Chapter 14

THE GREAT GLACIER, SIDE VIEW, SHOWING GRINDING OF THE FACE OF THE MOUNTAINS.—The grinding force of a glacier, as it moves down the side of a mountain, is strikingly illustrated in this splendid photograph. At the point of the glacier will be observed an accumulation of stones and débris wrenched from their places higher up by the resistless grinding force of the immense body of ice, moving steadily and irresistibly into the valleys below, cutting its way like an immense plow as it goes. The numerous photographs and printed descriptions of these wonders of the northern latitudes, inGlimpses of America, add a large degree of interest and value to this work.

LATOURELLE FALLS, WASHINGTON.

It is probable that these legends are the relics of the teachings of mission fathers who came to this region more than two hundred years ago.

From Tacoma we went to Seattle, another exquisite city of marvelous growth and immense possibilities, which occupies a strip of land between Puget Sound and Lake Washington; it has a very large water front, and exhibits a harbor as active with shipping as San Francisco. From Seattle, where we left our photograph car, we went to Port Townsend, and thence across the Straits of Juan de Fuca to Victoria, on Vancouver Island, where we first touched the soil of British Columbia. This city is also a very beautiful one, and from the summit of Beacon Hill a magnificent view is obtained, commanding a very great expanse of water, Mount Baker, and the Olympic Range, in which latter are numerous glaciers large enough to swallow up the Alps.

A VIEW OF MOUNT HOOD.

On the 2d of May we took passage at Victoria, on the Pacific Coast Steamship Company’s vesselQueen, and started upon a delightful voyage to Alaska, that opalescent gem in the frosted coronet of the far northwest. The trip is a revelation, a day-dream of indescribable transports, a luxury of blissful surprises. It is a strange combination of ocean and inland water travel, and just enough of each to provide all the pleasures of both, with none of the monotonies or discomforts of either. The route is almost entirely land-locked through channels of varying width, among islands which appear numberless, and as green with prolific vegetation as the shores of Killarney’s lakes.

UMATILLA INDIAN CAMP, OREGON.

At places the channel narrows and passes through walls of very great height, and again widens to many miles, but all the while there are emerald shores, and high-rising banks over which tumble many beautiful waterfalls, and still above these, in the hazy backgrounds, are snow-capped mountains. Two hundred miles north of Victoria is Nanaimo, the last town with telegraphic connections, and six hundred miles beyond the steamer touches at Fort Wrangel, where the first contact with Alaska Indians is made, and interest at once centers in the curious appearance and habits which they display. Passing thence through Wrangel Narrows the region of ice is reached, indicated by a few straggling bergs that have become detached from the glacier that forms in a fiord called Thunder Bay, near the mouth of Stikeen River. Then follows a view of the Coast Range, which is rent with icy cañons that glow and gleam with refractions of clear sunlight, until in places they suggest the palace of Iris. Through this maze of mighty wonders the steamer plows her way to the town of Juneau, famous not so much for its latitude as being the location of the largest quartz-mill in the world. Thence we proceeded through a labyrinth of islands into Lynn Canal, which is considered to be the “most sublimely beautiful and spacious of all the mountain-walled channels of the Alaska route.” The Auk and Eagle Glaciers are displayed on the right as you enter the canal, coming with grand effect from their far-reaching fountains and down through the forests. But it is on the west side of the canal, near the head, that the most striking feature of the landscape is seen—the Davidson Glacier. It first appears as an immense ridge of ice thrust forward into the channel, but when you have gained a position directly in front, it is shown as a broad flood issuing from a noble granite gate-way, and spreading out to right and left in a beautiful fan-shaped mass, three or four miles in width, the front of which is separated from the water by its terminal moraine. This is one of the most notable of the large glaciers that are in the first stage of decadence, reaching nearly to tide-water, but failing to enter it, send off icebergs. Davidson Glacier is on the left shore of Chilcat River, and very near the Indian village of Chilcat, the northernmost point reached by the regular line of steamers. The place is of very little interest except for its salmon canneries and other fisheries. Cod, herring and halibut are very plentiful, but all the streams thereabout abound with salmon. Indeed, during certain seasons they are so numerous as to fairly choke the shallow rivers, and in places they may be scooped up with shovels. From this point the steamer turns south to Icy Strait, then proceeds north again by that channel into Glacier Bay, whence beyond to Mount St. Elias is the real ice-land of Alaska.

INDIAN RIVER, ALASKA.

THE MOUNTAIN NEAR MUIR GLACIER.

According to general opinion Alaska is a cold and forbidding region, fit for habitation only by Esquimau Indians and fur traders. But this opinion is very much overdrawn, for in the valleys and along the islands of the coast, where the influence of the warm currents of the Pacific Ocean is felt, the climate is mild, and a vegetation almost semi-tropical is produced. This is shown to a considerable extent in the photograph of Indian River on this page.—The companion picture, with our photographer in the foreground, represents a front view of a portion of Muir Glacier, where the ice accumulation of centuries has piled up until it is mountain high.

CAVE IN THE GREAT GLACIER, BRITISH AMERICA.

Glancing for a moment at the results of a general exploration, we find that there are between sixty and seventy small residual glaciers in the California Sierras. Through Oregon and Washington, glaciers, some of them of considerable size, still exist on the highest volcanic cones of the Cascade Mountains—the Three Sisters, Mounts Jefferson, Hood, St. Helens, Adams, Tacoma, Baker, and others, though none of them approach the sea. Through British Columbia and Southeastern Alaska the broad, sustained chain of mountains extending along the coast is generally glacier-bearing. The upper branches of nearly every cañon are occupied by glaciers, which gradually increase in size to the northward until the lofty region between Glacier Bay and Mount St. Elias is reached.

The largest of the glaciers that discharge into Glacier Bay is the Muir, and being also the most accessible is the one to which tourists are taken and allowed to go ashore and climb about its ice-cliffs and watch the huge blue bergs as with tremendous thundering roar and surge they emerge and plunge from the majestic vertical ice-wall in which the glacier terminates.

The front of the glacier is about three miles wide, but the central berg-producing portion, that stretches across from side to side of the inlet, like a huge jagged barrier, is only about half as wide. The height of the ice-wall above the water is from 250 to 300 feet, but soundings made by Captain Carroll show that about 720 feet of the wall is below the surface, while still a third portion is buried beneath moraine material. Therefore, were the water and rocky detritus cleared away, a sheer wall of blue ice would be presented a mile and a half wide and more than a thousand feet high.

SCUZZIE FALLS, NEAR NORTH BEND, BRITISH AMERICA.

The number of bergs that become detached from the glacier every twelve hours varies with tide and weather, but generally a new one is thus fresh born every six or seven minutes, and so massive that the discharge may be heard like thunder or cannonading two or more miles away. When one of the fissured masses falls there is first a heavy, plunging crash, then a deep, deliberate, long-drawn-out thundering roar, followed by clashing, grating sounds from the agitated bergs set in motion by the new arrival, and the swash of waves along the beach. All the very large bergs rise from the bottom with a still grander commotion, rearing aloft in the air nearly to the top of the wall, with tons of water pouring down their sides, heaving and plunging again and again ere they settle and sail away as blue crystal islands; free at last after being held rigid as part of the slow-crawling glacier for centuries. And strange it seems that ice formed from snow on the mountains two and three hundred years ago, should after all its toil and travel in grinding down and fashioning the face of the landscape still remain so lovely in color and so pure.

The rate of motion of the glacier as has been determined by Professor Reid is, near the front, about from five to ten feet per day. This one glacier is made up of about 200 tributary glaciers, which drain an area of about a thousand square miles, and contains more ice than all the eleven hundred glaciers of the Alps combined. The distance from the front back to the head of the farthest tributary is about fifty miles, and the width of the trunk below the confluence of the main tributaries is twenty miles or more.

Next to the Muir, the largest of the glaciers enters the bay at its extreme northwestern extension. Its broad, majestic current, fed by unnumbered tributaries, is divided at the front by an island, and from its long, blue wall theicebergs plunge and roar in one eternal storm, sounding on day and night, winter and summer, and from century to century. Five or six glaciers of the first class discharge into the bay, the number varying as the several outlets of the ice-fields are regarded as distinct glaciers, or one. About an equal number of the second class descend with broad, imposing currents to the level of the bay without entering it to discharge bergs; while the tributaries of these and the smaller glaciers are innumerable.

FACE OF MUIR GLACIER, ALASKA.

Mr. John Muir, the explorer of Muir Glacier, thus describes his visit to that wonderful ice-swept region: “The clouds cleared away on the morning of the 27th, and we had glorious views of the ice-rivers pouring down from their spacious fountains on either hand, and of the grand assemblage of mountains, immaculate in their robes of new snow, and bathed and transfigured in the most impressively lovely sunrise light I ever beheld. Memorable, too, was the starry splendor of a night spent on the east side of the bay, in front of two large glaciers north of the Muir. Venus seemed half as big as the Moon, while the berg-covered bay, glowing and sparkling with responsive light, seemed another sky of equal glory. Shortly after three o’clock in the morning, I climbed the dividing ridge between the two glaciers, 2,000 feet above camp, for the sake of the night views; and how great was the enjoyment in the solemn silence between those two radiant skies no words may tell.”

The destructive effects of glaciers and the extent of their ravages have been made the subject of many interesting essays by distinguished scientists, but nowhere has it been so interestingly and understandingly treated as by Dr. Wright in theEdinburgh Review, on the “Ice Age of North America.” The monograph, much abbreviated, is as follows:

“It is not more than 10,000 years ago since the whole of North America and Northern Europe emerged from beneath a deluge of ice which seems to have destroyed the aboriginal inhabitants as remorselessly as Noah’s flood.

“The chipped flint implement-makers perished with their contemporaries, the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the sabre-toothed tiger, and left the globe to be repeopled by the polished stone-working or Neolithic progenitors of its actual inhabitants. The gap between the two races is conspicuous, and has not yet been archæologically bridged. A catastrophe is indicated; and a catastrophe by water. This is the conclusion of science; how singularly it harmonizes with the biblical narrative is almost superfluous to point out.”

VILLAGE OF KASA-AN, ALASKA.—It will doubtless be a surprise to many persons not familiar with the conditions of the Alaskan Indians to observe that their houses are usually quite substantially built of frame or wood. We generally think of Indians as living in wigwams or huts, but in the case of the Alaskans they were for many years previous to the purchase of that country by our government under the influence of Russia, and are therefore partly civilized and somewhat advanced in the modern ways of living. But they still retain their old superstition, as shown by the totem poles in front of their houses. These poles are carved and mounted with rude representations of birds, beasts and reptiles, which are intended to give notice to the public that the spirits of the deceased ancestors of the occupants of the houses have entered into the living counterparts of these rude carvings, and that any indignities offered to them will be vigorously and promptly resented.

CHRISTINE FALLS, ALICE BAY, ALASKA.

The destruction of the Antediluvians who lived before the Ice Age set in was accomplished much further back; the date 6,000 B. C. represents the end of the Ice Age, not its beginning. How it was that ice submerged the world no one seems to be exactly able to say, but a great deal of valuable information has been obtained by the geological research of the present century. Before this devastating deluge of ice set in—

“Trees reigned without interruption, in north temperate and Polar regions, throughout the vast expanse of tertiary time. Palms and cycads then sprang up in the room of oaks and beeches in England; turtles and crocodiles haunted English rivers and estuaries; lions, elephants, and hyenas roamed at large over English dry land. Anthropoid apes lived in Germany and France, fig and cinnamon trees flourished in Dantzic; in Greenland, up to seventy degrees of latitude, magnolias bloomed, and vines ripened their fruit; while in Spitzbergen, and even in Grinnell Land, within little more than eight degrees of the pole, swamp-cypresses and walnuts, cedars, limes, planes and poplars grew freely.”

For some reason or other the temperature gradually fell, and great glaciers forming in the northern regions, the highlands of Canada and the Arctic Circles, submerged Northern Europe and reduced Canada and half of the United States to the present condition of Greenland. Those who see glaciers to-day can form little idea of the enormous possibilities of semi-fluid ice. Only in Alaska, where the Muir Glacier empties itself into the Muir inlet at the rate of seventy feet a day, can we form any idea of the glacier as a destructive agency. This glacier empties two hundred million cubic feet of ice into the sea every day; that is to say, 45,000 tons of ice fall into the water every minute in avalanches with detonations which sound like the booming of a cannonnade. The very earth seemsto tremble, and the sea boils and foams with the continual discharge of fresh icebergs. “From observations upon living glaciers,” says Dr. Wright, “and from the known nature of ice, we may learn to recognize the track of a glacier as readily and unmistakably as we would the familiar foot-prints of an animal.” By the effects of ice-grinding, rocks are smoothed and polished, rounded and mammillated. They are, moreover, striated. “These may be called glacial hieroglyphics; glacial deposits are equally distinctive. They are of three different kinds—ground moraine, terminal moraine, and erratic bowlders. The heights to which the ice-flood rose are frequently self-registered on the mountains which once breasted its flow. They serve, in Dr. Wright’s phrase, as ‘glaciometers.’ Thus it has been learned that the ice was a mile thick in New England and a couple of thousand feet thick in Pennsylvania. The date of the close of the Glacial Epoch in the United States can scarcely, then, be placed earlier than 6,000 B. C. For it was, we repeat, the withdrawal of the ice that set the chronometer of the Falls going. The Falls of Niagara, indeed, constitute in themselves, in Dr. Wright’s apt phrase, ‘a glacial chronometer.’”

TAKU GLACIER, ALASKA.

It was this tremendous agency of glacial action that gave us Northwest America as we have it at present. “The inexhaustible fertility of the Far West is an endowment from vanished glaciers.”

The world to-day is very different from what it was in the old times. The mountains stood higher and the glaciers forming on their slopes crumpled the earth in beneath their weight. The earth-crust was not strong enough to bear the weight of its ice-armor. About six million square miles were covered with ice, varying in thickness of half a mile to a mile. Taking it only at half a mile in height, the weight per square mile was no less than two thousand million of tons. “And the whole of this enormous mass being extracted from the ocean, its differential effect in producing change of level was doubled. The ice-cumbered land accordingly went down, like an overladen ship, until it was awash with the waves, and sea-shells were deposited along coast-fringes above the drift. Then, as the ice melted, recovery ensued.” The whole article is full of interesting and suggestive reading, and is an excellent example of a popular presentation of the results of scientific research.

DAWSON’S GLACIER, BRITISH AMERICA.

The return trip was made down Chatham and Peril Straits to Sitka, the capital city of Alaska, situated on the Pacific shore of Baranoff Island. The place has grown very much in importance in the past few years, though it has not increased correspondingly in size. It is a considerable harbor for whaling and sealing vessels, that touch there for supplies, and accordingly supports a population that is largely American. The natives, however, still continue in considerable numbers, but contact with English-speaking people is rapidly civilizing them, and their old-time characteristics are fast disappearing. But in one particular they exhibit small change, viz.: religion. Long under the domination of Russian influence and missionaries of the Greek Church, it is not surprising that the natives should continue in the faith which was thus first established among them. There are three Greek churches in the city, all fairly well supported, though the communicants are content to worship in rather humble edifices. But while adopting the Greek faith, the native Indians generally retain their ancient mortuary customs; and among the interior tribes particularly, witchcraft, or Shamanism, and exorcism, still prevail. Burial of bodies is very seldom practiced among any of the Indians, as preservation of their dead is a universal desire. It is, therefore, a common thing to see their cemeteries, instead of earth-mounds and tombstones, a collection of mortuary houses, in which the dead are laid with great care, concealed only by the skins or blankets in which they are wrapped, something after the manner of the Sioux Indians. Thus disposed of, the dead are long preserved in that cold climate, the houses themselves often decaying before dissolution of the bodies is far advanced. This, however, applies to what may be called the better class of natives. Among the interior and poor people, it is the custom to remove the body to some secluded spot, usually on a bluff overlooking a river, and lay it upon the ground. A shelter is made by building over it a small conical-shaped structure of spruce logs, and a tree near-by is stripped of its branches and small pieces of cloth are tied to it to mark the spot. The household utensils, sled, and some of the weapons of the deceased are left with him, should he be the head of a family, and the place is tabooed thenceforth.

THE POOL AT BANFF HOT SPRINGS, BRITISH AMERICA.—These celebrated springs are in the Rocky Mountain region of British Columbia, on the line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. They are celebrated for their healing qualities, and have become a favorite resort for invalids and tourists. The photograph represents the pool or principal spring, at the foot of a great mountain. The rocks thereabout show volcanic origin, and several of the springs flow with water of a high temperature, and possess remedial qualities equal to those of the hot springs of Arkansas. The scenery of that region is sublime in the highest degree, and possesses even a greater attraction for tourists than the springs do.

DEVIL’S GATE, BEAVER CAÑON, BRITISH AMERICA.

Our return journey was devoid of the surprises which made the northward trip so delightful, yet the charm which possessed us after leaving Victoria continued throughout, for the magnificent scenery along the route cannot be exhausted by a single glance, but rather grows in beauty when lingeringly watched. It was impossible to feel that the voyage was being made on any part of the ocean, so still was the water, so green the near-by shores, so clear the sky, dropping down all around upon frosted peaks and island forests. And the nights were so gloriously grand, sprinkled with jewels of light from moon and stars that made the world as beautiful as the lawn in front of paradise, and brought to mind the poet’s tribute to nature’s solitude:

“The waves were dead;The tides were in their graves;The moon, their mistress, had expired before;The winds were withered in the stagnant air.”

“The waves were dead;

The tides were in their graves;

The moon, their mistress, had expired before;

The winds were withered in the stagnant air.”

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