USA > Alaska > Alaska, the great country > Part 32
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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 not one be afflicted with kleptomania ? "
"He wouldn't steal here," said the boy, confidently. " Nobody ever does."
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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 de- sired, luxuries ; we asked only well-cooked, clean, whole- some 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 sub- stantial, 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 to
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coax 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, gather- ing 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 en- chanted 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 inten- sified, 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,
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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, a goose couldn't get lost. Norman McCau- ley 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 Com- pany 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 hun- dred 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 in- structions 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.
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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 atmos- phere.
" 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 was 2 G
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useless to tell me to do so ; for I was embedded in it half- way to my waist. We kept going, slowly and hesitat- ingly ; 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 im- agined. 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 lav- ender. 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 through
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the 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 dis- tance ; 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 higli 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, desperately
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though 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 hear- ing 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 mos- quitoes 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.
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Copyright by E. A. Hegg, Juneau
TELLER
Courtesy of Webster & Stevens, Seattle
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But we had seen the Grand Canyon of the Yukon - which Schwatka in an evil hour named Miles, for the distinguished army-general -and White Horse Rapids ; and seeing them was worth the blisters and the blood. And we know how far it is from the head of the canyon to White Horse town. No matter what the three " oldest " settlers, the railway folders, Schwatka, and all the others say, -we know. It is fifteen miles ! Also, among those who scoff at Rex Beach for having the villain in his last novel eaten up by mosquitoes on the Yukon, we are not to be included.
Numerous and valuable copper mines lie within a ra- dius of fifteen miles from White Horse. The more impor- tant ones are those of the Pennsylvania syndicate, The B. N. White Company, The Arctic Chief, The Grafter, the Anaconda, and the Best Chance. The Puebla, operated by B. N. White, lies four miles northwest of town. It makes a rich showing of magnatite, carrying copper values averaging four and five per cent, with a small by-product of gold and silver.
In the summer of 1907 this mine had in sight two hun- dred and fifty thousand tons of pay ore. The deepest development then obtained had a hundred-foot surface showing three hundred feet in width, and stripped along with the strike of the vein seven hundred feet, showing a solid, unbroken mass of ore. Tunnels and cross-cuts driven from the bottom of the shaft showed the body to be the same width and the values the same as the surface outcrop.
The Arctic Chief ranks second in importance ; and extensive development work is being carried on at all the mines. The railway is building out into the mining district.
Six-horse stages are run from White Horse to Dawson
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after the river closes. The distance is four hundred and thirty-five miles ; the fare in the early autumn and late spring is a hundred and twenty-five dollars ; in winter, when sleighing is good, sixty dollars.
White Horse was first named Closeleigh by the railway company ; but the name was not popular. At one place in the rapids the waves curving over rocks somewhat resemble a white horse, with wildly floating mane and tail of foam. This is said to be the origin of the name.
White Horse is only eight years old. The hotel accom- modations, if one does not mind a little thing like not being able to eat, are good. The rooms are clean and comfortable and filled with sweet mountain and river air.
At eight o'clock that evening the steamer Dawson struggled up the river and landed within fifty yards of the hotel. We immediately went aboard ; but it was nine o'clock the next morning before we started, so we had another night in White Horse.
The Yukon steamers are four stories high, with a place for a roof garden. I could do nothing for some time but regard the Dawson in silent wonder. It seemed to glide along on the surface of the water, like a smooth, flat stone when it is "skipped."
The lower deck is within a few inches of the water ; and high above is the pilot-house, with its lonely-looking captain and pilot ; and high, oh, very high, above them- like a charred monarch of a Puget Sound forest - rises the black smoke-stack, from which issue such vast funnels of smoke and such slow and tremendous breathing.
This breathing is a sound that haunts every memory of the Yukon. It is not easy to describe, it is so slow and so powerful. It is not quite like a cough - unless one could cough in instead of out ; it is more like a sobbing, shivering in-drawing of the breath of some mighty animal. It echoes from point to point, and may be heard for
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several miles on a still day. Day and night it moves through the upper air, and floats on ahead, often echoing so insistently around some point which the steamer has not turned, that the "cheechaco" is deluded into the belief that another steamer is approaching.
The captains and pilots of the Yukon are the loneliest- looking men! First of all, they are so far away from everybody else ; and second, passengers, particularly women, are not permitted to be in the pilot-house, nor on the texas, nor even on the hurricane-deck, of steamers passing through Yukon Territory.
Between White Horse and Lake Lebarge the river is about two hundred yards wide. The water is smooth and deep. It loiters along the shore, but the current is strong and bears the steamer down with a rush, compelling it to zigzag ceaselessly from shore to shore.
Going down the Yukon for the first time, one's heart stands still nearly half the time. The steamer heads straight for one shore, approaches it so closely that its bow is within six inches of it, and then swings powerfully and starts for the opposite shore- its great stern wheel barely clearing the rocky wall.
The serious vexations and real dangers of navigation in this great river, from source to mouth, are the sand and gravel bars. One may go down the Yukon from White Horse to St. Michael in fourteen days ; and one may be a month on the way - pausing, by no will of his own, on various sand-bars.
The treacherous current changes hourly. It is seldom found twice the same. It washes the sand from side to side, or heaps it up in the middle - creating new channels and new dangers. The pilot can only be cautious, un- tiringly watchful - and lucky. The rest he must leave to heaven.
It is twenty-seven miles from White Horse to Lake
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Lebarge. Midway, the Tahkeena River flows into the Lewes, running through banks of clay.
Lake Lebarge is thirty-two miles long and three and a half wide. The day was suave. The water was silvery blue, and as smooth as satin; gray, deeply veined cliffs were reflected in the water, whose surface was not disturbed by a ripple or wave ; the air was soft ; farther down the river were forest fires, and just sufficient haze floated back to give the milky old-rose lights of the opal to the atmosphere. There is one small island in the lake. It was not named ; and it received the name - as Vancouver would say - of Fireweed Isle, because it floated like a rosy cloud on the pale blue water.
The Indians called this lake Kluk-tas-si, and Schwatka favored retaining it ; but the French name has endured, and it is not bad.
The Lake Lebarge grayling and whitefish are justly famed. Steamers stop at some lone fisherman's landing and take them down to Dawson, where they find ready sale. At Lower Lebarge there is a post-office and a telegraph station. Our steamer paused; two men came out in a boat, delivered a large supply of fish, received a few parcels of mail, and went swinging back across the water.
A dreary log-cabin stood on the bank, labelled " Clark's Place." A woman in a scarlet dress, walking through the reeds beside the beach, made a bit of vivid color. It seemed very, very lonely - with that kind of loneliness that is unendurable.
A quarter of a mile farther, around a bend in the shore, the boat landed at the telegraph station, where the Cana- dian flag was flying.
The different reaches of the Yukon are called locally by very confusing names. The river rising in Summit Lake on the White Pass railway is called both Lewes and
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Yukon; the stretch immediately below Lake Lebarge is ealled Lewes, Thirty-Mile, and Yukon. When we reach the old Hudson Bay post of Selkirk, however, our per- plexities over this matter are at an end. The Pelly River here joins the Lewes, and all agree that the splendid river that now surges on to the sea is the Yukon.
It is daylight all the time, and no one should sleep be- tween White Horse and Dawson. Not an hour of this beautiful voyage on the Upper Yukon should be wasted.
The banks are high and bold, for the most part spring- ing sheer out of the water in columns and pinnacles of solid stone. There are also forestated slopes rising to peaks of snow; and the same kind of clay cliffs that we saw at White Horse, white and shining in the bluish light of morning, but more beautiful still in the mysterious rosy shadows of midnight.
There are some striking columns of red rock along Lake Lebarge, and their reflections in the water at sunset of a still evening are said to be entraneing : "two warm pietures of rosy red in the sinking sun, joined base to base by a thread of silver, at the edge of the other shore."
There are many high hills of soft gray limestone, veined and shaded with the green of spruce; vast slopes, timbered heavily ; low valleys and picturesque mouths of rivers.
Five-Finger, or Rink, Rapids is caused by a contraction of the river from its usual width to one of a hundred and fifty yards. Five bulks of stone, rising to a perpendicular height of forty or fifty feet, are stretched across the ehan- nel. The steamer seems to touch the stone walls as it rushes through on the boiling rapids.
The Upper Ramparts of the Yukon begin at Fort Sel- kirk. Here the waters eut through the lower spurs of the mountains, and for a distance of a hundred and fifty miles, reaching to Dawson, the scenery is sublime.
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" Quiet Sentinel " is a rocky promontory which, seen in profile, resembles the face and entire figure of a woman. She stands with her head slightly bowed, as if in prayer, with loose draperies flowing in classic lines to her feet, and with a rose held to her lips. One of the greatest singers of the present time might have posed for the " Quiet Sentinel."
Rivers and their valleys are more famed in the northern interior than towns. Teslin, Tahkeena, Teslintoo, Big and Little Salmon, Pelly, Stewart, White, Forty-Mile, Indian, Sixty-Mile, Macmillan, Klotassin, Porcupine, Chandlar, Koyukuk, Unalaklik, Tanana, Mynook, - these be names to conjure with in the North ; while those south of the Yukon and tributary to other waters have equal fame.
As for the Klondike, it is the only stream of its size, being but the merest creek and averaging a hundred feet in width, which has given its name to one whole country and to a portion of another country. During the past decade it has not been unusual to hear the name Klondike Country applied to all Alaska and that part of Canada adjacent to the Klondike district. The tiny, gold-bearing creeks, from ten to twenty feet wide, tributary to the Klondike, are known by name and fame in all parts of the world to-day. They are Bonanza, Hunker, Too- Much-Gold, Eldorado, Rock, North Fork, All-Gold, Gold-Bottom, and others of less importance. The Bo- nanza flows into the Klondike at Dawson, and it is but a half-hour's walk to the dredge at work in this stream.
In 1833 Baron Wrangell directed Michael Tebenkoff to establish Fort St. Michael's on the small island in Norton Sound to which the name of the fort was given. Three years later it was attacked by natives, but was success- fully defended by Kurupanoff, who was in charge.
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In 1836 a Russian named Glasunoff entered the delta of the Yukon, ascending the river as far as the mouth of the Anvik River. In 1838 Malakoff extended the explo- ration as far as Nulato, where he established a Russian post and placed Notarmi in command.
When the garrison returned to St. Michael's on ac- count of the failure of provisions, the following winter, natives destroyed the fort and all buildings which had been erected. It was rebuilt and again destroyed in 1839. In 1841 it once more arose under Derabin, who remained in command. The following year Lieutenant Zagoskin reached Nulato, ascending to Nowikakat in 1843.
The Russians were therefore established on the lower Yukon several years before the English established them- selves upon the upper river.
In 1840 Mr. Robert Campbell was sent by Sir George Simpson to explore the Upper Liard River. Mr. Camp- bell ascended the river to its head waters, crossed the mountains, and descended the Pelly River to the Lewes, where, eight years later, he established Fort Selkirk.
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