USA > Alaska > Peerless Alaska, our cache near the pole > Part 15
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to eight inches long, awl-shaped, ringed at the base and bending slightly backward. These, like the hoofs, are shining black, like polished ebony, and for handles of spoons, forks, etc., make beautiful ornaments when skillfully carved. Notwithstanding its name, this animal is regarded as an antelope by naturalists, and not a goat at all. Its true home is among the loftiest peaks of the snow-clad mountains, above timber line, where no vegetation grows save mosses, lichens and a few alpine shrubs and grasses. I have met those who liked the flavor of its meat when young, but generally it is not esteemed. It is usually killed by a method of hunting known as stalking, and the regula- tion outfit of a native would be a belted shirt of squirrel- skin, a grotesque head-dress made of fur, close seal-skin bootees laced half way to the knee, old-time spears to serve as alpen-stocks, bows and arrows, raw-hide ropes and Hud- son Bay rifles. Up on the ridges back of Mt. St. Elias, which constitute a favorite hunting-ground for goats, is found a bear similar to the "roach-back " or " silver-tip" of the Rockies, but of a beautiful bluish under-color, with the tips of the long hairs silvery white. The traders call it " St. Elias silver bear."
The range of the bighorn sheep extends much further south than the goats, even to the mountains of Arizona on the south, as well as to the sphagnous barrens of the north. Its habitat is by no means confined to high altitudes, much less summits, though it is restricted to rough regions. It delights in table-lands and dry mesas, not so much for the precarious pickings of their scant vegetation as for the outlook they afford against sur- prises from enemies. Up to six years ago it was not unusual to shoot them on the Yellowstone river-bluffs from decks of passing steamers, the land back of the bluffs being broken, but by no means mountainous. Stalking the ¿mountain sheep is extremely delicate work, requiring much finesse, but as game the animal may be regarded more valuable than the goat, since it affords not only pelt and fleece, but estimable mutton and horns of much value for dishes and sundry domestic utensils. Not nearly so many of these are killed as goats in Alaska ; indeed the latter are undoubtedly far the most numerous of the two. Alaska seems to be the ultimate preserve of their breed, which it will be a pity to exterminate without an effort at domestication. The sheep is much the larger animal, reaching upward of 200 pounds in weight. It has been aptly described as having the head of a sheep and the body
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of a deer. The horns of the male are marvelously immense, curving backward and outward until they form a circle whose circumference may reach three feet. Such a horn would measure six inches in diameter at the base, and make a dish which, when split, steamed, spread and shaped, would measure almost a foot in width, with length to suit. The horns are often badly splintered as the result of fight- ing, but not from pitching headlong over precipices, accord- ing to hunters' fables. The female horn is much smaller and nearly erect, with very little backward curve, a fact which will readily account for their being confounded with mountain goats by inexperienced persons who perhaps never saw them except at a distance. The color, however, should readily dis- tinguish the two, as the sheep in summer are a wood-brown, and often darker, while in winter they are never pure white like the goats. The legs and belly, however, and a portion of the buttocks are white. In spring the old rams are a dingy white. Outwardly the coat is stiff and wire-haired, not half the length of the goat's, but it is underlaid by a fine, thick wool. Successful hunters stalk them in the early morning when they are feeding low down, after first having climbed convenient heights to reconnoiter. When a herd is discovered, the most cautious, patient and wily hunter, who takes a judicious advantage of such inequali- ties of the land as favor his approaching unobserved, will bring in the most meat. At noon the sheep retire to the sky-parlors for rumination and siestas.
Since the mining rush began in 1892, moose and cari- boo have furnished most of the fresh meat for the eastern camps and reindeer for the northwest. Hunting for big game for sport has been much in vogue in southeastern Alaska, and animals of immense size have been shot, moose weighing 1,400 pounds and bears twelve feet long. Some antlers had a spread of over six feet. Apprehending ex- termination, a stringent game law has been formulated. [See Appendix A.] The headwaters of the Kuskokwim is now the principal big game region, about four hundred miles square. Propagation of reindeer under government auspices in northwestern Alaska provides for the eco- nomic needs of that section. There are about 16,000 of them now. The breeding of blue foxes for their hides, which fetch from $35 to $75 a pelt in London and St. Petersburg, is practiced on forty or more islands along the coast, and a good many natives own blue fox ranches on a small scale. A complete first-class ranche costs about $15,000. The fur business in Alaska is looking up.
THE GLACIER FIELDS.
The excursion steamers which make their weekly trips from Seattle, Wash., to Sitka and beyond, cruise along two thousand miles of Alaskan coast. No fewer than six large glaciers can be seen, including the Davidson, Sundown, Brady, Patterson, Taku, and Muir. The foot of the Brady glacier, in Taylor Bay, is estimated to be from four to six miles wide. It has not been visited much and no measure- ments have been made ; but on a clear day not only it and its well defined moraine, but the magnificent Fairweather group of mountains, sixteen thousand feet high, with La Perouse and Crillon, in which so many glaciers take their rise, are all in full view. A more magnificent sight is rarely seen, and those who have had opportunities in Europe say that there is nothing to compare with it there, certainly in purely glacial scenery. The Muir and Davidson glaciers are spurs or outflows of the same ice-field, which has an unbroken expanse of four hundred miles-large enough to lie over the whole domain of Switzerland. The Muir is the ultimate objective point of sight-seers, who, by the time they have become accustomed to the unfamiliar blending of Mediterranean with Alpine scenery so exclusively charac- teristic of the North Pacific coast, are partially prepared for the astounding revelation which presently awaits them at the head of Glacier Bay. This bay is about one hundred and twenty miles north-east of Sitka, and lies in latitude fifty-nine degrees and twenty minutes. It is, therefore, the most northern point reached on the regular trips of the excursion steamers. Sitka has yet to be visited, but that polyglot settlement lies south. It occupies a secondary place in the anticipations of those whose conceptions of a glacier have been inspired by visions or readings of the Matterhorn or Rhone. Briefly this whole region is full of glaciers, although under the fervid sun of July it would seem as if every thing in the shape of ice and snow would speedily melt.
Until a comparatively recent period, glacial dynamics have remained to a certain extent a matter of theory. The
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birth of an iceberg is said to be a phenomenon unknown in Europe. On that continent the glacial force is almost spent, and he who would witness the mighty outcome of its latent power must seek it on the confines of the New World. He will not find it in the fastnesses of Switzerland. There the once overwhelming accumulations of snow, which filled the mountain valleys to the level of their topmost peaks, no longer supply the glacial streams with material for bergs. The ice-fields have dwindled to insignificant areas, and their discharge is, for the most part, fluvial, though much of their bulk is dissipated by evaporation or absorption into the warm earth of the lower altitudes. But in Greenland, which has recently been investigated by sundry explorers, the ice-fields are found to cover the country like a pall for two thousand five hundred miles from Cape Farewell to the furthest discovered point, and their breadth is not fully determined. Out of the almost interminable waste of frigid desolation pours the great glacier Sermitsialik, with a width of from two to four miles, completely occupying the valley out of which it debouches to the depth of two thousand feet or more. It is only one of hundreds of similar frozen rivers, all of which, as far as is known, are pigmies beside the great Humboldt glacier discovered by Dr. Kane at the head of Smith Sound. This is sixty miles in width, with inclosing walls of rock a thousand feet high. Its front abuts the sea, and is washed by the waves like any other coast line.
From these Titanic sources of perpetual supply are emitted those stupendous icebergs which fill the north Atlantic from June to August to such an extent that dozens can be counted from the masthead within the scope of view. The dimensions of some of them are incredible. I have seen one off the coast of Labrador which was estimated to be two miles long and three hundred feet high ; and this great mass was sloughed off entire from the Humboldt sea wall with one tremendous cleavage. From the Muir I have seen the like cleavage occur. Such mountains of ice are perpetually falling all along the line, with an intermittent crash and roar like the tumult of a tempest. The din of the great commotion can be heard for miles ; and even after they are adrift in the warmer currents of more southern latitudes where they melt and diminish by the sea's ero- sion, they are constantly turning over and over in the ef- fort to keep their balance, and the noise and commotion of the heaving waters is heard for distances of miles. The Eskimos, it is told by the Danish explorers, regard all this as the work of evil spirits, and believe that to look
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upon these agonizing throes is death; so, while they were innocently observing their phenomena through their glasses, the timid natives, usually circumspect enough, roughly ordered them to turn their backs!
The glaciers of the North Pacific are much smaller than those of Greenland, but the Muir, before the earthquake, was three miles long, with a perpendicular face of four hundred feet, stretching like a frozen waterfall or gigan- tic dam entirely across the head of the bay. Its breast was as blue as turquoise. At a distance it look like a fillet rent from the azure sky and laid across the brow of the cliff. When the full blaze of the south-western sun lights up its opalescence, it gleams like the gates of the celestial city. I suppose that an iceberg of no insignificant size is sloughed off from some portion of its sea wall as often as once in five minutes, but these detachments seldom represent more than a limited section, and most of them break up into comparatively small fragments before they are fairly launched on their seaward journey. It is an axiom that mechanical forces are best comprehended by their prod- ucts ; so that no one can begin to realize what a stupendous factor a glacier is until he sees the measure of its infinite power thus made supremely manifest. Visitors are told that glaciers move at the rate of so many feet or inches daily. Ocular evidence may be obtained by fixed land- marks, which indicate a stated progression. From the size and frequency of the cleavages here it would seem that the progress of the Muir must be several rods a day, though an estimate can only be approximated, as there is no true alignment, and the center moves faster than the sides.
Long before the steamer reaches the entrance of Glacier Bay straggling lumps of ice appear, dazzling white, and resting like blocks of marble on the polished sea, which is scarcely moved by an imperceptible swell pulsating through the Sound. The sun is warm and grateful, and the sky without a cloud, excepting those which stretch like filmy gauze from peak to peak, the temperature perhaps 60 de- grees in the shade. Half of the passengers have never seen an ice-cake, and they are eager with excitement to get nearer the polar videttes which are drifting by, away off under the land. The course of the vessel bears gradually toward the headland at the entrance, and the lumps of ice become more numerous. Bevies of ladies rush to the taff- rail as one of them passes close under the counter. Pres- ently a passing promontory opens out a large iceberg of fantastic shape, and then another, tall and stately, with
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turrets like a castle. Sea gulls, hagden and shags hover about their gleaming walls like snow-flakes in the air, or sit in solemn ranks upon the battlements. Objects change positions constantly, and countermarch across the field of view. Fancies dissolve before they are formed. Reflections from the land appear in darksome shades across the water, and from the looming icebergs in tremulous semblances, ghost-like and pallid. The scenic effects, at once so mag- ical and duplicated everywhere, grow momentarily more weird.
Meantime, the steamer slacks her headway, slows down, and presently with a sullen thud, lies alongside a small berg, whose rounded apex peers up over the deadeyes into the head of the companionway, looking for all the world as if it was going to come aboard. All the curious ladies pipe a combination scream, and make for the door of the cap- tain's stateroom. Then the quarter boat is swung out of the davits and lowered away; and the steward and the mate and the sailors tackle the glistening harlequin with pikes and axes, and, after much chopping and maneuvering with bights and bowlines, contrive to split off a big lump, and hoist it inboard with a sling. This supply is for the ice-chest. How pure, and cold, and beautiful, and trans- parent it is ! How precious to passengers who have been for two days stinted, and to the steward whose meat was likely to spoil ! The chunks cut off seem colorless, but the central core of the berg itself glows like a great blue eye, sentient and expressive, with that sort of poetical light termed " spirtuelle." You never tire of gazing into the translucent depths of the glacier ice, whose radiance emu- lates the blue and green of beryl, turquoise, chrysoprase and emerald. You gaze into them as into the arcana of the empyrean, with some vague awe of their mysterious source, and the intangible causes which gave them birth. And the grand icebergs !- so cold, yet so majestic ; so solid, yet so unsubstantial ; so massive, yet so ethereal !- whose bas- tions are mighty enough to shiver an onset, and yet so vola- tile that the warmth of wooing spring will dissipate them into vapor. Children of the Arctic frost, conceived in the upper air, inspired by the effulgent sun, and molded in the bowels of intensest congelation : the human mind can not contemplate them without a sympathetic inspiration, for their duplex entity is so like our combination of soul and body !
Who will tell me what paints the ice-bergs, and gives the sky its blue; colors the depths of the ocean, and imparts to
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Niagara its hues of intensest green ? Behind an intelligi- ble explanation lies the revelation which all men wish to know. Let us wait.
A stiff breeze was blowing as we entered Glacier Bay, and the breath came bitterly cold from off the ice field. The bay was filled with floating bergs and floes, and the temperature dropped quite rapidly to 46 degrees. The ruffled surface of the water assumed that peculiar tinge of cold steel-gray which landscapes wear in winter. The at- mosphere put on a sympathetic hue and grew perceptibly denser. Snow covered all the peaks, and the mer de glace spread out before us like a great white apron on the lap of the mountain. It is fourteen miles from the entrance to the head of the bay, and over the entire landscape nature seemed dead. Not a living thing appeared-not a gull on the wing, nor a seal in the gloomy fiords. Desolation reigned throughout, for there was nothing to sustain life. The creation was all new, and the glacier was still at work gradually preparing it for the abode of organic life. Dark- ness only was needed to relegate us to the primordium of chaos. But the sun was bright on the distant peaks, which inclosed the bay on all sides, and their intangible, ghostly outlines, scarcely distinguished from the fleecy clouds about them, seemed indefinitely beyond the convex line of earth. Seldom are mundane gloom and supernal glory contrasted by such startling juxtaposition.
As the steamer neared the glacier, speculations began respecting the height of its perpendicular front, but no one guessed higher than the vessel's topmast. It was only when she lay anchored in ninety fathoms of water, close under the ice, and not a quarter of a mile from shore, that spectators began to conceive the magnitude of the glacier and all its surroundings. The glacier wall overhung us with its mighty majesty, three times the height of the steamer's mast, or more, and we seemed none too far away to escape the constantly cleaving masses which dropped from its face with deafening detonations. The foam which gathered from the impetus of the plunges surged up- ward fully two-thirds of the height of the cliff, and the resulting swell tossed the large steamer like a toy, and rolled up in breakers of surf upon the beach. The vessel was in actual danger from the fragments of ice which occa- sionally thumped against her sides. Indeed, her wheels were afterward badly mashed in making her way out of the bay into open water. A paddle-wheel steamer is unfit for such navigation.
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The glacier wall is by no means smooth, but is seamed and riven in every part by clefts and fissures. It is hol- lowed into caverns and grottoes, hung with massive stalac- tites, and fashioned into pinnacles and domes. Every sec- tion and configuration has its heart of translucent blue or green, interlaced or bordered by fretted frost-work of intensest white; so that the appearance is at all times gnome-like and supernatural. No portion of the wall ever seems to pitch forward all at once in a sheer fall from top to bottom, but sections split off from the buttresses, or drop from midway, or the top. The apparent slowness of their descent is sublimity itself, because it carries with it the measure of its stupendous vastness and inappreciable height.
Impressions of magnitude and majesty, I opine, are not conveyed so much by any relative standard of comparison as by the degree with which we come within the range of their power or influence. One must realize before he can appreciate, and he can not realize fully until he becomes to a certain extent a participator. Proximity shudders and trembles at what remoteness and impunity view with dis- passionate equanimity. I can not conceive how any one can sit close by and contemplate without emotion the stu- pendous throes which give birth to the icebergs, attended with detonations like explosions of artillery, and reverber- ations of thunder across the sky, and the mighty wreckage which follows each convulsion. Nevertheless, I have seen a lady loll with complaisance in her steamer chair, com- fortably wrapped from the chilly air, and observe the astounding scene with the same languid contemplation that she would discuss her social fixtures and appointments. Zounds ! I believe that such a human negation would calmly view the wreck of worlds, and hear the crack of doom at the final rendering, if it did not affect " her set." She could watch at a suitable distance the agonies of Christian martyrs; the carnage of great battles ; the sweep of cyclones; and diluvial submergence. Dynamite would not appall her-but to me it would be the acme of satis- faction, ineffably supreme, to startle such clods of in- anition by a cry of "mouse," and electrify them into a momentary emotion. No vinaigrette would ever mitigate the shock.
I say, one can not estimate the magnitude of these glacial phenomena by contiguous objects, because they are all un- familiar. The steamer itself, although considerable in size, seems like an atom. As for the rest, the fragments of ice
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which are seen stranded along the beach, looking no larger than blocks, measure twelve feet high. Those lumps drift- ing past yonder fiord are icebergs higher than our topmast. The other side of the bay which, we imagine, one could swim across with ease, is five miles off. The ice ledge itself is four hundred feet high. The peaks in the distance, forty miles away, are sixteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. There is the Devil's Thumb, looking no higher than the Washington Monument, a sheer monolith six thousand feet high, with faces almost perpendicular. The timber line around the feet of the distant ranges resembles a cinc- ture of moss.
From a pinnacle of elevation overlooking the Muir ice field, which is obtained by an arduous half day's climb, although some expected to accomplish it in an hour, one can count no less than fifteen tributary glacial streams, any one of which is as large as the great Rhone glacier.
Drawn from the inexhaustible but annually diminishing accumulations of snow which fill the mountain valleys to a depth of at least 2,000 feet, these separate streams of plastic congelation unite like the strands of a rope to form the irresistible current of the Muir. The surface of the glacier is not uniformly level and smooth like a boulevard. It has its drifts and dykes, its cascades, riffs, and rapids, like any unfrozen river. In the immediate front, and extending a mile or more back, its whole surface is the most rugged formation imaginable. It is utterly impossible for any living creature to traverse it, being in fact a compacted aggregation of wedge-shaped and rounded cones of solid ice, capped by discolored and disintegrating snow. But away back in the mountain passes it is easily traversed with sledges or snow shoes. Indians cross the divide at sundry places all along the coast from the Stickeen to Copper River.
Looking afar off into the blank perspective the icy re-en- forcements which pour out of the mountain fastnesses like gathering clans seem compacted into indefinable fleecy masses, while in the immediate van they pass in review in serried phalanxes of cowled and hooded monks twenty feet tall, wrapped in dirty toques and capuchins, snow powdered, and bedraggled, and pressing forward with never-ceasing march, as if all the life-long denizens of the Gothard and St. Bernard had set out at once to temper their frigid tongues in the tepid waters which are warmed by the Kuro-Siwo. In other places, where the mer-de-glace is level like a plain, its surface is seamed with deep crevasses and slashed with rifts and chasms whose sides and walls deep down for sixty
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feet are dazzling blue. Thus the incipient bergs are split and carved and chiseled and prepared for their final segre- gation, so that they will break off easily when they reach the front.
Meantime the sub-glacial river which is flowing under- neath buoys up the ice and floats it to the sea. It is esti- mated, by soundings made as near as vessels dare approach, that it is fully eight hundred feet deep. The water flows beneath the glacier, just as it does under the deposit of a snow-laden roof, forming icicles at the eaves. To this mighty channel, between its flanking slopes of rock, the glacier is at last restricted. Evidences are abundant that it is continually receding. They are scored high up on the abutting rocks by the adamantine ice. They are attested by the stranded débris of the lateral moraines, and recorded in the written narratives of Vancouver, who speaks of his inability to enter this bay in 1793, which is now navigable fourteen miles inland. Once the ice-field was level with the distant mountain tops ; now it has settled, with melting and thaw, until the peaks are far above the surface. The annual accumulations are dissolving and diminishing faster than they can be replenished, and centuries hence snow will no longer be perpetual in the valleys. The warm hills will throw off their useless mantle, and nothing will remain of the Muir glacier except a goodly stream and some tribu- tary rills leaping with a musical cadence from the vernal melting among the peaks. The deep and cavernous gully which now retains the sub-glacial outflow of the ice-field will become an estuary of the ocean, and the legend of the Muir will be illustrated in parti-colored tapestry lining the verdant slopes and meadows with flowers and foliage. Per- haps some goodly village will nestle at the terminal moraine, as it now does in the Matterhorn among the Alps. Then all the soil deposited in the valleys and upon the hillsides will tell us of the wear and tear which even now is grinding down the mountains, of the denudation, pulverizing, leveling, and filling up of which the glacier has been the potent agent since the world began.
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