, it widens abruptly into a round water chamber, or basin, where the waters boil and seethe in dangerous whirlpools and eddies. Then it again narrows, and the waters rush wildly and tumultuously through walls of dark stone, veined with gray and lavender. The current runs fifteen miles an hour, and rafts "shooting" the rapids are hurled violently from side to side, pushed on end, spun round in whirlpools, buried for seconds in boiling foam, and at last are shot throughthe final narrow avenue like spears from a catapult—only to plunge madly on to the more dangerous White Horse Rapids.
The waves dash to a height of four or five feet and break into vast sheets of spray and foam. Their roar, flung back by the stone walls, may be heard for a long distance; and that of the rapids drifts over the streets of White Horse like distant, continuous thunder, when all else is still.
We found a difficult way by which, with the assistance of alpenstocks and overhanging tree branches, we could slide down to the very water, just above Whirlpool Basin. We stood there long, thinking of the tragedies that had been enacted in that short and lonely stretch; of the lost outfits, the worn and wounded bodies, the spirits sore; of the hearts that had gone through, beating high and strong with hope, and that had returned broken. It is almost as poignantly interesting as the old trail; and not for two generations, at least, will the perils of those days be forgotten.
It was about noon that, remembering our long walk, we turned reluctantly and set out for White Horse.
Somewhere back of the basin we lost our way. We could not find the "tram"; searching for it, we got into a swamp and could not make our way back to the river; and suddenly the mosquitoes were upon us.
The underbrush was so thick that our netting was torn into shreds and left in festoons and tatters upon every bush; yet I still bear in my memory the vision of my friend floating like a tall, blond bride—for my dark-haired Scotch friend was not with me on the Yukon voyage—through the shadows of that swamp before her bridal veil went to pieces.
Her bridal glory was grief. In a few moments we were both as black as negroes with mosquitoes; for, desperatelythough we fought, we could not drive them away. The air in the swamp was heavy and still; our progress was unspeakably difficult—through mire and tall, lush grasses which, in any other country on earth, would have been alive with snakes and crawling things.
The pests bit and stung our faces, necks, shoulders, and arms; they even swarmed about our ankles; while, for our hands—they were soon swollen to twice their original size.
We wept; we prayed; we said evil things in the hearing of heaven; we asked God to forgive us our sins, or, at the very least, to punish us for them in some other way; but I, at least, in the heaviest of my afflictions, did not forget to thank Him because there are no snakes in Alaska or the Yukon. It seemed to me, even, in the fervor of my gratitude, that it had all been planned æons ago for our special benefit in this extreme hour.
But I shall spare the reader a further description of our sufferings.
I had always considered the Alaskan mosquito a joke. I did not know that they torture men and beasts to a terrible death. They mount in a black mist from the grass; it is impossible for one to keep one's eyes open. Dogs, bears, and strong men have been known to die of pain and nervous exhaustion under their attacks.
After an hour of torture we forced our way through the network of underbrush back to the river, and soon found a narrow path. There was a slight breeze, and the mosquitoes were not so aggressive. There was still a three-mile walk, along the shore bordering the rapids, before we could rest; and during the last mile each step caused such agony that we almost crawled.
When we removed our shoes, we found them full of blood. Our feet were blistered; the blisters had broken and blistered again.