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Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska

BY

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD

_Third Edition_


ST. LOUIS, MO., 1914

Published by B. HERDER
17 South Broadway

FREIBURG (BADEN)
Germany

LONDON, W. C.
68 Great Russell Str.




Copyright, 1899, by Joseph Gummersbach.


--BECKTOLD--
PRINTING AND BOOK MFG. CO.
ST. LOUIS, MO.




                       To
               KENNETH O'CONNOR,
     First-District-of-Columbia Volunteers,
Gen'l Shafter's Fifth Army Corps, Santiago de Cuba:
   IN MEMORY OF OUR HOME-LIFE IN THE BUNGALOW.




NOTE.


The Author returns thanks to the Editor of the _Ave Maria_ for the
privilege of republishing these notes of travel and adventure.




CONTENTS.

  Chapter.                                        Page.
        I. Due West to Denver                         7
       II. In Denver Town                            18
      III. The Garden of the Gods                    29
       IV. A Whirl across the Rockies                40
        V. Off for Alaska                            47
       VI. In the Inland Sea                         56
      VII. Alaskan Village Life                      66
     VIII. Juneau                                    74
       IX. By Solitary Shores                        86
        X. In Search of the Totem-Pole               98
       XI. In the Sea of Ice                        111
      XII. Alaska's Capital                         124
     XIII. Katalan's Rock                           136
      XIV. From the Far North                       148
       XV. Out of the Arctic                        159




CHAPTER I.

Due West to Denver.


Commencement week at Notre Dame ended in a blaze of glory. Multitudes of
guests who had been camping for a night or two in the recitation
rooms--our temporary dormitories--gave themselves up to the boyish
delights of school-life, and set numerous examples which the students
were only too glad to follow. The boat race on the lake was a picture;
the champion baseball match, a companion piece; but the highly decorated
prize scholars, glittering with gold and silver medals, and badges of
satin and bullion; the bevies of beautiful girls who for once--once only
in the year--were given the liberty of the lawns, the campus, and the
winding forest ways, that make of Notre Dame an elysium in summer; the
frequent and inspiring blasts of the University Band, and the general
joy that filled every heart to overflowing, rendered the last day of the
scholastic year romantic to a degree and memorable forever.

There was no sleep during the closing night--not one solitary wink; all
laws were dead-letters--alas that they should so soon arise again from
the dead!--and when the wreath of stars that crowns the golden statue of
Our Lady on the high dome, two hundred feet in air, and the
wide-sweeping crescent under her shining feet, burst suddenly into
flame, and shed a lustre that was welcomed for miles and miles over the
plains of Indiana--then, I assure you, we were all so deeply touched
that we knew not whether to laugh or to weep, and I shall not tell you
which we did. The moon was very full that night, and I didn't blame it!

But the picnic really began at the foot of the great stairway in front
of the dear old University next morning. Five hundred possible
presidents were to be distributed broadcast over the continent; five
hundred sons and heirs to be returned with thanks to the yearning bosoms
of their respective families. The floodgates of the trunk-rooms were
thrown open, and a stream of Saratogas went thundering to the station at
South Bend, two miles away. Hour after hour, and indeed for several
days, huge trucks and express wagons plied to and fro, groaning under
the burden of well-checked luggage. It is astonishing to behold how big
a trunk a mere boy may claim for his very own; but it must be remembered
that your schoolboy lives for several years within the brass-bound
confines of a Saratoga. It is his bureau, his wardrobe, his private
library, his museum and toy shop, the receptacle of all that is near and
dear to him; it is, in brief, his _sanctum sanctorum_, the one inviolate
spot in his whole scholastic career of which he, and he alone, holds the
key.

We came down with the tide in the rear of the trunk freshet. The way
being more or less clear, navigation was declared open. The next moment
saw a procession of chariots, semi-circus wagons and barouches filled
with homeward-bound schoolboys and their escorts, dashing at a brisk
trot toward the railroad station. Banners were flying, shouts rent the
air; familiar forms in cassock and biretta waved benedictions from all
points of the compass; while the gladness and the sadness of the hour
were perpetuated by the aid of instantaneous photography. The
enterprising kodaker caught us on the fly, just as the special train was
leaving South Bend for Chicago; a train that was not to be dismembered
or its exclusiveness violated until it had been run into the station at
Denver.

After this last negative attack we were set free. Vacation had begun in
good earnest. What followed, think you? Mutual congratulations,
flirtations and fumigations without ceasing; for there was much lost
time to be made up, and here was a golden opportunity. O you who have
been a schoolboy and lived for months and months in a pent-up Utica,
where the glimpse of a girl is as welcome and as rare as a sunbeam in a
cellar, you can imagine how the two hours and forty-five minutes were
improved--and Chicago eighty miles away. It is true we all turned for a
moment to catch a last glimpse of the University dome, towering over the
treetops; and we felt very tenderly toward everyone there. But there
were "sweet girl graduates" on board; and, as you know well enough, it
required no laureate to sing their praises, though he has done so with
all the gush and fervor of youth.

It was summer. "It is always summer where they are," some youngster was
heard to murmur. But it was really the summer solstice, or very near it.
The pond-lilies were ripe; bushels of them were heaped upon the
platforms at every station we came to; and before the first stage of our
journey was far advanced the girls were sighing over lapfuls of lilies,
and the lads tottering under the weight of stupendous _boutonnières_.

As we drew near the Lake City, the excitement visibly increased. Here,
there were partings, and such sweet sorrow as poets love to sing. It
were vain to tell how many promises were then and there made, and of
course destined to be broken; how everybody was to go and spend a happy
season with everybody or at least somebody else, and to write meanwhile
without fail. There were good-byes again and again, and yet again; and,
with much mingled emotion, we settled ourselves in luxurious seats and
began to look dreamily toward Denver.

In the mazes of the wonderful city of Chicago we saw the warp of that
endless steel web over which we flew like spiders possessed. The sunken
switches took our eye and held it for a time. But a greater marvel was
the man with the cool head and the keen sight and nerves of iron, who
sat up in his loft, with his hand on a magic wand, and played with
trainfuls of his fellowmen--a mere question of life or death to be
answered over and over again; played with them as the conjurer tosses
his handful of pretty globes into the air and catches them without one
click of the ivories. It was a forcible reminder of Clapham Junction;
the perfect system that brings order out of chaos, and saves a little
world, but a mad one, from the total annihilation that threatens it
every moment in the hour, and every hour in the day, and every day in
the year.

It did not take us long to discover the advantages of our special-car
system. There were nigh fifty of us housed in a brace of excursion cars.
In one of these--the parlor--the only stationary seats were at the two
ends, while the whole floor was covered with easy-chairs of every
conceivable pattern. The dining car was in reality a cardroom between
meals--and _such_ meals, for we had stocked the larder ourselves.
Everywhere the agents of the several lines made their appearance and
greeted us cordially; they were closeted for a few moments with the
shepherd of our flock, Father Zahm, of the University of Notre Dame,
Indiana; then they would take a bite with us--a dish of berries or an
ice,--for they invariably accompanied us down the road a few miles; and
at last would bid us farewell with a flattering figure of speech, which
is infinitely preferable to the traditional "Tickets, please; tickets!"

At every town and village crowds came down to see us. We were evidently
objects of interest. Even the nimble reporter was on hand, and looked
with a not unkindly eye upon the lads who were celebrating the first
hours of the vacation with an enthusiasm which had been generating for
some weeks. There was such a making up of beds when, at dark, the parlor
and dining cars were transformed into long, narrow dormitories, and the
boys paired off, two and two, above and below, through the length of our
flying university, and made a night of it, without fear of notes or
detentions, and with no prefect stalking ghostlike in their midst.

It would be hard to say which we found most diverting, the long, long
landscape that divided as we passed, through it and closed up in the
rear, leaving only the shining iron seam down the middle; the beautiful,
undulating prairie land; the hot and dusty desolation of the plains;
the delicious temperature of the highlands, as we approached the Rockies
and had our first glimpse of Pike's Peak in its mantle of snow: the
muddy rivers, along whose shores we glided swiftly hour after hour: the
Mississippi by moonlight--we all sat up to see that--or the Missouri at
Kansas City, where we began to scatter our brood among their far Western
homes. At La Junta we said good-bye to the boys bound for Mexico and the
Southwest. It was like a second closing of the scholastic year; the
good-byes were now ringing fast and furious. Jolly fellows began to grow
grave and the serious ones more solemn; for there had been no cloud or
shadow for three rollicking days.

To be sure there was a kind of infantile cyclone out on the plains,
memorable for its superb atmospheric effects, and the rapidity with
which we shut down the windows to keep from being inflated
balloon-fashion. And there was a brisk hail-storm at the gate of the
Rockies that peppered us smartly for a few moments. Then there were some
boys who could not eat enough, and who turned from the dessert in
tearful dismay; and one little kid who dived out of the top bunk in a
moment of rapture, and should have broken his neck--but he didn't!

We were quite sybaritical as to hours, with breakfast and dinner
courses, and mouth-organs and cigarettes and jam between meals. Frosted
cake and oranges were left untouched upon the field after the
gastronomical battles were fought so bravely three or four times a day.
Perhaps the pineapples and bananas, and the open barrel of strawberries,
within reach of all at any hour, may account for the phenomenon.

Pueblo! Ah me, the heat of that infernal junction! Pueblo, with the
stump of its one memorable tree, or a slice of that stump turned up on
end--to make room for a new railway-station, that could just as well
have been built a few feet farther on,--and staring at you, with a full
broadside of patent-medicine placards trying to cover its nakedness. On
closer inspection we read this legend: "The tree that grew here was 380
years old; circumference, 28 feet; height, 79 feet; was cut down June
25, 1883, at a cost of $250." So perished, at the hands of an amazingly
stupid city council, the oldest landmark in Colorado. Under the shade of
this cottonwood Kit Carson, Wild Bill, and many another famous Indian
scout built early camp fires. Near it, in 1850, thirty-six whites were
massacred by Indians; upon one of its huge limbs fourteen men were
hanged at convenient intervals; and it is a pity that the city council
did not follow this admirable lead and leave the one glory of Pueblo to
save it from damnation. It afforded the only grateful shelter in this
furnace heat; it was the one beautiful object in a most unbeautiful
place, and it has been razed to the ground in memory of the block-heads
whose bodies were not worthy to enrich the roots of it. Tradition adds,
pathetically enough, that the grave of the first white woman who died in
that desert was made beneath the boughs of the "Old Monarch." May she
rest in peace under the merciless hands of the baggage-master and his
merry crew! Lightly lie the trunks that are heaped over her nameless
dust! Well, there came a time when we forgot Pueblo, but we never will
forgive the town council.

Then we listened in vain at evening for the strumming of fandango music
on multitudinous guitars, as was our custom so long as the _muchachos_
were with us. Then we played no more progressive euchre games many miles
in length, and smoked no more together in the ecstasy of unrestraint;
but watched and waited in vain--for those who were with us were no
longer of us for some weeks to come, and the mouths of the singers were
hushed. The next thing we knew a city seemed to spring suddenly out of
the plains--a mirage of brick and mortar--an oasis in the
wilderness,--and we realized, with a gasp, that we had struck the
bull's-eye of the Far West--in other words, Denver!




CHAPTER II.

In Denver Town.


Colorado! What an open-air sound that word has! The music of the wind is
in it, and a peculiarly free, rhythmical swing, suggestive of the
swirling lariat. Colorado is not, as some conjecture, a corruption or
revised edition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who was sent out by
the Spanish Viceroy of Mexico in 1540 in search of the seven cities of
Cibola: it is from the verb _colorar_--colored red, or ruddy--a name
frequently given to rivers, rocks, and ravines in the lower country. Nor
do we care to go back as far as the sixteenth century for the beginning
of an enterprise that is still very young and possibly a little fresh.
In 1803 the United States purchased from France a vast territory for
$15,000,000; it was then known as Louisiana, and that purchase included
the district long referred to as the Great American Desert.

In 1806 Zebulon Pike camped where Pueblo now stands. He was a
pedestrian. One day he started to climb a peak whose shining summit had
dazzled him from the first; it seemed to soar into the very heavens, yet
lie within easy reach just over the neighboring hill. He started bright
and early, with enthusiasm in his heart, determination in his eye, and a
cold bite in his pocket. He went from hill to hill, from mountain to
mountain; always ascending, satisfied that each height was the last, and
that he had but to step from the next pinnacle to the throne of his
ambition. Alas! the peak was as far away as ever, even at the close of
the second day; so famished, foot-frozen and well-nigh in extremity, he
dragged his weary bones back to camp, defeated. That peak bears his name
to this day, and probably he deserves the honor quite as much as any
human molecule who godfathers a mountain.

James Pursley, of Bardstown, Ky., was a greater explorer than Pike; but
Pursley gives Pike much credit which Pike blushingly declines. The two
men were exceptionally well-bred pioneers. In 1820 Colonel Long named a
peak in memory of his explorations. The peak survives. Then came General
Fremont, in 1843, and the discovery of gold near Denver fifteen years
later; but I believe Green Russell, a Georgian, found _color_ earlier
on Pike's Peak.

Colorado was the outgrowth of the great financial crisis of 1857. That
panic sent a wave westward,--a wave that overflowed all the wild lands
of the wilderness, and, in most cases, to the advantage of both wave and
wilderness. Of course there was a gradual settling up or settling down
from that period. Many people who didn't exactly come to stay got stuck
fast, or found it difficult to leave; and now they are glad of it.
Denver was the result.

Denver! It seems as if that should be the name of some out-of-door
production; of something brawny and breezy and bounding; something
strong with the strength of youth; overflowing with vitality; ambitions,
unconquerable, irrepressible--and such is Denver, the queen city of the
plains. Denver is a marvel, and she knows it. She is by no means the
marvel that San Francisco was at the same interesting age; but, then,
Denver doesn't know it; or, if she knows it, she doesn't care to mention
it or to hear it mentioned.

True it is that the Argonauts of the Pacific were blown in out of the
blue sea--most of them. They had had a taste of the tropics on the way;
paroquets and Panama fevers were their portion; or, after a long pull
and a strong pull around the Horn, they were comparatively fresh and
eager for the fray when they touched dry land once more. There was much
close company between decks to cheer the lonely hours; a very bracing
air and a very broad, bright land to give them welcome when the voyage
was ended--in brief, they had their advantages.

The pioneers of Denver town were the captains or mates of prairie
schooners, stranded in the midst of a sealike desert. It was a voyage of
from six to eight weeks west of the Mississippi in those days. The only
stations--and miserably primitive ones at that--lay along Ben Holliday's
overland stage route. They were far between. Indians waylaid the
voyagers; fires, famine and fatigue helped to strew the trail with the
graves of men and the carcasses of animals. Hard lines were these; but
not so hard as the lines of those who pushed farther into the
wilderness, nor stayed their adventurous feet till they were planted on
the rich soil of the Pacific slope.

Pioneer life knows little variety. The _menu_ of the Colorado banquet
July 4, 1859, will revive in the minds of many an old Californian the
fast-fading memories of the past; but I fear, twill be a long time
before such a _menu_ as the following will gladden the eyes of the
average prospector in the Klondyke:

     MENU.

     SOUP.
     A la Bean.

     FISH.
     Brook Trout, a la catch 'em first.

     MEATS.
     Antelope larded, pioneer style.

     BREAD.
     Biscuit, hand-made, full weight, a la
     yellow.

     VEGETABLES.
     Beans, mountain style, warranted boiled
     forty-eight hours, a la soda.

     DESSERT.
     Dried Apples, Russell gulch style.
     Coffee, served in tin cups, to be washed
     clean for the occasion, overland
     style, a la no cream.

In those days Horace Greeley, returning from his California tour, halted
to cast his eye over the now West. The miners primed an old blunderbus
with rich dust, and judiciously salted Gregory gulch. Of course Horace
was invited to inspect it. Being somewhat horny-handed, he seized pick
and shovel and went to work in earnest. The pan-out was astonishing. He
flew back to New York laden with the glittering proofs of wealth; gave a
whole page of the _Tribune_ to his tale of the golden fleece; and a rush
to the new diggings followed as a matter of course.

Denver and Auraria were rival settlements on the opposite shores of
Cherry Creek; in 1860 they consolidated, and then boasted a population
of 4000, in a vast territory containing but 60,000 souls. The boom was
on, and it was not long before a parson made his appearance. This was
the Rev. George Washington Fisher of the Methodist Church, who accepted
the offer of a saloon as a house of worship, using the bar for a pulpit.
His text was: "Ho, everyone that thirsteth! come ye to the waters. And
he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat. Yea, come buy wine and milk
without money and without price." On the walls were displayed these
legends: "No trust," "Pay as you go," "Twenty-five cents a drink," etc.

Colorado Territory was organized in 1861, and was loyal to the Union.
Denver was still booming, though she suffered nearly all the ills that
precocious settlements are heir to. The business portion of the town was
half destroyed in 1863; Cherry Creek flooded her in 1864, floating
houses out of reach and drowning fifteen or twenty of the inhabitants.
Then the Indians went on the war-path; stages and wagon trains were
attacked; passengers and scattered settlers massacred, and the very town
itself threatened. Alarm-bells warned the frightened inhabitants of
impending danger; many fled to the United States Mint for refuge, and to
cellars, cisterns, and dark alleys. This was during the wild reign of
Spotted Horse along the shores of the Platte, before he was captured by
Major Downing at the battle of Sand Creek, and finally sent to Europe on
exhibition as a genuine child of the forest.

Those were stirring times, when every man had an eye to business, and
could hardly afford to spare it long enough to wink. It is related of a
certain minister who was officiating at a funeral that, while standing
by the coffin offering the final prayer, he noticed one of the mourners
kneeling upon the loose earth recently thrown from the grave. This man
was a prospector, like all the rest, and in an absent-minded way he had
tearfully been sifting the soil through his fingers. Suddenly he arose
and began to stake out a claim adjoining the grave. This was, of course,
observed by the clergyman, who hastened the ceremonials to a conclusion,
and ended his prayer thus: "Stake me off a claim, Bill. We ask it for
Christ's sake. Amen."

Horace Greeley's visit was fully appreciated, and his name given to a
mountain hamlet, long after known familiarly as "Saint's Rest," because
there was nothing stimulating to be found thereabout. Poor Meeker, for
many years agricultural editor of the New York _Tribune_, founded that
settlement. He was backed by Greeley, and established the Greeley
_Tribune_ at Saint's Rest. In 1877 Meeker was made Indian agent, and he
did his best to live up to the dream of the Indian-maniacs; but, after
two years of self-sacrifice and devotion to the cause, he was brutally
betrayed and murdered by Chief Douglas, of the Utes, his guest at the
time. Mrs. Meeker and her daughters, and a Mrs. Price and her child,
were taken captive and subjected to the usual treatment which all women
and children may expect at the hands of the noble red-man. They were
rescued in due season; but what was rescue to them save a prolongation
of inconsolable bereavement?

When General Grant visited Central, the little mountain town received
him royally. A pavement of solid silver bricks was laid for him to walk
upon from his carriage to the hotel door. One sees very little of this
barbaric splendor nowadays even in Denver, the most pretentious of far
Western burgs. She is a metropolis of magnificent promises. Alighting at
the airy station, you take a carriage for the hotel, and come at once to
the centre of the city. Were you to continue your drive but a few blocks
farther, you would come with equal abruptness to the edge of it. The
surprise is delightful in either case, but the suddenness of the
transition makes the stranger guest a little dizzy at first. There are
handsome buildings in Denver--blocks that would do credit to any city
under the sun; but there was for years an upstart air, a palpable
provincialism, a kind of ill-disguised "previousness," noticeable that
made her seem like the brisk suburb of some other place, and that other
place, alas! invisible to mortal eye. Rectangular blocks make a
checker-board of the town map. The streets are appropriately named
Antelope, Bear, Bison, Boulder, Buffalo, Coyote, Cedar, Cottonwood,
Deer, Golden, Granite, Moose, etc. The names of most trees, most
precious stones, the great States and Territories of the West, with a
sprinkling of Spanish, likewise beguile you off into space, and leave
the once nebulous burg beaming in the rear.

Denver's theatre is remarkably handsome. In hot weather the atmosphere
is tempered by torrents of ice-water that crash through hidden aqueducts
with a sound as of twenty sawmills. The management _dams_ the flood when
the curtain rises and the players begin to speak; the music lovers
_damn_ it from the moment the curtain falls. They are absorbed in
volumes of silent profanity between the acts; for the orchestra is
literally drowned in the roar of the rushing element. There was nothing
that interested me more than a copy of Alice Polk Hill's "Tales of the
Colorado Pioneers"; and to her I return thanks for all that I borrowed
without leave from that diverting volume.

Somehow Denver, after my early visit, leaves with me an impression as of
a perfectly new city that has just been unpacked; as if the various
parts of it had been set up in a great hurry, and the citizens were now
impatiently awaiting the arrival of the rest of the properties. Some of
the streets that appeared so well at first glance, seemed, upon
inspection, more like theatrical flats than realities; and there was
always a consciousness of everything being wide open and uncovered.
Indeed, so strongly did I feel this that it was with difficulty I could
refrain from wearing my hat in the house. Nor could I persuade myself
that it was quite safe to go out alone after dark, lest unwittingly I
should get lost, and lift up in vain the voice of one crying in the
wilderness; for the blank and weird spaces about there are as wide as
the horizon where the distant mountains seem to have slid partly down
the terrestrial incline,--spaces that offer the unwary neither hope nor
hospice,--where there is positively shelter for neither man nor beast,
from the red-brick heart of the ambitious young city to her snow-capped
ultimate suburb.




CHAPTER III.

The Garden of the Gods.


The trains run out of Denver like quick-silver,--this is the prettiest
thing I can say of Denver. They trickle down into high, green valleys,
under the shadow of snow-capped cliffs. There the grass is of the
liveliest tint--a kind of salad-green. The air is sweet and fine;
everything looks clean, well kept, well swept--perhaps the wind is the
keeper and the sweeper. All along the way there is a very striking
contrast of color in rock, meadows, and sky; the whole is as appetizing
to the sight as a newly varnished picture.

We didn't down brakes until we reached Colorado Springs; there we
changed cars for Manitou. Already the castellated rocks were filling us
with childish delight. Fungi decked the cliffs above us: colossal,
petrified fungi, painted Indian fashion. At any rate, there is a kind of
wild, out-of-door, subdued harmony in the rock-tints upon the exterior
slopes of the famed Garden of the Gods, quite in keeping with the spirit
of the decorative red-man. Within that garden color and form run riot,
and Manitou is the restful outpost of this erratic wilderness.

It is fitting that Manitou should be approached in a rather primitive
manner. I was glad when we were very politely invited to get out of the
train and walk a plank over a puddle that for a moment submerged the
track; glad when we were advised to foot it over a trestle-bridge that
sagged in the swift current of a swollen stream; and gladder still when
our locomotive began to puff and blow and slaken its pace as we climbed
up into the mouth of a ravine fragrant with the warm scents of
summer--albeit we could boast but a solitary brace of cars, and these
small ones, and not overcrowded at that.

Only think of it! We were scarcely three hours by rail from Denver; and
yet here, in Manitou, were the very elements so noticeably lacking
there. Nature in her natural state--primitive forever; the air seasoned
with the pungent spices of odoriferous herbs; the sweetest sunshine in
abundance, and all the shade that makes sunshine most agreeable.

Manitou is a picturesque hamlet that has scattered itself up and down a
deep ravine, regardless of the limiting lines of the surveyor. The
railway station at Manitou might pose for a porter's lodge in the
prettiest park in England. Surely there is hope for America when she can
so far curb her vulgar love of the merely practical as to do that sort
of thing at the right time and in the right place.

A fine stream brawls through the bed of this lovely vale. There are
rustic cottages that cluster upon the brink of the stream, as if charmed
by the music of its song; and I am sure that the cottagers dwelling
therein have no wish to hang their harps upon any willows whatever; or
to mingle their tears, though these were indeed the waters of Babylon
that flow softly night and day through the green groves of Manitou. The
breeze stirs the pulse like a tonic; birds, bees, and butterflies dance
in the air; the leaves have the gloss of varnish--there is no dust
there,--and everything is cleanly, cheerful and reposeful. From the
hotel veranda float the strains of harp and viol; at intervals during
the day and night music helps us to lift up our hearts; there is nothing
like it--except more of it. There is not overmuch dressing among the
women, nor the beastly spirit of loudness among the men; the domestic
atmosphere is undisturbed. A newspaper printed on a hand-press, and
distributed by the winds for aught I know, has its office in the main
lane of the village; its society column creates no scandal. A solitary
bicycle that flashes like a shooting star across the placid foreground
is our nearest approach to an event worth mentioning.

Loungers lounge at the springs as if they really enjoyed it. An amiable
booth-boy displays his well-dressed and handsomely mounted foxskins, his
pressed flowers of Colorado, his queer mineralogical jewelry, and his
uncouth geological specimens in the shape of hideous bric-a-brac, as if
he took pleasure in thus entertaining the public; while everybody has
the cosiest and most sociable time over the counter, and buys only by
accident at last.

There are rock gorges in Manitou, through which the Indian tribes were
wont noiselessly to defile when on the war-path in the brave days of
old; gorges where currents of hot air breathe in your face like the
breath of some fierce animal. There are brilliant and noisy cataracts
and cascades that silver the rocks with spray; and a huge winding cavern
filled with mice and filth and the blackness of darkness, and out of
which one emerges looking like a tramp and feeling like--well! There are
springs bubbling and steeping and stagnating by the wayside; springs
containing carbonates of soda, lithia, lime, magnesia, and iron;
sulphates of potassa and soda, chloride of sodium and silica, in various
solutions. Some of these are sweeter than honey in the honeycomb; some
of them smell to heaven--what more can the pampered palate of man
desire?

Let all those who thirst for chalybeate waters bear in mind that the Ute
Iron Spring of Manitou is 800 feet higher than St. Catarina, the highest
iron spring in Europe, and nearly 1000 feet higher than St. Moritz; and
that the bracing air at an elevation of 6400 feet has probably as much
to do with the recovery of the invalid as has the judicious quaffing of
medicinal waters. Of pure iron springs, the famous Schwalbach contains
rather more iron than the Ute Iron, and Spa rather less. On the whole,
Manitou has the advantage of the most celebrated medicinal springs in
Europe, and has a climate even in midwinter preferable to all of them.

On the edge of the pretty hamlet at Manitou stands a cottage half hidden
like a bird's nest among the trees. I saw only the peaks of gables under
green boughs; and I wondered when I was informed that the lovely spot
had been long untenanted, and wondered still more when I learned that it
was the property of good Grace Greenwood. Will she ever cease wandering,
and return to weave a new chaplet of greenwood leaves gathered beneath
the eaves of her mountain home?

At the top of the village street stands Pike's Peak--at least it seems
to stand there when viewed through the telescopic air. It is in reality
a dozen miles distant; but is easily approached by a winding trail, over
which ladies in the saddle may reach the glorious snow-capped summit and
return to Manitou between breakfast and supper--unless one should prefer
to be rushed up and down over the aerial railway. From the signal
station the view reminds one of a map of the world. It rather dazes than
delights the eye to roam so far, and imagination itself grows weary at
last and is glad to fold its wings.

Manitou's chief attraction lies over the first range of hills--the
veritable Garden of the Gods. You may walk, ride or drive to it; in any
case the surprise begins the moment you reach the ridge's top above
Manitou, and ceases not till the back is turned at the close of the
excursion--nor then either, for the memory of that marvel haunts one
like a feverish dream. Fancy a softly undulating land, delicately wooded
and decked with many an ornamental shrub; a landscape that composes so
well one can scarcely assure himself that the artist or the landscape
gardener has not had a hand in the beautifying of it.

In this lonely, silent land, with cloud shadows floating across it, at
long intervals bird voices or the bleating of distant flocks charm the
listening ear. Out of this wild and beautiful spot spring Cyclopean
rocks, appalling in the splendor of their proportions and the
magnificence of their dyes. Sharp shafts shoot heavenward from breadths
of level sward, and glow like living flames; peaks of various tinges
overlook the tops of other peaks, that, in their turn, lord it among
gigantic bowlders piled upon massive pedestals. It is Ossa upon Pelion,
in little; vastly impressive because of the exceptional surroundings
that magnify these magnificent monuments, unique in their design and
almost unparalleled in their picturesque and daring outline. Some of the
monoliths tremble and sway, or seem to sway; for they are balanced
edgewise, as if the gods had amused themselves in some infantile game,
and, growing weary of this little planet, had fled and left their toys
in confusion. The top-heavy and the tottering ones are almost within
reach; but there are slabs of rock that look like slices out of a
mountain--I had almost said like slices out of a red-hot volcano; they
stand up against the blue sky and the widespreading background in
brilliant and astonishing perspective.

I doubt if anywhere else in the world the contrasts in color and form
are more violent than in the Garden of the Gods. They are not always
agreeable to the eye, for there is much crude color here; but there are
points of sight where these columns, pinnacles, spires and obelisks,
with base and capital, are so grouped that the massing is as fantastical
as a cloud picture, and the whole can be compared only to a petrified
after-glow. I have seen pictures of the Garden of the Gods that made me
nearly burst with laughter; I mean color studies that were supremely
ridiculous in my eyes, for I had not then seen the original; but none of
these makes me laugh any longer. They serve, even the wildest and the
worst of them, to remind me of a morning drive, in the best of company,
through that grand garden where our combined vocabularies of delight and
wonderment were exhausted inside of fifteen minutes; and where we drove
on and on, hour after hour, from climax to climax, lost in speechless
amazement.

Glen Eyrie is the valley of Rasselas--I am sure it is. The Prince of
Abyssinia left the gate open when he, poor fool! went forth in search of
happiness and found it not. Now any one may drive through the domain of
the present possessor and admire his wealth of pictorial
solitude--without, however, sharing it further. If it were mine, would I
permit thus much, I wonder? Only the elect should enter there; and once
the charmed circle was complete, we would wall up the narrow passage
that leads to this terrestrial paradise, and you would hear no more from
us, or of us, nor we of you, or from you, forever.

On my first visit to Colorado Springs I made a little pilgrimage. I
heard that a gentle lady, whom I had always wished to see, was at her
home on the edge of the city. No trouble in finding the place: any one
could direct me. It was a cosy cottage in the midst of a garden and
shaded by thickly leaved trees. Some one was bowed down among the
strawberry beds, busy there; yet the place seemed half deserted and
very, very quiet. Big bamboo chairs and lounges lined the vine-curtained
porch. The shades in the low bay-window were half drawn, and a glint of
sunshine lighted the warm interior. I saw heaps of precious books on the
table in that deep window. There was a mosquito door in the porch, and
there I knocked for admittance. I knocked for a long time, but received
no answer. I knocked again so that I might be heard even in the
strawberry bed. A little kitten came up out of the garden and said
something kittenish to me, and then I heard a muffled step within. The
door opened--the inner door,--and beyond the wire-cloth screen, that
remained closed against me, I saw a figure like a ghost, but a very
buxom and wholesome ghost indeed.

I asked for the hostess. Alas! she was far away and had been ill; it
was not known when she would return. Her address was offered me, and I
thought to write her,--thought to tell her how I had sought out her
home, hoping to find her after years of patient waiting; and that while
I talked of her through the wire-cloth screen the kitten, which she must
have petted once upon a time, climbed up the screen until it had reached
the face of the amiable woman within, and then purred and purred as only
a real kitten can. I never wrote that letter; for while we were chatting
on the porch she of whom we chatted, she who has written a whole armful
of the most womanly and lovable of books, Helen Hunt Jackson, lay dying
in San Francisco and we knew it not. But it is something to have stood
by her threshold, though she was never again to cross it in the flesh,
and to have been greeted by her kitten. How she loved kittens! And now I
can associate her memory with the peacefulest of cottages, the easiest
of veranda chairs, a bay-window full of books and sunshine, and a
strawberry bed alive with berries and blossoms and butterflies and bees.
And yonder on the heights her body was anon laid to rest among the
haunts she loved so dearly.




CHAPTER IV.

A Whirl across the Rockies.


A long time ago--nearly a quarter of a century--California could boast a
literary weekly capable of holding its own with any in the land. This
was before San Francisco had begun to lose her unique and delightful
individuality--now gone forever. Among the contributors to this once
famous weekly were Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Prentice Mulford, Joaquin
Miller, Dan de Quille, Orpheus C. Kerr, C. H. Webb, "John Paul," Ada
Clare, Ada Isaacs Menken, Ina Coolbrith, and hosts of others. Fitz Hugh
Ludlow wrote for it a series of brilliant descriptive letters recounting
his adventures during a recent overland journey; they were afterward
incorporated in a volume--long out of print--entitled "The Heart of the
Continent."

In one of these letters Ludlow wrote as follows of the probable future
of Manitou: "When Colorado becomes a populous State, the springs of the
Fontaine-qui-Bouille will constitute its Spa. In air and scenery no more
glorious summer residence could be imagined. The Coloradian of the
future, astonishing the echoes of the rocky foothills by a railroad from
Denver to the springs, and running down on Saturday to stop over Sunday
with his family, will have little cause to envy us Easterners our
Saratoga as he paces up and down the piazza of the Spa hotel, mingling
his full-flavored Havana with that lovely air, unbreathed before, which
is floating down upon him from the snow peaks of the range." His
prophecy has become true in every particular. But what would he have
thought had he threaded the tortuous path now marked by glistening
railway tracks? What would he have said of the Grand Cañon of the
Arkansas, the Black Cañon of the Gunnison, Castle Cañon and Marshall
Pass over the crest of the continent?

I suppose a narrow-gauge road can go anywhere. It trails along the slope
of shelving hills like a wild vine; it slides through gopher-hole
tunnels as a thread slides through the eye of a needle; it utilizes
water-courses; it turns ridiculously sharp corners in a style calculated
to remind one of the days when he played "snap-the-whip" and happened
to be the snapper himself. This is especially the case if one is sitting
on the rear platform of the last car. We shot a cañon by daylight, and
marvelled at the glazed surface of the red rock with never so much as a
scratch over it. On the one hand we nearly scraped the abrupt
perpendicular wall that towered hundreds of feet above us; on the other,
a swift, muddy torrent sprang at our stone-bedded sleepers as if to
snatch them away; while it flooded the cañon to the opposite wall, that
did not seem more that a few yards distant. The stream was swollen, and
went howling down the ravine full of sound and fury--which in this case,
however, signified a good deal.

Once we stopped and took an observation, for the track was under water;
then we waded cautiously to the mainland, across the sunken section, and
thanked our stars that we were not boycotted by the elements at that
inhospitable point. Once we paused for a few minutes to contemplate the
total wreck of a palace car that had recently struck a projecting
bowlder--and spattered.

The camps along the track are just such as may be looked for in the
waste places of the earth--temporary shelter for wayfarers whose homes
are under their hats. The thin stream of civilization that trickles off
into the wilderness, following the iron track, makes puddles now and
again. Some of these dwindle away soon enough--or perhaps not quite soon
enough; some of them increase and become permanent and beautiful.

Night found us in the Black Cañon of the Gunnison. Could any time be
more appropriate? Clouds rolled over us in dense masses, and at
intervals the moon flashed upon us like a dark lantern. Could anything
be more picturesque? We knew that much of the darkness, the blackness of
darkness, was adamantine rock; some of it an inky flood--a veritable
river of death--rolling close beneath us, but quite invisible most of
the time; and the night itself a profound mystery, through which we
burned an endless tunnel--like a firebrand hurled into space.

Now and again the heavens opened, and then we saw the moon soaring among
the monumental peaks; but the heights were so cloudlike and the cloud
masses so solid we could not for the life of us be certain of the nature
of either. There were cañons like huge quarries, and cañons like rocky
mazes, where we seemed to have rushed headlong into a _cul de sac_, and
were in danger of dashing our brains out against the mighty walls that
loomed before us. There was many a winding stream which we took at a
single bound, and occasionally an oasis, green and flowery; but, oh, so
few habitations and so few spots that one would really care to inhabit!

Marshall Pass does very well for once; it is an experience and a
novelty--what else is there in life to make it livable save a new
experience or the hope of one? Such a getting up hill as precedes the
rest at the summit! We stopped for breath while the locomotive puffed
and panted as if it would burst its brass-bound lungs; then we began to
climb again, and to wheeze, fret and fume; and it seemed as if we
actually went down on hands and knees and crept a bit when the grade
became steeper than usual. Only think of it a moment--an incline of two
hundred and twenty feet to the mile in some places, and the track
climbing over itself at frequent intervals. Far below us we saw the
terraces we had passed long before; far above us lay the great land we
were so slowly and so painfully approaching. At last we reached the
summit, ten thousand eight hundred and twenty feet above sea level--a
God-forsaken district, bristling with dead trees, and with hardly air
enough to go around.

We stopped in a long shed--built to keep off the sky, I suppose.
Gallants prospected for flowers and grass-blades, and received the
profuse thanks of the fair in exchange for them. Then we glided down
into the snow lands that lay beyond--filled with a delicious sense of
relief, for a fellow never feels so mean or so small a pigmy as when
perched on an Alpine height.

More cañons followed, and no two alike; then came plain after plain,
with buttes outlined in the distance; more plains, with nothing but
their own excessive plainness to boast of. We soon grew vastly weary;
for most plains are, after all, mere platitudes. And then Salt Lake
City, the Mormon capital, with its lake shimmering like a mirage in the
great glow of the valley; and a run due north through the well-tilled
lands of the thrifty "saints," getting our best wayside meals at
stations where buxom Mormon women served us heartily; still north and
west, flying night and day out of the insufferable summer dust that
makes ovens of those midland valleys. There was a rich, bracing air far
north, and grand forests of spicy pine, and such a Columbia river-shore
to follow as is worth a week's travel merely to get one glimpse of; and
at last Portland, the prettiest of Pacific cities, and heaps of friends
to greet me there.

Bright days were to follow, as you shall soon see; for I was still bound
northward, with no will to rest until I had plowed the floating fields
of ice and dozed through the pale hours of an arctic summer under the
midnight sun.




CHAPTER V.

Off for Alaska.


If you are bound for Alaska, you can make the round trip most
conveniently and comfortably by taking the steamer at Portland, Oregon,
and retaining your state-room until you land again in Portland, three
weeks later. Or you can run north by rail as far as Tacoma; there board
a fine little steamer and skim through the winding water-ways of Puget
Sound (as lovely a sheet of water as ever the sun shone on), debark at
Port Townsend, and here await the arrival of the Alaska steamer, which
makes its excursion trip monthly--at least it used to before the
Klondyke hoards deranged the time-table and the times.

If this does not satisfy you, you may take passage at San Francisco for
Port Townsend or Victoria, and connect at either port with the Alaska
boat. Those who are still unsuited had better wait a bit, when, no
doubt, other as entirely satisfactory arrangements will be made for
their especial convenience. I went by train to Tacoma. I wanted to sniff
the forest scents of Washington State, and to get a glimpse of the brave
young settlements scattered through the North-western wilderness. I
wanted to skirt the shore of the great Sounds, whose praises have been
ringing in my ears ever since I can remember--and that is a pretty long
time now.

I wanted to loaf for a while in Port Townsend, the old jumping-off
place, the monogram in the extreme northwest corner of the map of the
United States of America--at least such it was until the Alaskan annex
stretched the thing all out of shape, and planted our flag so far out in
the Pacific that San Francisco lies a little east of the centre of the
Union, and the Hawaiian islands come within our boundaries; for our
Aleutian-island arm, you know, stretches a thousand miles to the west of
Hawaii--it even chucks Asia under the chin.

But now let me offer you a stray handful of leaves from my
note-book--mere suggestions of travel.

At Portland took morning train for Tacoma, one hundred and forty-seven
miles. Swarms of people at the station, and some ominous "good-byes";
the majority talking of Alaska in a superior fashion, which implies that
they are through passengers, and they don't care who knows it. Alaska
boat left Portland two days ago; we are to catch her at Port Townsend,
and it looks as if we should crowd her. Train crosses the Columbia River
on a monster ferry; a jolly and restful half hour in the cars and out of
them.

A very hot and dusty ride through Washington State,--part of it pretty
enough and part of it by no means so. Cars full of screaming babies,
sweltering tourists, and falling cinders that sting like dumb
mosquitoes. Rather a mixed neighborhood on the rail. An effusively
amiable evangelist bobs up almost immediately,--one of those fellows
whom no amount of snubbing can keep under. Old Probabilities is also on
board, discoursing at intervals to all who will give ear. Some quiet and
interesting folk in a state of suspense, and one young fellow--a regular
trump,--promise better things.

We reach Tacoma at 6.30 p. m.; a queer, scattering town on Commencement
Bay, at the head of Puget Sound. Very deep water just off shore. Two
boys in a sailboat are blown about at the mercy of the fitful wind; boat
on beam-ends; boys on the uppermost gunwale; sail lying flat on the
water. But nobody seems to care, not even the young castaways. Perhaps
the inhabitants of Tacoma are amphibious. Very beautiful sheet of water,
this Puget Sound; long, winding, monotonous shores; trees all alike,
straight up and down, mostly pines and cedars; shores rather low, and
outline too regular for much picturesque effect. Tacoma commands the
best view of the Sound and of Mt. Tacoma, with its fifteen thousand
perpendicular feet looming rose-pink in the heavens, and all its fifteen
glaciers seeming to glow with an inner tropic warmth. There are eighteen
hundred miles of shore-line embroidering this marvellous Sound. We are
continually rounding abrupt points, as in a river,--points so much alike
that an untutored eye can not tell one from another. Old Probabilities
industriously taking his reckonings and growing more and more
enthusiastic at every turn--especially so when the after-glow burns the
sea to a coal; it reminds him of a volcanic eruption. There are some
people who when they see anything new to them are instantly reminded of
something else they have seen, and the new object becomes second rate on
the spot. A little travel is a dangerous thing.

Pay $3.25 for my fare from Tacoma to Port Townsend, and find a moment
later that some are paying only $1 for the same accommodations.
Competition is the mother of these pleasant surprises, but it is worth
thrice the original price--the enjoyment of this twilight cruise. More
after-glow, much more, with the Olympian Mountains lying between us and
the ocean. In the foreground is a golden flood with scarlet ripples
breaking through it--a vision splendid and long continued. Air growing
quite chilly; strong draughts at some of the turns in the stream.
Surely, in this case, the evening and the morning are not the same day.

At 9.30 p. m. we approach Seattle--a handsome town, with its terraces of
lights twinkling in the gloaming. Passengers soon distribute themselves
through the darkness. I am left alone on the after-deck to watch the
big, shadowy ships that are moored near us, and the exquisite
phosphorescent light in the water--a wave of ink with the luminous trail
of a struck match smouldering across it. Far into the night there was
the thundering of freight rolling up and down the decks, and the ring of
invisible truck-wheels.

Slept by and by, and was awakened by the prolonged shriek of a steam
whistle and a stream of sunlight that poured in at my state-room window.
We were backing and slowing off Port Ludlow. Big sawmill close at hand.
Four barks lie at the dock in front of it; a few houses stand on the
hill above; pine woods crowd to the water's edge, making the place look
solemn. Surely it is a solemn land and a solemn sea about here. After
breakfast, about 8.30 o'clock, Port Townsend hove in sight, and here we
await the arrival of the Alaska boat. What an odd little town it is--the
smallest possible city set upon a hill; the business quarter huddled at
the foot of the hill, as if it had slid down there and lodged on the
very edge of the sea! The hotels stalk out over the water on stilts. One
sleeps well in the sweet salt air, lulled by the murmur of the waves
under the veranda.

I rummage the town in search of adventure; climb one hundred and fifty
steep steps, and find the highlands at the top, green, pastoral and
reposeful. Pleasant homes are scattered about; a few animals feed
leisurely in the grassy streets. One diminutive Episcopal chapel comes
near to being pretty, yet stops just short of it. But there is a kind of
unpretending prettiness in the bright and breezy heights environed by
black forest and blue sea.

A revenue cutter--this is a port of customs, please remember--lies in
the offing. She looks as if she were suspended in air, so pure are the
elements in the northland. I lean from a parapet, on my way down the
seaward face of the cliff, and hear the order, "Make ready!" Then comes
a flash of flame, a white, leaping cloud, and a crash that shatters an
echo into fragments all along the shore; while beautiful smoke rings
roll up against the sky like victorious wreaths.

I call on the Hon. J. G. Swan, Hawaiian Consul, author of "The Northwest
Coast; or, Three Years' Residence in Washington Territory." Find him
delightful, and delightfully situated in a perfect museum of Indian
relics; himself full of the liveliest recollections of Indian life, and
quite an authority on Indian tongues and traditions; find also an old
schoolmate, after long years of separation, and am most courteously
entertained. What a drive we had over the hills and along the beach,
where the crows haunt the water's edge like sea-birds! It has been
repeatedly affirmed that these crows have been seen to seize a clam,
raise it high in the air, let it drop upon a rock, and then pounce upon
the fragments and feast furiously. But I have never seen one who has had
ocular proof of this.

There was a very happy hour spent at Colonel Douglas' quarters, over at
the camp; and then such a long, long drive through the deep wildwood,
with its dense undergrowth, said to be the haunt of bear, panther, wild
cat, deer, and other large game. Bearberries grew in profusion
everywhere. The road, kept in splendid repair by the army men, dipped
into a meadow full of savage mosquitoes; but escaping through two gates,
we struck again into the forest, where the road was almost overgrown
with dew-damp brush, that besprinkled us profusely as we passed.

We paused upon the slope above Port Discovery Bay; saw an old fellow on
the porch of a wee cottage looking steadfastly into the future--across
the Bay; with pipe in mouth, he was the picture of contentment,
abstraction and repose. He never once turned to look at us, though few
pass that way; but kept his eyes fixed upon a vision of surpassing
beauty, where the vivid coloring was startling to the eye and the
morning air like an elixir. Nothing but the great summer hotel of the
future--it will surely come some day and stand right there--can rob the
spot of its blissful serenity.




CHAPTER VI.

In the Inland Sea.


We were waiting the arrival of the Alaska boat,--wandering aimlessly
about the little town, looking off upon the quiet sea, now veiled in a
dense smoke blown down from the vast forest fires that were sweeping the
interior. The sun, shorn of his beams, was a disk of copper; the
sun-track in the sea, a trail of blood. The clang of every ship's bell,
the scream of every whistle, gave us new hope; but we were still
waiting, waiting, waiting. Port Townsend stands knee-deep in the edge of
a sea-garden. I sat a long time on the dock, watching for some sign of
the belated boat. Great ropes of kelp, tubes of dark brown sea-grass,
floated past me on the slow tide. Wonderful anemones, pink,
balloon-shaped, mutable, living and breathing things,--these panted as
they drifted by. At every respiration they expanded like the sudden
blossoming of a flower; then they closed quite as suddenly, and became
mere buds. When the round core of these sea-flowers was exposed to the
air--the palpitating heart was just beneath the surface most of the
time,--they withered in a breath; but revived again the moment the water
glazed them over, and fairly revelled in aqueous efflorescence.

"Bang!" It was the crash of an unmistakable gun, that shook the town to
its foundations and brought the inhabitants to their feet in an instant.
Out of the smoke loomed a shadowy ship, and, lo! it was the Alaska boat.
A goodly number of passengers were already on board; as many more were
now to join her; and then her prow was to be turned to the north star
and held there for some time to come. In a moment the whole port was in
a state of excitement. New arrivals hurried on shore to see the lions of
the place. We, who had been anxiously awaiting this hour for a couple of
long summer days, took the ship by storm, and drove the most amiable and
obliging of pursers nearly frantic with our pressing solicitations.

Everybody was laying in private stores, this being our last chance to
supply all deficiencies. Light literature we found scattered about at
the druggist's and the grocer's and the curiosity shops; also ink,
pens, note-books, tobacco, scented soap and playing-cards were
discovered in equally unexpected localities. We all wanted volumes on
the Northwest--as many of them as we could get; but almost the only one
obtainable was Skidmore's "Alaska, the Sitkan Archipelago," which is as
good as any, if not the best. A few had copies of the "Pacific Coast
Pilot. Alaska. Part I. Dixon's Entrance to Yakutat Bay,"--invaluable as
a practical guide, and filled with positive data. Dall and Whimper we
could not find, nor Bancroft at that time. Who will give us a handy
volume reprint of delightful old Vancouver?

We were busy as bees all that afternoon; yet the night and the starlight
saw us satisfactorily hived, and it was not long before the buzzing
ceased, as ship and shore slept the sleep of the just. By and by we
heard pumping, hosing, deck-washing, the paddling of bare feet to and
fro, and all the familiar sounds of an early morning at sea. The ship,
however, was motionless: we were lying stock-still. Doubtless everybody
was wondering at this, as I was, when there came a crash, followed by a
small avalanche of broken timber, while the ship quaked in her watery
bed. I thought of dynamite and the _Dies Irae_; but almost immediately
the cabin-boy, who appeared with the matutinal coffee, said it was only
the _Olympian_, the fashionable Sound steamer, that had run into us, as
was her custom. She is always running into something, and she succeeded
in carrying away a portion of our stern gear on this occasion.
Nevertheless, we were delayed only a few hours; for the _Olympian_ was
polite enough not to strike us below the water-line, and so by high noon
we were fairly under way.

From my log-book I take the following: This is slow and easy sailing--a
kind of jog-trot over the smoothest possible sea, with the paddles
audibly working every foot of the way. We run down among the San Juan
Islands, where the passages are so narrow and so intricate they make a
kind of watery monogram among the fir-lined shores. A dense smoke still
obscures the sun,--a rich haze that softens the distance and lends a
picturesqueness that is perhaps not wholly natural to the locality,
though the San Juan Islands are unquestionably beautiful.

The Gulf of Georgia, the Straits of Fuca, and Queen Charlotte Sound are
the words upon the lips of everybody. Shades of my schoolboy days! How
much sweeter they taste here than in the old geography class! Before us
stretches a wilderness of islands, mostly uninhabited, which penetrates
even into the sunless winter and the shadowless summer of Behring Sea.

As for ourselves, Old Probabilities has got down to business. He has
opened an impromptu peripatetic school of navigation, and triumphantly
sticks a pin into every point that tallies with his yard-square chart.
The evangelist has his field-glass to his eye in search of the
unregenerated aborigines. The swell tourists are much swollen with
travel; they loosen the belts of their Norfolks, and at intervals affect
a languid interest in this mundane sphere. There are delightful people
on board--many of them--and not a few others. There are bevies of
girls--all young, all pretty; and all, or nearly all, bubbling over with
hearty and wholesome laughter.

What richness! A good, clean deck running the whole length of the ship;
a cosy and cheerful social hall, with a first-class upright piano of
delicious tone, and at least a half dozen creditable performers to
awaken the soul of it; a good table, good weather, good luck, and
positively nothing to do but have a good time for three solid weeks in
the wilderness. The pestiferous telephone can not play the earwig on
board this ship; the telegraph, with metallic tick, can not once startle
us by precipitating town tattle; the postal service is cut off; wars and
rumors of wars, the annihilation of a nation, even the swallowing up of
a whole continent, are now of less consequence to us than the
possibility of a rain-shower this afternoon, or the solution of the
vexed question, "Will the aurora dazzle us before dawn?" We do not
propose to wait upon the aurora: for days and days and days we are going
to climb up the globe due North, getting nearer and nearer to it all the
while. Now, inasmuch as everything is new to us, we can easily content
ourselves for hours by lounging in the easy-chairs, and looking off upon
the placid sea, and at the perennial verdure that springs out of it and
mantles a lovely but lonely land.

Only think of it for a moment! Here on the northwest coast there are
islands sown so thickly that many of the sea-passages, though deep
enough for a three-decker to swim in, are so narrow that one might
easily skim his hat across them. There are thousands of these
islands--yea, tens of thousands,--I don't know just how many, and
perhaps no man does. They are of all shapes and sizes, and the majority
of them are handsomely wooded. The sombre green of the woods, stretching
between the sombre blue-green of the water and the opaline sheen of the
sky, forms a picture--a momentary picture,--the chief features of which
change almost as suddenly and quite as completely as the transformations
in a kaleidoscope. We are forever turning corners; and no sooner are we
around one corner than three others elbow us just ahead. Now, toward
which of the three are we bound, and will our good ship run to larboard
or to starboard? This is a turn one might bet on all day long--and lose
nearly every time.

A bewildering cruise! Vastly finer than river sailing is this Alaskan
expedition. Here is a whole tangle of rivers full of strange tides,
mysterious currents, and sweet surprises. Moreover, we can get lost if
we want to--no one can get lost in a river. We can rush in where pilots
fear to tread, strike sunken rocks, toss among dismal eddies, or plunge
into whirlpools. We can rake overhanging boughs with our yard-arms if
we want to--but we don't want to. In 1875 the United States steamer
_Saranac_ went down in Seymour Narrows, and her fate was sudden death.
The United States steamer _Suwanee_ met with a like misfortune on
entering Queen Charlotte Sound. It is rather jolly to think of these
things, and to realize that we were in more or less danger; though the
shores are as silent as the grave, the sea sleeps like a mill-pond, and
the sun sinks to rest with great dignity and precision, nightly bathing
the lonely North in sensuous splendor.

It is getting late. Most of us are indulging in a constitutional. We
rush up and down the long flush decks like mad; we take fiendish delight
in upsetting the pious dignity of the evangelist; we flutter the smokers
in the smoking-room--because, forsooth, we are chasing the girls from
one end of the ship to the other; and consequently the denizens of the
masculine cabin can give their undivided attention to neither cards nor
tobacco. What fun it all is--when one is not obliged to do it for a
living, and when it is the only healthy exercise one is able to take!

By and by the girls fly to their little nests. As we still stroll in the
ever-so-late twilight, at 10 p. m., we hear them piping sleepily, one to
another, their heads under their wings no doubt. They are early
birds--but that is all right. They are the life of the ship; but for
their mirth and music the twilight would be longer and less delightful.
Far into the night I linger over a final cigarette. An inexpressible
calm steals over me,--a feeling as of deliverance, for the time being at
least, from all the cares of this world. We are steaming toward a mass
of shadows that, like iron gates, seem shut against us. A group of
fellow-voyagers gathers on the forward deck, resolved to sit up and
ascertain whether we really manage to squeeze through some crevice, or
back out at last and go around the block. I grow drowsy and think fondly
of my little bunk.

What a night! Everything has grown vague and mysterious. Not a voice is
heard--only the throb of the engine down below and the articulated
pulsation of the paddles, every stroke of which brings forth a hollow
sound from the sea, as clear and as well defined as a blow upon a
drumhead; but these are softened by the swish of waters foaming under
the wheel. Echoes multiply; myriads of them, faint and far, play
peek-a-boo with the solemn pilot, who silently paces the deck when all
the ship is wrapped in a deep sleep.




CHAPTER VII.

Alaskan Village Life.


With the morning coffee came a rumor of an Indian village on the
neighboring shore. We were already past it, a half hour or more, but
canoes were visible. Now this was an episode. Jack, the cabin-boy, slid
back the blind; and as I sat up in my bunk, bolstered among the pillows,
I saw the green shore, moist with dew and sparkling in the morning
light, sweep slowly by--an endless panorama. There is no dust here, not
a particle. There is rain at intervals, and a heavy dew-fall, and
sometimes a sea fog that makes it highly advisable to suspend all
operations until it has lifted. After coffee I found the deck gaily
peopled. The steamer was running at half speed; and shortly she took a
big turn in a beautiful lagoon and went back on her course far enough to
come in sight of the Indian village, but we did not stop there. It seems
that one passage we were about to thread was reached at a wrong stage
of the tide; and, instead of waiting there for better water, we loafed
about for a couple of hours, enjoying it immensely, every soul of us.

Vancouver Island lay upon our left. It was half veiled in mist, or
smoke; and its brilliant constellation of sky-piercing peaks, green to
the summit, with glints of sunshine gilding the chasms here and there,
and rich shadows draping them superbly, reminded me of Nukahiva, one of
the Marquesas Islands--the one where Herman Melville found his famed
Typee. It seems extravagant to associate any feature in the Alaskan
archipelago with the most romantic island in the tropical sea; but there
are points of similarity, notwithstanding the geographical
discrepancy--daring outlines, magnificent cloud and atmospheric effects,
and a fragrance, a pungent balsamic odor ever noticeable. This
impalpable, invisible balm permeates everything; it is wafted out over
the sea to us, even as the breath of the Spice Islands is borne over the
waves to the joy of the passing mariner.

Surely there can be no finer tonic for a fagged fellow with feeble lungs
than this glorious Alaskan air. There is no danger of surfeit here; the
over-sweet is not likely to be met with in this latitude; and, then, if
one really feels the need of change, why, here is a fishing station. The
forest is trimmed along the shore so that there is scant room for a few
shanties between the water and the wilderness. A dock runs but a little
way out into the sea, for the shores are precipitous and one finds a
goodly number of fathoms only a few yards from the shingle.

At the top of the dock, sometimes nearly housing the whole of it, stands
a shed well stored with barrels, sacks of salt, nets, and all the
necessary equipments of a first-class fish-canning establishment. A few
Indian lodges are scattered along the shore. The Indians, a hearty and
apparently an industrious and willing race, do most of the work about
here. A few boats and canoes are drawn up upon the beach. The atmosphere
is heavy with the odor of ancient fish. The water-line is strewn with
cast-off salmon heads and entrails. Indian dogs and big, fat flies
batten there prodigiously. Acres of salmon bellies are rosy in the sun.
The blood-red interiors of drying fish--rackfuls of them turned wrong
side out--are the only bit of color in all Alaska. Everybody and
everything is sombre and subdued.

Yet not all fishing stations are cheerless. The salmon fishery and
trading store located at Loring are picturesque. The land-lock nook is
as lovely as a Swiss lake; and, oh, the myriad echoes that waken in
chorus among these misty mountains! The waters of the Alaskan
archipelago are prolific. Vast shoals of salmon, cod, herring, halibut,
mullet, ulicon, etc., silver the surface of the sea, and one continually
hears the splash of leaping fish.

A traveller has written of his visit to the fishing-grounds on the Naass
river, where the tribes had gathered for what is called their "small
fishing"--the salmon catch is at another time. These small fish are
valuable for food and oil. They run up the river for six weeks only, and
with the utmost regularity. At the point he visited, the Naass was about
a mile and a half wide; yet so great was the quantity of fish that, with
three nails driven into a stick, an Indian would rake up a canoeful in a
short time. Five thousand Indians were congregated from British Columbia
and Alaska; their faces painted red and black; feathers upon their
heads, and imitations of wild beasts upon their dresses. Over the fish
was an immense cloud of sea-gulls--so many were there, and so thick
were they, that the fluttering of their wings was like a swift fall of
snow. Over the gulls were eagles soaring and watching their chance. The
halibut, the cod, the porpoise, and the finback whale had followed the
little ones out of the deep; and there was confusion worse confounded,
and chaos came again in the hours of wild excitement that followed the
advent of the small fry, for each and all in sea and air were bent upon
the destruction of these little ones.

Seven thousand salmon have been taken at one haul of the seine in this
latitude. Most of these salmon weigh sixty pounds each, and some have
been caught that weigh a hundred and twenty pounds. Yet there are no
game fish in Alaska. Let sportsmen remember that far happier hunting
grounds lie within twenty miles of San Francisco, and in almost any
district of the Northern or Eastern States. On a certain occasion three
of our fellow-voyagers, armed in fashionable fishing toggery, went forth
from Sitka for a day's sport. A steam launch bore them to a land where
the rank grass and rushes grew shoulder high. Having made their way with
difficulty to the margin of a lake, they came upon a boat which
required incessant bailing to prevent its speedy foundering. One kept
the craft afloat while the others fished until evening. They caught
nothing, yet upon landing they found five fish floundering under the
seats; these swam in through a hole in the bottom of the boat. I say
again, on good authority, there are no game fish in Alaska. There are
salmon enough in these waters to supply the world--but the world can be
supplied without coming to these waters at all. The truth is, I fear,
that the market has been glutted and the business overdone.

One evening we anchored off a sad and silent shore. A few Indian lodges
were outlined against the woods beyond. A few Indians stolidly awaited
the arrival of a small boat containing one of our fellow-passengers.
Then for some hours this boat was busily plying to and fro, bringing out
to us all that was portable of a once flourishing, or at least
promising, fishery and cannery, now defunct. Meanwhile the mosquitoes
boarded our ship on a far more profitable speculation. It was pitiful to
see our friend gathering together the _débris_ of a wrecked fortune--for
he had been wealthy and was now on the down grade of life--hoping
almost against hope to be able to turn an honest penny somehow,
somewhere, before he dies.

At times we saw solitary canoes containing a whole family of Indians
fishing in the watery waste. What solemn lives they must lead! But a
more solemn and more solitary scene occurred a little later. All the
afternoon we had been sailing under splendid icy peaks. We came in out
of the hot sun, and were glad of the cool, snow-chilled air that visited
us lightly at intervals.

It was the hour of 9.30 p. m. The sun was dropping behind a lofty
mountain range, and in its fine glow we steamed into a lovely cove under
a towering height. A deserted, or almost deserted, fishing village stood
upon a green bottom land--a mere handful of lodges, with a young growth
of trees beyond, and an older growth between these and the glacier that
was glistening above them all. A cannery looking nearly new stood at the
top of a tall dock on stilts. On the extreme end of the dock was a
figure--a man, and a white man at that--with both hands in his pockets,
and an attitude of half-awakened curiosity. The figure stood
stock-still. We wondered if it lived, if it breathed, or if it was an
effigy set up there in scorn of American enterprise. We slowed up and
drew near to the dock. It was a curious picture: a half dozen log-built
lodges; a few tall piles driven into the land for steamer or trading
schooner to make fast to; a group of Indians by a feeble camp
fire,--Indians who never once changed their postures more than to
wearily lift their heads and regard us with absolute indifference.

When we were near enough to hail the motionless figure on the dock, we
did not hail him. Everybody was wildly curious: Everybody was perfectly
dumb. The whole earth was silent at last; the wheels had stopped; the
boat was scarcely moving through the water. The place, the scene, the
hour seemed under a spell. Then a bell rang very shrilly in the deep
silence; the paddles plunged into the sea again; we made a graceful
sweep under the shadow of the great mountain and proudly steamed away.
Not a syllable had been exchanged with that mysterious being on the
dock; we merely touched our hats at the last moment; he lifted his,
stalked solemnly to the top of the dock and disappeared. There is a bit
of Alaskan life for you!




CHAPTER VIII.

Juneau.


Sitka, the capital of Alaska, sleeps, save when she is awakened for a
day or two by the arrival of a steamer-load of tourists. Fort Wrangell,
the premature offspring of a gold rumor, died, but rose again from the
dead when the lust of gold turned the human tide toward the Klondike.
Juneau, the metropolis, was the only settlement that showed any signs of
vigor before the Klondike day; and she lived a not over-lively village
life on the strength of the mines on Douglas Island, across the narrow
straits. There were sea-birds skimming the water as we threaded the
labyrinthine channels that surround Juneau. We were evidently not very
far from the coast-line; for the gulls were only occasional visitors on
the Alaskan cruise, though the eagles we had always with us. They soared
aloft among the pines that crowned the mountain heights; they glossed
their wings in the spray of the sky-tipped waterfalls, and looked down
upon us from serene summits with the unwinking eye of scorn. It is
awfully fine sailing all about Juneau. Superb heights, snow-capped in
many cases, forest-clad in all, and with cloud belts and sunshine
mingling in the crystalline atmosphere, form a glorious picture, which,
oddly enough, one does not view with amazement and delight, but in the
very midst of which, and a very part of which, he is; and the proud
consciousness of this marks one of the happiest moments of his life.

Steaming into a lagoon where its mountain walls are so high it seemed
like a watery way in some prodigious Venice; steaming in, stealing in
like a wraith, we were shortly saluted by the miners on Douglas Island,
who are, perhaps, the most persistent and least harmful of the
dynamiters. It was not long before we began to get used to the batteries
that are touched off every few minutes, night and day; but how strange
to find in that wild solitude a 120-stamp mill, electric lights, and all
the modern nuisances! Never was there a greater contrast than the one
presented at Douglas Island. The lagoon, with its deep, dark waters,
still as a dead river, yet mirroring the sea-bird's wing; a strip of
beach; just above it rows of cabins and tents that at once suggest the
mining camps of early California days; then the rather handsome quarters
of the directors; and then the huge mill, admirably constructed and set
so snugly among the quarries that it seems almost a part of the ore
mountain itself; beyond that the great forest, with its eagles and big
game; and the everlasting snow peaks overtopping all, as they lose
themselves in the fairest of summer skies. Small boats ply to and fro
between Douglas Island and Juneau, a mile or more up the inlet on the
opposite shore. These ferries are paddled leisurely, and only the
explosive element at Douglas Island gives token of the activity that
prevails at Gastineaux Channel.

Soon, weary of the racket on Douglas Island, and expecting to inspect
the mine later on, we returned across the water and made fast to the
dock in the lower end of Juneau. This settlement has seen a good deal of
experience for a young one. It was first known as Pilsbury; then some
humorist dubbed it Fliptown. Later it was called Rockwell and
Harrisburg; and finally Juneau, the name it still bears with more or
less dignity. The customary Indian village hangs upon the borders of the
town; in fact, the two wings of the settlement are aboriginal; but the
copper-skin seems not particularly interested in the progress of
civilization, further than the occasional chance it affords him of
turning an honest penny in the disposal of his wares.

No sooner was the gang-plank out than we all made a rush for the trading
stores in search of curios. The faculty of acquisitiveness grows with
what it feeds on; and before the Alaskan tour is over, it almost amounts
to a mania among the excursionists. You should have seen us--men, women
and children--hurrying along the beach toward the heart of Juneau, where
we saw flags flying from the staves that stood by the trading-stores. It
was no easy task to distance a competitor in those great thoroughfares.
Juneau has an annual rainfall of nine feet; the streets are guttered:
indeed the streets are gutters in some cases. I know of at least one
little bridge that carries the pedestrian from one sidewalk to another,
over the muddy road below. I was headed off on my way to the N. W. T.
Co.'s warehouse, and sat me down on a stump to write till the rush on
bric-a-brac was over. Meanwhile I noticed the shake shanties and the
pioneers who hung about them, with their long legs crooked under rush
chairs in the diminutive verandas.

Indian belles were out in full feather. Some had their faces covered
with a thick coating of soot and oil; the rims of the eyelids, the tip
of the nose and the inner portions of the lips showing in striking
contrast to the hideous mask, which they are said to wear in order to
preserve their complexion. They look for the most part like black-faced
monkeys, and appear in this guise a great portion of the time in order
to dazzle the town, after a scrubbing, with skins as fair and sleek as
soft-soap. Even some of the sterner sex are constrained to resort to art
in the hope of heightening their manly beauty; but these are, of course,
Alaskan dudes, and as such are doubtless pardonable.

There is a bath-house in Juneau and a barber-shop. They did a big
business on our arrival. There are many billiard halls, where prohibited
drinks are more or less surreptitiously obtained. A dance-hall stands
uninvitingly open to the street. At the doorway, as we passed it, was
posted a hand-lettered placard announcing that the ladies of Juneau
would on the evening in question give a grand ball in honor of the
passengers of the _Ancon_. Tickets, 50 cents.

It began to drizzle. We dodged under the narrow awnings of the shops,
and bargained blindly in the most unmusical lingos. Within were to be
had stores of toy canoes--graceful little things hewn after the Haida
model, with prows and sides painted in strange hieroglyphics; paddles
were there--life-size, so to speak,--gorgeously dyed, and just the
things for hall decorations; also dishes of carved wood of quaint
pattern, and some of them quite ancient, were to be had at very moderate
prices; pipes and pipe-bowls of the weirdest description; halibut
fish-hooks, looking like anything at all but fish-hooks; Shaman rattles,
grotesque in design; Thlinket baskets, beautifully plaited and stained
with subdued dyes--the most popular of souvenirs; spoons with bone bowls
and handles carved from the horns of the mountain goat or musk-ox; even
the big horn-spoon itself was no doubt made by these ingenious people;
Indian masks of wood, inlaid with abalone shells, bears' teeth, or
lucky stones from the head of the catfish; Indian wampum; deer-skin
sacks filled with the smooth, pencil-shaped sticks with which the native
sport passes the merry hours away in games of chance; bangles without
end, and rings of the clumsiest description hammered out of silver coin;
bows and arrows; doll papooses, totem poles in miniature. There were
garments made of fish-skins and bird-skins, smelling of oil and
semi-transparent, as if saturated with it; and half-musical instruments,
or implements, made of twigs strung full of the beaks of birds that
clattered with a weird, unearthly Alaskan clatter.

There were little graven images, a few of them looking somewhat
idolatrous; and heaps upon heaps of nameless and shapeless odds and ends
that boasted more or less bead-work in the line of ornamentation; but
all chiefly noticeable for the lack of taste displayed, both in design
and the combination of color. The Chilkat blanket is an exception to the
Alaskan Indian rule. It is a handsome bit of embroidery, of significant
though mysterious design; rich in color, and with a deep, knotted fringe
on the lower edge--just the thing for a lambrequin, and to be had in
Juneau for $40, which is only $15 more than is asked for the same
article in Portland, Oregon, as some of us discovered to our cost. There
were quantities of skins miserably cured, impregnating the air with
vilest odors; and these were waved at you and wafted after you at every
step. In the forest which suddenly terminates at the edge of the town
there is game worth hunting. The whistler, reindeer, mountain sheep and
goat, ermine, musk-rat, marmet, wolf and bear, are tracked and trapped
by the red-man; but I doubt if the foot of the white-man is likely to
venture far into the almost impenetrable confusion of logs and brush
that is the distinguishing feature of the Alaskan wilderness. Beautiful
antlers are to be had in Juneau and elsewhere; and perhaps a cinnamon or
a black cub as playful as a puppy, and full of a kind of half-savage
fun.

In the upper part of the town, where the stumps and brush are thickest,
there are cosy little log-cabins, and garden patches that seem to be
making the most of the summer sunshine. In the window of one of these
cabins we saw a face--dusky, beautiful, sensitive. Dreamy eyes slumbered
under fringes that might have won a song from a Persian poet; admirably
proportioned features, delicious lips, almost persuaded us that a
squaw-man might in some cases be excusable for his infatuation. Later we
discovered that the one beauty of Alaska was of Hawaiian parentage; that
she was married, and was as shy of intruders as a caged bird. Very
dissimilar are the ladies of Juneau.

In the evening the town-crier went to and fro announcing the opening of
the ball. It was still drizzling; the cliffs that tower above the
metropolis were capped with cloud; slender, rain-born rivulets plunged
from these airy heights into space and were blown away like smoke.
Sometimes we caught glimpses of white, moving objects, far aloft against
the black wall of rock: these were mountain sheep.

The cannonading at Douglas Island continued--muffled thunder that ceases
neither night nor day. Nobody seemed to think of sleeping. The dock was
swarming with Indians; you would have known it with your eyes shut, from
the musky odor that permeated every quarter of the ship. The deck was
filled with passengers, chatting, reading, smoking, looking off upon the
queer little town and wondering what its future was likely to be. And
so, we might have lingered on indefinitely, with the light of a dull
day above us--a light that was to grow no less till dawn, for there is
no night there,--were it not that some one looked at his watch, and lo!
it was the midnight hour.

Then we went to the ball given by the ladies of Juneau in our honor.
Half a dozen young Indian maidens sat on a bench against the wall and
munched peanuts while they smiled; a few straggling settlers gathered at
the bar while they smiled; two fiddlers and a guitar made as merry as
they could under the circumstances in an alcove at the top of the hall.
Round dances were in vogue,--round dances interspersed with flirtations
and fire-water; round dances that grew oblong and irregular before
sunrise--and yet it was sunrise at the unearthly hour of 3.30 a. m., or
thereabout. We all felt as if we had been cheated out of something when
we saw his coming; but perhaps it was only the summer siesta that had
been cut short,--the summer siesta that here passes for the more
wholesome and old-fashioned sleep of the world lower down on the map.

During the night, having discharged freight and exhausted the resources
of Juneau, including a post-office, and a post-mistress who sorts the
mail twice a month, we steamed back to Douglas Island, and dropped many
fathoms of noisy chain into the deep abreast of the camp. The eve of the
Fourth in the United States of America is nothing in comparison with the
everlasting racket at this wonderful mine. The iron jaws of the
120-stamp mill grind incessantly, spitting pulverized rock and ore into
the vats that quake under the mastication of the mighty molars; cars
slip down into the bowels of the earth, and emerge laden with precious
freight; multitudinous miners relieve one another, watch and watch.
Electric light banishes even a thought of dusk; and were it now
winter--the long, dark, dreary winter of the North, with but half a
dozen hours of legitimate daylight out of the four and twenty--the work
at Douglas Island would go on triumphantly; and it will go forever--or,
rather, until the bottom drops out of the mine, just as it drops out of
everything in this life. All night long the terrible rattle and rumble
and roar of the explosive agent robbed us of our rest. I could think of
nothing but the gnomes of the German fairy tale; the dwarfs of the black
mountain, with their glowworm lamps, darting in and out of the tunnels
in the earth like moles, and heaping together the riches that are the
cause of so much pleasure and pain, and envy and despair, and sorrow and
sin, and too often death.




CHAPTER IX.

By Solitary Shores.


Probably no one leaves Juneau with regret. Far more enjoyable was the
day we spent in Ward's Cove, land-locked, wooded to the water's edge,
and with forty-five fathoms of water of the richest sea-green hue. Here
lay the _Pinta_ and the _Paterson_, two characteristic representatives
of the United States Navy--as it was before the war--the former a
promoted tug-boat, equipped at an expense of $100,000, and now looking
top-heavy and unseaworthy, but just the thing for a _matinée_
performance of Pinafore, if that were not out of date.

This _Pinta_, terrible as a canal-boat, armed to the teeth, drew up
under our quarter to take in coal. You see the _Ancon_ combined business
with pleasure, and distributed coal in quantities to suit throughout the
Alaskan lagoon. Now, there is not much fun in coaling, even when a
craft as funny as the _Pinta_ is snuggling up under your quarter,
looking more like the Pinafore than ever, with her skylarking sailors,
midshipmite and all; so Captain Carroll secured a jaunty little
steam-launch, and away we went on a picnic in the forest primeval. The
launch was laden to the brim; three of our biggest boats were in tow; an
abundant collation, in charge of a corps of cabin-boys, gave assurance
of success in one line at least.

We explored. Old Vancouver did the same thing long ago, and no doubt
found these shores exactly as we find them to-day. We entered a shallow
creek at the top of the cove; landed on a dreary point redolent of stale
fish, and the beach literally alive and creeping with small worms above
half an inch in length. A solitary squaw was splitting salmon for
drying. She remained absorbed in her work while we gathered about and
regarded her with impudent curiosity. Overcome by the fetid air of the
place, we re-embarked and steamed gaily miles away over the sparkling
sea.

In an undiscovered country--so it seemed to us--we came to a smooth and
sandy strip of shore and landed there. But a few paces from the
lightly-breaking ripples was the forest--and such a forest! There were
huge trees, looking centuries old, swathed in blankets of moss, and the
moss gray with age. Impenetrable depths of shadow overhead, impenetrable
depths of litter under foot. Log had fallen upon log crosswise and at
every conceivable angle.

Out of the fruitful dust of these deposed monarchs of the forest sprang
a numerous progeny--lusty claimants, every one of them,--their foliage
feathery and of the most delicate green, being fed only by the thin
sunshine that sifts through the dense canopy, supported far aloft by the
majestic columns that clustered about us. Under foot the russet moss was
of astonishing depth and softness. One walks with care upon it, for the
foot breaks through the thick matting that has in many cases spread from
log to log, hiding treacherous traps beneath. The ferns luxuriate in
this sylvan paradise; and many a beautiful shrub, new to us, bore
flowers that blushed unseen until we made our unexpected and perhaps
unwelcome appearance.

Here we camped. The cloth was spread in a temple not made with hands;
how hard it is to avoid ringing in these little old-time tags about
flowers and forests! The viands were deftly served; the merry jest went
round, and sometimes came back the same way, "returned with thanks." And
thus we revelled in the midst of a solitude that may never before have
been broken by the sound of human voice. When we held our peace--which
we did at long intervals, and for a brief moment only--we realized this
solemn fact; but it didn't seem to impress us much on the spot. Why,
even the birds were silent. Only the sea-gulls flashed their white wings
under the boughs in the edge of the wood, and wheeled away in dizzy
circles, piping sharp, peevish cries.

It was a delightful day we passed together. The memory of it is one of
the most precious souvenirs of the Alaskan tour; and it was with
reluctance that we returned to the ship, after consulting our watches
with astonishment; for the late hours gave no warning, and we might have
passed the night there in the loveliest of twilights.

The _Pinta_ was about to withdraw to her anchorage as we boarded the
_Ancon_; and then, too late, I discovered among the officers of that
terror of the sea an old friend with whom I had revelled in the halcyon
days at Stag Racket Bungalow, Honolulu. He was then on the U. S.
man-of-war, _Alaska_ of jolly memory; and he, with his companions,
constituted the crack mess of the navy. But the _Alaska_ is a sheer
hulk, and her once jovial crew scattered hither and yon; he alone, in
the solitude of these unfreighted waters, remains to tell the tale. I
thought it a happy coincidence that, having met him first under _Old
Glory_, then floating in the trade wind that blew over southern seas, I
should find him last in the lone land that gave name to the ship that
brought him over. Can the theosophists unravel this mystery, or see
aught in it that verges upon the mystic philosophy? As we steamed out of
Wood's Cove that night, with the echoes of a parting salute filling the
heavens to overflowing, we saw a cluster of small, dark islets in the
foreground; shining waters beyond flowed to the foot of far-away
mountains; a silvery sky melted into gold as it neared the horizon: this
picture, as delicate in tint as the most exquisite water-color, was
framed in a setting of gigantic pines; and it was by this fairy portal
we entered the sea of ice.

From solitude to solitude is the order in Alaska. The solitude of the
forest and the sea, of the mountain and ravine,--with these we had
become more or less familiar when our good ship headed for the solitude
of ice and snow. I began to feel as if we were being dragged out on the
roof of the world--as if we were swimming in the flooded eaves of a
continent. Sometimes there came over me a sense of loneliness--of the
distance that lay between us and everybody else, and of the helplessness
of our case should any serious accident befall us. It is this very
state, perhaps, that ages the hearts of the hardiest of the explorers
who seek vainly to unravel the polar mystery.

From time to time as we sailed, the sea, now a brighter blue than ever,
was strewn with fragments of ice. Very lovely they looked as they hugged
the distant shore; a ghostly and fantastical procession, borne ever
southward by the slow current; and growing more ghostly and fantastical
hour by hour, as they dwindled in the clear sunshine of the long summer
days. Anon the ice fragments increased in number and dimensions. The
whole watery expanse was covered with brash, and we were obliged to pick
our way with considerable caution. At times we narrowly escaped grazing
small icebergs, that might have disabled us had we come in collision
with them. As it was, many an ice-cake that looked harmless enough,
being very low in the water, struck us with a thud that was startling;
or passed under our old-fashioned side-wheels, splintering the paddles
and causing our hearts to leap within us. A disabled wheel meant a
tedious delay in a latitude where the resources are decidedly limited.
Often we thought of the miserable millions away down East simmering in
the sultry summer heat, while the thermometer with us stood at 45
degrees in the sun, and the bracing salt air was impregnated with
balsamic odors.

In this delectable state we sighted a bouncing baby iceberg, and at once
made for it with the enthusiasm of veritable discoverers. It was pretty
to see with what discretion we approached and circled round it,
searching for the most favorable point of attack. So much of an iceberg
is beneath the surface of the water, ballasting the whole, that it is
rather ticklish business cruising in its vicinity. We lay off and on,
coquetting with the little beauty, while one of our boats pulled up to
it, and threw a lariat over a glittering peak that flamed in the sun
like a torch. Then we drew in the slack and made fast, while a half
dozen of our men mounted the slippery mass, armed with ropes and axes,
and began to hack off big chunks, which were in due season transferred
to our iceboxes.

Our iceberg was about fifty feet in length and twenty or thirty feet out
of the water. It was a glittering island, with savage peaks, deep
valleys, bluffs, and promontories. The edges were delicately frilled and
resembled silver filigree. Some of these, which were transparent and as
daintily turned as old Venetian glass, dripped continually like
rain-beaten eaves. The portion nearest the water's edge was honeycombed
by the wavelets that dashed upon it without ceasing, rushing in and out
of the small, luminous caverns in swift, sparkling rivulets. Much of the
surface was crusted with a fine frosting; it was full of wells deep
enough to sink a man in. These wells were filled with water, and with a
blue light, celestial in its loveliness,--a light ethereal and pellucid.
It was as if the whole iceberg were saturated with transfused moonbeams,
that gave forth a mellow radiance, which flashed at times like
brilliants, and burst into flame and played like lightning along the
almost invisible rims and ridges. The unspeakable, the incomprehensible
light throbbed through and through; and was sometimes bluish green and
sometimes greenish blue; but oftenest with the one was the other, both
at once, and with a perfectly bewildering tint added,--in a word, it was
frozen moonlight and no mistake. O my friend, I assure you there are
many famous sports with not half the fun in them that there is in
lassoing an iceberg!

Once more I turn to my note-books. I find that the morning had been
foggy; that we could see scarcely a ship's length ahead of us; that the
water was like oil beneath and the mists like snow above and about,
while we groped blindly. Of course we could not press forward under the
circumstances; for we were surrounded by islands great and small, and
any one of these might silently materialize at a moment's notice; but we
were not idle. Now and again our paddles beat the water impetuously, and
they hung dripping, while the sea stretched around us as we leisurely
drifted on like a larger bubble in danger of bursting upon an
unexpected rock. We sounded frequently. There was an abundance of
water--there nearly always is throughout the Alaskan archipelago; enough
and to spare; but the abrupt shore might be but a stone's-throw from us
on the one hand or the other.

What was to be done? In the vast stillness we blew a blast on our shrill
whistle, and listened for the echo. Sometimes it returned to us almost
on the instant and we cried, "Halt!" When we halted or veered off,
creeping as it were on the surface of the oily sea, sometimes a faint or
far-off whisper--"the horns of elf-land"--gave us assurance of plenty of
space and the sea-room we were sorely in need of just then. Once we saw
looming right under our prow a little islet with a tuft of fir-trees
crowning it--the whole worthy to be made the head-piece or tail-piece to
some poem on solitude. It was very picturesque; but it seemed to be
crouching there, lying in wait for us, ready to arch its back the moment
we came within reach. The rapidity with which we backed out of that
predicament left us no time for apologies.

Again we got some distance up the wrong channel. When the fog lifted for
a moment, we discovered the error, put about without more ado, and went
around the block in a hurry. Meanwhile we had schooled our ears to
detect the most delicate shades of sound; to measure or weigh each
individual echo with an accuracy that gave us the utmost
self-satisfaction. Perhaps Captain Carroll or Captain George, who was
spying out the land with his ears, would not have trusted the ship in
our keeping for five minutes--but no matter.

Presently the opaque atmosphere began to dissolve away; and as the sun
brushed the webs from his face, and darted sharp beams upon the water
all at once in a shower, the fog-banks went to pieces and rolled away in
sections out of sight, like the transformation scene in a Christmas
pantomime. And there we were in the very centre of the smiling island
world, with splendid snow peaks towering all about us; and such a flood
of blue sky and bluer water, golden sunshine and gilded fields of snow,
of jutting shores clad in perennial verdure, and eagles and sea-birds
wheeling round about us, as can be seen nowhere else in the wide world
to the same advantage.

We were entering a region of desolation. The ice was increasing, and the
water took that ghastly hue, even a glimpse of which is enough to chill
the marrow in one's bones. Vegetation was dying out. A canoe-full of
shivering Indians were stemming the icy flood in search of some chosen
fishery,--all of them blanketed, and all--squaw as well as
papooses--taking a turn at the paddle. These were the children of
Nature, whose song-birds are the screaming eagle, the croaking raven,
and the crying sea-doves blown inland by the wild westerly gales.

We were now nearly within sound of the booming glaciers; and as we drew
nearer and nearer I could but brood over the oft imagined picture of
that vast territory--our Alaska,--where, beyond that mountain range, the
almost interminable winter is scarcely habitable, and the summers so
brief it takes about six of them to make a swallow.




CHAPTER X.

In Search of the Totem-Pole.


Hour after hour and day after day we are coasting along shores that
become monotonous in their beauty. For leagues the sea-washed roots of
the forest present a fairly impassable barrier to the foot of man. It is
only at infrequent intervals that a human habitation is visible, and
still more seldom does the eye discover a solitary canoe making its way
among the inextricable confusion of inlets. Sometimes a small cluster of
Indian lodges enlivens the scene; and this can scarcely be said to
enliven it, for most Indian lodges are as forlorn as a last year's
bird's-nest. Sometimes a bright little village gives hope of a break in
the serenity of the season--a few hours on shore and an extra page or
two in our log-books. Yet again, sometimes it is a green jungle, above
the sea, out of which rise diminutive box-houses, like exaggerated
dove-cotes, with a goodly number of towering cedar columns, curiously
carved, perhaps stained black or red in patches, scattered through them.
These are Indian cemeteries. They are hedged about with staves, from the
top of which flutter ragged streamers. They are rich in rude carvings of
men and birds and beasts. Now and again a shield as big as a target, and
looking not unlike an archery-target, marks the tomb of some warrior.
The unerring shafts of death search out the obscurest handfuls of people
scattered through these wide domains; and every village has its solemn
suburb, where the houses of the dead are decorated with barbaric
bric-a-brac.

Many of the tombs are above ground--airy sarcophagi on high poles
rocking in the wind and the rain. Some are nearer the earth, like
old-fashioned four-poster bed-steads; and there the dead sleep well.
Others are of stone, with windows and peaked roofs,--very comfortable
receptacles. But most of the bodies are below ground, and the last
vestiges of their graves are lost in the depths of the jungle.
Incineration is not uncommon in Alaska, and in such cases the ashes are
distributed among the winds and waves. Birds feast upon the bodies of
certain tribes--meat-offerings, very gracious in the sight of the Death
Angel; but by far the larger portion find decent burial, and they are
all long and loudly and sincerely mourned.

We awoke one morning at Casa-an, and found ourselves made fast to a
dock. On the dock was a salmon-house, or shed, a very laboratory of
ancient and fish-like smells. It was not long before the tide slipped
away from us and left the steamer resting easily on her beam-ends in
shallow water. We were prisoners for a few hours; but we were glad of
this, for every hour was of interest to us. This was our first chance to
thoroughly explore an Indian village; and, oh! the dogs, cousins-german
to the coyotes, that shook off their fleas and bayed us dismally! Lodges
of the rudest sort were scattered about in the most convenient
localities. As for streets or lanes, there were none visible. The
majority of the lodges were constructed of hemlock bark or of rough
slabs, gaudily festooned with split salmon drying in the sun. The lodges
are square, with roofs slightly inclined; they are windowless and have
but one narrow door about shoulder high.

The Casa-an Indians are a tribe of the Haidas, the cleverest of the
northern races. They are expert craftsmen. From a half dollar they will
hammer out or mold a bangle and cover it with chasing very deftly cut.
Their wood-carvings, medicine-man rattles, spoons, broth bowls, and the
like, are curious; but the demand for bangles keeps the more ingenious
busy in this branch of industry. Unfortunately, some simple voyager gave
the rude silversmiths a bangle of the conventional type, and this is now
so cunningly imitated that it is almost impossible to secure a specimen
of Haida work of the true Indian pattern. Very shortly the Indian
villages of Alaska will be stocked with curios of genuine California
manufacture. The supply of antiquities and originals has been already
nearly, if not quite, exhausted. It is said that no sooner is the boom
of the paddle-wheel heard in the noiseless Alaskan sea than the Indian
proceeds to empty of its treasures his cedar chest or his red Chinese
box studded with brass nails, and long before the steamer heaves in
sight the primitive bazar is ready for the expected customer. There is
much haggling over the price of a curio, and but little chance of a
bargain. If one has his eye upon some coveted object, he had best
purchase it at once at the first figure; for the Indian is not likely
to drop a farthing, and there are others who will gladly outbid the
hesitating shopper.

Time is no object in the eyes of these people. If an Indian thought he
could make a quarter more on the sale of a curio by holding it a month
longer, until the arrival of the next excursion boat, or even by getting
into his canoe and paddling a day or two over to the next settlement, he
would as lief do it as not. By the merest chance I drew from a heap of
rubbish in the corner of a lodge a Shaman rattle, unquestionably
genuine. This Shaman rattle is a quaintly carved rattle-box, such as is
used by sorcerers or medicine-men in propitiation of the evil spirit at
the bedside of the dying. The one I have was not offered for sale, nor
did the possessor seem to place much value on it; yet he would not budge
one jot or tittle in the price he first set upon it, and seemingly set
at a guess. Its discovery was a piece of pure luck, but I would not
exchange it for any other curio which I chanced to see during the whole
voyage.

In one of the lodges at Casa-an a chief lay dying. He was said to be the
last of his race; and, judging from appearances, his hours were fast
drawing to a close. He was breathing painfully; his face was turned to
the wall. Two or three other Indians sat silently about, stirring at
intervals a bright wood-fire that burned in the centre of the lodge. The
curling smoke floated gracefully through a hole in the roof--most of it,
but not quite all. As we entered (we were in search of the dying chief;
for, as he seemed to be the one lion in the settlement, his fame was
soon noised abroad) we found that the evangelist had forestalled us. He
was asking the price of salmon in San Francisco; but upon our appearance
he added, solemnly enough: "Well, we all must die--Indians and all." An
interpreter had reluctantly been pressed into service; but as the
missionary work was not progressing, the evangelist dropped the
interpreter, rolled up his spiritual sleeves and pitched in as follows:

"Say, you Injun! you love God? You love Great Spirit?" No answer came
from the thin, drawn lips, tightly compressed and visible just over the
blankets edge in the corner of the lodge. "Say, John! you ready to die!
You make your peace with God! You go to heaven--to the happy
hunting-ground?" The chief, who had silenced the interpreter with a
single look, was apparently beyond the hearing of human speech; so the
evangelist, with a sigh, again inquired into the state of the salmon
market on the Pacific coast. Then the stricken brave turned a glazed eye
upon the man of God, and the latter once more sought to touch that heart
of stone: "I say, you Injun! you prepared to meet Great Spirit? You
ready to go to happy hunting-ground?" The chief's eyes flamed for a
moment, as with infinite scorn he muttered between his teeth to the
evangelist: "You ---- fool! You go to ----!" And he went.

While the steamer was slowly righting we had ample time to inspect the
beached hull of a schooner with a history. She was the Pioneer of
Casa-an once commanded by a famous old smuggler named Baronovich. Long
he sailed these waters; and, like Captain Kidd, he bore a charmed life
as he sailed. It is a mystery to me how any sea-faring man can trust his
craft to the mercy of the winds and tides of this myriad-islanded inland
sea. This ancient mariner, Baronovich, not only braved the elements, but
defied Russian officials, who kept an eye upon him night and day. On one
occasion, having been boarded by the vigilant inspectors, and his
piratical schooner thoroughly searched from stem to stern, he kindly
invited the gentlemen to dine with him, and entertained them at a board
groaning with the contraband luxuries which his suspicious guests had
been vainly seeking all the afternoon. It is a wee little cabin and a
shallow hold that furnish the setting for a sea-tale as wildly
picturesque as any that thrills the heart of your youthful reader; but
high and dry lies the moldering hulk of the dismantled smuggler, and
there is no one left to tell the tale.

As we lounged about, some hideous Indians--I trust they were not framed
in the image of their Maker,--ill-shapen lads, dumpy, expressionless
babies, green-complexioned half-breeds, sat and looked on with utter
indifference. Many of the Haida Indians have kinky or wavy hair,
Japanese or Chinese eyes, and most of them toe out; but they are, all
things considered, the least interesting, the most ungainly and the most
unpicturesque of people. If there is work for them to do they do it,
heedless of the presence of inquisitive, pale-faced spectators. Indeed
they seem to look down upon the white-man, and perhaps they have good
reasons for so doing. If there is no work to be done, they are not at
all disconcerted.

I very much doubt if a Haida Indian--or any other Indian, for that
matter--knows what it is to be bored or to find the time hanging heavily
on his hands. I took note of one old Indian who sat for four solid hours
without once changing his position. He might have been sitting there
still but that his wife routed him out after a lively monologue, to
which he was an apparently disinterested listener. At last he arose with
a grunt, adjusted his blanket, strode grimly to his canoe and bailed it
out; then he entered and paddled leisurely to the opposite shore, where
he disappeared in the forest.

Filth was everywhere, and evil odors; but far, far aloft the eagles were
soaring, and the branches of a withered tree near the settlement were
filled with crows as big as buzzards. Once in awhile some one or another
took a shot at them--and missed. Thus the time passed at Casa-an. One
magnifies the merest episode on the Alaskan voyage, and is grateful for
it.

Killisnoo is situated in a cosy little cove. It is a rambling village
that climbs over the rocks and narrowly escapes being pretty, but it
manages to escape. Most of the lodges are built of logs, have small,
square windows, with glass in them, and curtains; and have also a kind
of primitive chimney. We climbed among these lodges and found them quite
deserted. The lodgers were all down at the dock. There were inscriptions
on a few of the doors: the name of the tenant, and a request to observe
the sacredness of the domestic hearth. This we were careful to do; but
inasmuch as each house was set in order and the window-curtains looped
back, we were no doubt welcome to a glimpse of an Alaskan interior. It
was the least little bit like a peep-show, and didn't seem quite real.
One inscription was as follows--it was over the door of the lodge of the
laureate:

             JOSEPH HOOLQUIN.

             My tum-tum is white,
             I try to do right:
           All are welcome to come
           To my hearth and my home.
     So call in and see me, white, red or black man:
     I'm de-late hyas of the Kootznahoo quan.

Need I add that _tum-tum_ in the Chinook jargon signifies the soul!
Joseph merely announced that he was clean-souled; also _de-late
hyas_--that is, above reproach.

At the store of the Northwest Trading Company we found no curios, and it
is the only store in the place. Sarsaparilla, tobacco, blankets, patent
medicines, etc., are there neatly displayed on freshly painted shelves,
but no curios. On a strip of plank walk in front of the place are
Indians luxuriously heaped, like prize porkers, and they are about as
interesting a spectacle to the unaccustomed eye.

Our whistle blew at noon. We returned on board, taking the cannery and
oil-factory on the way, and finding it impossible to forget them for
some time afterward. At 12.45 p. m. we were off, but we left one of the
merriest and most popular of our voyagers behind us. He remained at
Killisnoo in charge of the place. As we swam off into the sweet sea
reaches, the poor fellow ran over the ridge of his little island,
looking quite like a castaway, and no doubt feeling like one. He sprang
from rock to rock and at last mounted a hillock, and stood waving his
arms wildly while we were in sight. And the lassies? They swarmed like
bees upon the wheelhouse, wringing their hands and their handkerchiefs,
and weeping rivers of imaginary tears over our first bereavement! But
really, now, what a life to lead, and in what a place, especially if
one happens to be young, and good-looking and a bit of a swell withal!

But is there no romance here? Listen! We came to anchor over night in a
quiet nook where the cliffs and the clouds overshadowed us. Everything
was of the vaguest description, without form and void. There seemed to
be one hut on shore, with the spark of a light in it--a cannery of
course. Canoes were drifting to and fro like motes in the darkness,
tipped with a phosphorescent rim. Indian voices hailed us out of the
ominous silence; Indian dogs muttered under their breath, yelping in a
whisper which was mocked by Indian papooses, who can bark before they
have learned to walk or talk.

Softly out of the balmy night--for it was balmy and balsamic (we were to
the windward of the cannery),--a shadowy canoe floated up just under our
rail; two shadowy forms materialized, and voices like the voices of
spirits--almost the softest voices in the world, voices of infantile
sweetness--hailed us. "_Alah, mika chahko!_" babbled the flowers of the
forest. My solitary companion responded glibly, for he was no stranger
in these parts. The maids grew garrulous. There was much bantering, and
such laughter as the gods delight in; and at last a shout that drew the
attention of the captain. He joined us just in season to recognize the
occupants of the canoe, as they shot through a stream of light under an
open port, crying "_Anah nawitka mika halo shem!_" And then we learned
that the sea-nymphs he had put to flight were none other than the belles
of Juneau City, the Alaskan metropolis, who were spending the summer at
this watering-place, and who were known to fame as "Kitty the Gopher,"
and "Feather-Legged Sal."




CHAPTER XI.

In the Sea of Ice.


We appreciated the sun's warmth so long as we were cruising among the
ice-wrack. Some of the passengers, having been forewarned, were provided
with heavy overcoats, oilskin hats, waterproofs, woolen socks, and
stogies with great nails driven into the soles. They were iron-bound,
copper-fastened tourists, thoroughly equipped--Alpine-stock and
all,--and equal to any emergency.

Certainly it rains whenever it feels like it in Alaska. It can rain
heavily for days together, and does so from time to time. The
excursion-boat may run out of one predicament into another, and the
whole voyage be a series of dismal disappointments; but this is not to
be feared. The chances are in favor of a round of sunshiny days and
cloudless nights as bright as the winter days in New England; of the
fairest of fair weather; bracing breezes tempered by the fragrant
forests that mantle each of the ten thousand islands; cool nights in
midsummer, when a blanket is welcome in one's bunk; a touch of a fog now
and again, generally lasting but a few hours, and welcome, also, by way
of change. As for myself, a rubber coat protected me in the few showers
to which we were exposed, and afforded warmth enough in the coldest
weather we encountered. For a climb over a glacier, the very thickest
shoes are absolutely necessary; beyond these, all else seems superfluous
to me, and the superfluous is the chief burden of travel.

We were gathered about the deck in little groups. The unpremeditated
coteries which naturally spring into existence on shipboard hailed one
another across decks, from the captain's cabin--a favorite resort--or
the smoking-room, as we sighted objects of interest. With us there was
no antagonism, albeit we numbered a full hundred, and for three weeks
were confined to pretty close quarters. Passing the hours thus, and
felicitating ourselves upon the complete success of the voyage, we were
in the happiest humor, and amiably awaited our next experience.

Presently we ran under a wooded height that shut off the base of a great
snow-capped mountain. The peak was celestial in its beauty,--a wraith
dimly outlined upon the diaphanous sky, of which it seemed a more
palpable part. When we had rounded this point we came face to face with
a glacier. We saw at a glance the length and the breadth of it as it
plowed slowly down between lofty rock-ridges to within a mile and a half
of the shore. This was our first sight of one of those omnipotent
architects of nature, and we watched it with a thrill of awe.

Picture to yourself a vast river, two or three miles in breadth, pouring
down from the eminence of an icy peak thirty miles away,--a river fed by
numerous lateral tributaries that flow in from every declivity. Imagine
this river lashed to a fury and covered from end to end, fathoms deep,
with foam, and then the whole suddenly frozen and fixed for
evermore--that is your glacier. Sometimes the surface is stained with
the _débris_ of the mountain; sometimes the bluish-green tinge of the
ancient ice crops out. Generally the surface is as white as down and
very fair to look upon; for at a distance--we were about eight miles
from the lower edge of it--the eye detects no flaw. It might be a
torrent of milk and honey. It might almost be compared in its
immaculate beauty to one of the rivers of Paradise that flow hard by
the throne of God. It seems to be moving in majesty, and yet is
stationary, or nearly so; for we might sit by its frozen shore and grow
gray with watching, and ever our dull eyes could detect no change in a
ripple of it. A river of Paradise, indeed, escaped from the gardens of
the blessed; but, overcome by the squalor of this little globe, it has
stopped short and turned to ice in its alabaster bed.

One evening, about 8.30 o'clock, the sun still high above the western
mountain range, we found ourselves opposite the Davidson glacier. It
passes out of a broad ravine and spreads fanlike upon the shore under
the neighboring cliffs. It is three miles in breadth along the front,
and is twelve hundred feet in height when it begins to crumble and slope
toward the shore. A terminal moraine, a mile and a half in depth,
separates it from the sea. A forest, or the remnant of a forest, stands
between it and the water it is slowly but surely approaching. The fate
of this solemn wood is sealed. Anon the mightiest among these mighty
trees will fall like grain before the sickle of the reaper.

We are very near this glacier. We see all the wrinkles and fissures and
the deep discolorations. We see how the monstrous mass winds in and out
between the mountains, and crowds them on every side, and rubs their
skin off in spots, and leaves grooved lines, like high-water marks,
along the face of the cliffs; how it gathers as it goes, and grinds to
powder and to paste whatever comes within its reach, growing worse and
worse, and greedier and more rapacious as it creeps down into the
lowlands; so that when it reaches the sea, where it must end its course
and dissolve away, it will have covered itself with slime and confusion.
It will have left ruin and desolation in its track, but it will likewise
have cleft out a valley with walls polished like brass and a floor as
smooth as marble,--one that will be utilized in after ages, when it has
carpeted itself with green and tapestried its walls with vines. Surely
no other power on earth could have done the job so neatly.

One sees this work in process and in fresh completion in Alaska. The
bald islet yonder, with a surface as smooth as glass and with delicate
tracery along its polished sides--tracery that looks like etching upon
glass,--was modelled by glaciers not so many years ago: within the
century, some of them, perhaps. A glacier--probably the very glacier we
are seeking--follows this track and grinds them all into shape. Every
angle of action--of motion, shall I say?--is indelibly impressed upon
each and every rock here about; so all these northlands, from sea to
sea, the world over, have been laboriously licked into shape by the
irresistible tide of ice. Verily, the mills of the gods grind slowly,
but what a grist they grind!

Let me record an episode that occasioned no little excitement among the
passengers and crew of the _Ancon_. While we were picking our way among
the floating ice--and at a pretty good jog, too,--a dark body was seen
to fall from an open port, forward, into the sea. There was a splash and
a shriek as it passed directly under the wheel and disappeared in the
foam astern. "Man overboard!" was the cry that rang through the ship,
while we all rushed breathlessly to the after-rail. Among the seething
waters in our wake, we saw a head appearing and disappearing, and
growing smaller and smaller all the while, though the swimmer was
struggling bravely to hold his own. In a moment the engines were
stopped; and then--an after-thought--we made as sharp a turn as
possible, hoping to lessen the distance between us, while a boat was
being manned and lowered for the rescue. We feared that it was the cook,
who was running a fair chance of being drowned or chilled to death. His
black head bobbed like a burnt cork on the crest of the waves; and,
though we marked a snow-white circle in the sea, we seemed to get no
nearer the strong swimmer in his agony; and all at once we saw him turn,
as in desperation or despair, and make for one of the little rocky
islets that were lying at no great distance. Evidently he believed
himself deserted, and was about to seek this desolate rock in the hope
of prolonging existence.

By this time we had come to a dead halt, and a prolonged silence
followed. Our sailor boys pulled lustily at the oars; yet the little
boat seemed to crawl through yawning waves, and, as usual, every moment
was an hour of terrible suspense. Then the captain, the most anxious
among us all, made a trumpet of his hands and shouted: "Here, Pete, old
boy! Here, Pete, you black rascal!" At the sound of his voice the
swimmer suddenly turned and struck out for the ship with an enthusiasm
that was actually ludicrous. We roared with laughter--we could not help
it; for when the boat had pulled up to the almost water-logged swimmer,
and he began to climb in with an energy that imperiled the safety of the
crew, we saw that the black rascal in question was none other than Pete
Bruin, Captain Carroll's pet bear. He shook himself and drenched the
oarsmen, who were trying to get him back to the ship; for he was half
frantic with delight, and it was pretty close quarters--a small boat in
a chop sea dotted with lumpy ice; and a frantic bear puffing and blowing
as he shambled bear-fashion from the stem to stern, and raised his voice
at intervals in a kind of hoarse "hooray," that depressed rather than
cheered his companions. It was ticklish business getting the boat and
its lively crew back to the davits in safety.

It was still more ticklish receiving the shaggy hero on deck; for he
gave one wild bound and alighted in the midst of a group of terrified
ladies and scattered the rest of us in dismay. But it was side-splitting
when the little fellow, seeing an open door, made a sudden break for
it, and plunged into the berth of a shy damsel, who, put to ignominious
flight in the first gust of the panic, had sought safety in her
state-room only to be singled out for the recipient of the rascal's
special attentions. She was rescued by the bravest of the brave; but
Bruin had to be dragged from behind the lace curtains with a lasso, and
then he brought some shreds of lace with him as a trophy. He was more
popular than ever after this little adventure, and many an hour we spent
in recounting to one another the varied emotions awakened by the
episode.

Heading for Glacier Bay, we found a flood of bitter cold water so filled
with floating ice that it was quite impossible to avoid frequent
collisions with masses of more or less magnitude. There was an almost
continual thumping along the ship's side as the paddle struck heavily
the ice fragments which we found littering the frozen sea. There was
also a dull reverberation as of distant thunder that rolled over the sea
to us; and when we learned that this was the crackling of the ice-pack
in the gorges, we thought with increasing solemnity of the majesty of
the spectacle we were about to witness.

Thus we pushed forward bravely toward an ice-wall that stretched across
the top of the bay from one high shore to the other. This wall of ice, a
precipitous bluff or palisade, is computed to be from two hundred to
five hundred feet in height. It is certainly nowhere less than two
hundred, but most of it far nearer five hundred feet above sea level,
rising directly out of it, overhanging it, and chilling the air
perceptibly. Picking our path to within a safe distance of the glacier,
we cast anchor and were free to go our ways for a whole glorious day.
According to Professor John Muir--for whom the glacier is deservedly
named,--the ice-wall measures three miles across the front; ten miles
farther back it is ten miles in breadth. Sixteen tributary glaciers
unite to form the one.

Professor Muir, accompanied by the Rev. S. Hall Young, of Fort Wrangell,
visited it in 1879. They were the first white men to explore this
region, and they went thither by canoe. Muir, with blankets strapped to
his back and his pockets stuffed with hard-tack, spent days in rapturous
speculation. Of all glacial theorists he is doubtless the most
self-sacrificing and enthusiastic. I believe, as yet, no one has timed
this glacier. It is dissolving away more rapidly than it travels; so
that although it is always advancing, it seems in reality to be
retreating.

Within the memory of the last three generations the Muir glacier filled
the bay for miles below our anchorage; and while it recedes, it is
creeping slowly down, scalping the mountains, grinding all the sharp
edges into powder or leaving a polished surface behind it. It gathers
rock dust and the wreck of every living thing, and mixes them up with
snow and ice. These congeal again, or are compressed into soft, filthy
monumental masses, waiting their turn to topple into the waves at last.
The wash of the sea undermines the glacier; the sharp sunbeams blast it.
It is forever sinking, settling, crushing in upon itself and splitting
from end to end, with fearful and prolonged intestinal reverberations,
that remind one of battle thunders and murder and sudden death. There
was hardly a moment during the day free from rumble or a crash or a
splash.

The front elevation might almost be compared to Niagara Falls in winter;
but here is a spectacular effect not often visible at Niagara. At
intervals huge fragments of the ice cliffs fall, carrying with them
torrents of snow and slush. Heaven only knows know many hundred thousand
tons of this _débris_ plunged into the sea under our very eyes. Nor was
it all _débris_: there were masses of solid ice so lustrous they looked
like gigantic emeralds or sapphires, and these were fifty or even a
hundred times the size of our ship. When they fell they seemed to
descend with the utmost deliberation; for they fell a much greater
distance than we could realize, as their bulk was beyond conception, so
that a fall of two hundred or three hundred feet seemed not a tenth part
of that distance.

With this deliberate descent, as if they floated down, they also gave an
impression of vast weight and when they struck the sea, the foam flew
two-thirds of the way up the cliff--a fountain three hundred feet in
height and of monstrous volume. Then after a long time--a very long time
it seemed to us--the ice would rise slowly from the deep and climb the
face of the cliff as if it were about to take its old place again; but
it sank and rose, until it had found its level, when it joined the long
procession drifting southward to warmer waves and dissolution.

In the meantime the ground swell that followed each submersion
resembled a tidal wave as it rolled down upon us and threatened to
engulf us. But the _Ancon_ rode like a duck--I can not consistently say
swan in this case,--and heaved to starboard and to larboard in
picturesque and thoroughly nautical fashion. Some of us were on shore,
wading in the mud and the slush, or climbing the steep bluffs that hem
in the glacier upon one side. Here it was convenient to glance over the
wide, wide snow-fields that seem to have been broken with colossal
harrows. It was even possible to venture out upon the ice ridges,
leaping the gaps that divided them in every direction. But at any moment
the crust might have broken and buried us from sight; and we found the
spectacle far more enjoyable when viewed from the deck of the steamer.

What is that glacier like? Well, just a little like the whitewashed
crater of an active volcano. At any rate, it is the glorious companion
piece to Kilauea in Hawaii. In these wonders of nature you behold the
extremes, fire and ice, having it all their own way, and a world of
adamant shall not prevail against them.




CHAPTER XII.

Alaska's Capital.


Sitka has always seemed to me the jumping-off place. I have vaguely
imagined that somehow--I know not just how--it had a mysterious affinity
with Moscow, and was in some way a dependence of that Muscovite
municipality. I was half willing to believe that an underground passage
connected the Kremlin with the Castle of Sitka; that the tiny capital of
Great Alaska responded, though feebly, to every throb of the Russian
heart. Perhaps it did in the good old days now gone; but there is little
or nothing of the Russian element left, and the place is as dead as dead
can be without giving offence to the olfactory organ.

We were picking our way through a perfect wilderness of islands, on the
lookout for the capital, of which we had read and heard so much. Surely
the Alaskan pilot must have the eye and the instinct of a sea bird or he
could never find a port in that labyrinth. Moreover, the air was misty:
we felt that we were approaching the sea. Lofty mountains towered above
us; sometimes the islands swam apart--they seemed all in motion, as if
they were swinging to and fro on the tide,--and then down a magnificent
vista we saw the richly wooded slopes of some glorious height that
loomed out of the vapor and bathed its forehead in the sunshine.
Sometimes the mist grew denser, and we could see hardly a ship's-length
ahead of us; and the air was so chilly that our overcoats were drawn
snugly about us, and we wondered what the temperature might be "down
south" in Dakota and New England.

In the grayest of gray days we came to Sitka, and very likely for this
reason found it a disappointment at first sight. Certainly it looked
dreary enough as we approached it--a little cluster of tumbledown houses
scattered along a bleak and rocky shore. We steamed slowly past it, made
a big turn in deep water, got a tolerable view of the city from one end
of it to the other, and then crept up to the one little dock, made fast,
and were all granted the freedom of the capital for a couple of days. It
is a gray place--gray with a greenish tinge in it--the kind of green
that looks perennial--a dark, dull evergreen.

There was some show of color among the costumes of the people on
shore--bright blankets and brighter calicoes,--but there was no
suspicion of gaiety or of a possible show of enthusiasm among the few
sedate individuals who came down to see us disembark. I began to wonder
if these solemn spectators that were grouped along the dock were ghosts
materialized for the occasion; if the place were literally dead--dead as
the ancient Russian cemetery on the hill, where the white crosses with
their double arms, the upper and shorter one aslant, shone through the
sad light of the waning day.

We had three little Russian maids on our passenger list, daughters of
Father Mitropolski, the Greek priest at Sitka. They were returning from
a convent school at Victoria, and were bubbling over with delight at the
prospective joys of a summer vacation at home. But no sooner had they
received the paternal embraces upon the deck than the virtue of
happiness went out of them; and they became sedate little Sitkans, whose
dignity belied the riotous spirit that had made them the life of the
ship on the way up.

We also brought home a little Russian chap who had been working down at
Fort Wrangell, and, having made a fortune--it was a fortune in his
eyes,--he was returning to stay in the land of his nativity. He was
quiet enough on shipboard--indeed, he had almost escaped observation
until we sighted Sitka; but then his heart could contain itself no
longer, and he made confidants of several of us to whom he had spoken
never a word until this moment. How glad he was to greet its solemn
shores, to him the dearest spot in all the earth! A few hours later we
met him. He was swinging on the gate at the homestead in the edge of the
town: a sweet, primitive place, that caught our eye before the youngster
caught our ears with his cheerful greeting. "Oh, I so glad!" said he,
with a mist in his eye that harmonized with everything else. "I make
eighty dollar in four month at Wrangell. My sister not know me when I
get home. I so glad to come back to Sitka. I not go away any more."

Of course we poured out of the ship in short order, and spread through
the town like ants. At the top of the dock is the Northwest Trading
Company's store--how we learned to know these establishments! Some
scoured it for a first choice, and got the pick of the wares; but here,
as elsewhere, we found the same motley collection of semi-barbarous
bric-a-brac--brilliantly painted Indian paddles spread like a sunburst
against the farther wall; heaps of wooden masks and all the fantastical
carvings such as the aborigines delight in, and in which they almost
excel. Up the main street of the town is another store, where a series
of large rooms, crowded with curios bewilders the purchaser of those
grotesque wares.

At the top of Katalan's rock, on the edge of the sea, stands the
Colonial Castle. It is a wooden structure, looking more like a barrack
than a castle. At the foot of the rock are the barracks and Custom
House. A thin sprinkling of marines, a few foreign-looking citizens--the
full-fledged Rusk of the unmistakable type is hard to find
nowadays,--and troops of Indians give a semblance of life to this
quarter. At the head of the street stands the Russian Orthodox Church;
and this edifice, with its quaint tower and spire, is really the lion of
the place. St. Michael's was dedicated in 1844 by the Venerable Ivan
Venianimoff, the metropolitan of Moscow, for years priest and Bishop at
Ounalaska and Sitka.

In his time the little chapel was richly decorated; but as the
settlement began falling to decay, the splendid vestments and sacred
vessels and altar ornaments, and even the Bishop himself, were
transferred to San Francisco. It then became the duty of the Bishop to
visit annually the churches at Sitka, Ounalaska and Kodiak, as the
Russian Government still allowed these dependencies an annuity of
$50,000. But the last incumbent of the office, Bishop Nestor, was lost
tragically at sea in May, 1883; and, as the Russian priesthood seems to
be less pious than particular, the office is still a-begging--unless I
have been misinformed. Probably the mission will be abandoned. Certainly
the dilapidated chapel, with its remnants of tarnished finery, its three
surviving families of Russian blood, its handful of Indian converts,
seems not likely to hold long together.

We witnessed a service in St. Michael's. The tinkling bells in the green
belfry--a bulbous, antique-looking belfry it is--rang us in from the
four quarters of the town. As there were neither pews, chairs nor prayer
carpets, we stood in serio-comic silence while the double mysteries of
the hidden Holy of Holies were celebrated. Not more than a dozen
devotees at most were present. These gathered modestly in the rear of
the nave and put us to shame with their reverent gravity. Strange chants
were chanted; it was a weird music, like a litany of bumblebees. Dense
clouds of incense issued from gilded recesses that were screened from
view.

It was all very strange, very foreign, very unintelligible to us. It was
also very monotonous; and when some of the unbelievers grew restless and
stole quietly about on voyages of exploration and discovery, they were
duly rewarded at the hands of the custodian of the chapel, who rather
encouraged the seeming sacrilege. He left his prayers unsaid to pilot us
from nook to nook; he exhibited the old paintings of Byzantine origin,
and in broken English endeavored to interpret their meaning. He opened
antique chests that we might examine their contents; and when a volume
of prayers printed in rustic Russian type and bound with clumsy metal
clasps, was bartered for, he seemed quite willing to dispose of it,
though it was the only one of the kind visible on the premises. This
excited our cupidity, and, with a purse in our hand, we groped into the
sacristy seeking what we might secure.

A set of small chromos came to light: bright visions of the Madonna,
done in three or four colors, on thin paper and fastened to blocks of
wood. They were worth about two cents--perhaps three for five. We paid
fifty cents apiece, and were glad to get them at that price--oh, the
madness of the seeker after souvenirs! Then all unexpectedly we came
upon a collection of half-obliterated panel paintings. They were thrown
carelessly in a deep window-seat, and had been overlooked by many. They
were Russian to the very grain of the wood; they were quaint to the
verge of the ludicrous; they were positively black with age; thick
layers of dust and dirt and smoke of incense coated them, so that the
faint colors that were laid upon them were sunk almost out of sight. The
very wood itself was weather-stained, and a chip out of it left no trace
of life or freshness beneath. Centuries old they seemed, these small
panels, sacred _Ikons_. In far-away Russia they may have been venerated
before this continent had verified the dream of Columbus. As we were
breaking nearly all the laws of propriety, I thought it safe to inquire
the price of these. I did so. Would I had been the sole one within
hearing that I might have glutted my gorge on the spot! They were
fifteen cents apiece, and they were divided among us as ruthlessly as if
they were the seamless shirt of blessed memory.

Meanwhile the ceremonies at the high altar had come to an end. The
amiable assistant of Father Mitropolski was displaying the treasures of
the sanctuary with pardonable pride,--jewelled crosiers, golden
chalices, robes resplendent with rubies, amethysts and pearls, paintings
upon ivory, and images clothed in silver and precious stones. The little
chapel, cruciform, is decorated in white and gold; the altar screens are
of bronze set with images of silver. Soft carpets of the Orient were
spread upon the steps of the altar.

How pretty it all seemed as we turned to leave the place and saw
everything dimly in the blue vapor that still sweetened and hallowed it!
And when the six bells in the belfry all fell to ringing riotously, and
the sun let slip a few stray beams that painted the spire a richer
green, and the grassy street that stretches from the church porch to the
shore was dotted with groups of strollers, St Michael's at Sitka, in
spite of its dingy and unsymmetrical exterior, seemed to us one of the
prettiest spots it had ever been our lot to see.

It is a grassy and a mossy town that gathers about the Russian chapel.
All the old houses were built to last (as they are likely to do) for
many generations to come. They are log-houses--the public buildings, the
once fashionable officers' club, and many of the residences,--formed of
solid square brown logs laid one upon another until you come to the
roof. At times the logs are clapboarded without, and are all lathed and
plastered within. The floors are solid and the stairs also. The wonder
is how the town can ever go to ruin--save by fire; for wood doesn't rot
in Alaska, but will lie in logs exposed to the changes of the season for
an indefinite period.

I saw in a wood back of the town an immense log. It was in the primeval
forest, and below it were layers of other logs lying crosswise and in
confusion. I know not how far below me was the solid earth, for mats of
thick moss and deep beds of dead leaves filled the hollows between the
logs; but this log, nearly three feet in diameter, was above them all;
and out of it--from a seed no doubt imbedded in the bark--had sprung a
tree that is to-day as great in girth as the log that lies prostrate
beneath its roots. These mighty roots have clasped that log in an
everlasting embrace and struck down into the soil below. You can
conjecture how long the log has been lying there in that tangle of
mighty roots--yet the log is to-day as sound a bit of timber as one is
likely to find anywhere.

Alaska is buried under forests like these--I mean that part of it which
is not still cased in ice and snow. A late official gave me out of his
cabinet a relic of the past. It is a stone pestle, rudely but
symmetrically hewn,--evidently the work of the aborigines. This pestle,
with several stone implements of domestic utility, was discovered by a
party of prospectors who had dug under the roots of a giant tree. Eleven
feet beneath the surface, directly under the tree and surrounded by
gigantic roots, this pestle, and some others of a similar character,
together with mortars and various utensils, were scattered through the
soil. Most of the collection went to the Smithsonian Institute, and
perhaps their origin and history may be some day conjectured. How many
ages more, I wonder, will be required to develop the resources of this
vast out-of-door country?

When the tardy darkness fell upon Sitka--toward midnight--the town was
hardly more silent than it had been throughout the day. A few lights
were twinkling in distant windows; a few Indians were prowling about;
the water rippled along the winding shore; and from time to time as the
fresh gusts blew in from the sea, some sleepless bird sailed over us on
shadowy wings, and uttered a half-smothered cry that startled the
listener. Then, indeed, old Sitka, which was once called New Archangel,
seemed but a relic of the past, whose vague, romantic history will
probably never be fully known.




CHAPTER XIII.

Katalan's Rock.


Katalan's Rock towers above the sea at the top corner of Sitka. Below
it, on the one hand, the ancient colonial houses are scattered down the
shore among green lawns like pasture lands, and beside grass-grown
streets with a trail of dust in the middle of them. On the other hand,
the Siwash Indian lodges are clustered all along the beach. This
rancheria was originally separated from the town by a high stockade, and
the huge gates were closed at night for the greater security of the
inhabitants; but since the American occupation the gates have been
destroyed, and only a portion of the stockade remains.

Katalan's Rock is steep enough to command the town, and ample enough to
afford all the space necessary for fortifications and the accommodation
of troops and stores. A natural Gibraltar, it was the site of the first
settlement, and has ever remained the most conspicuous and distinguished
quarter of the colony. The first building erected on this rock was a
block-house, which was afterward burned. A second building, reared on
the ruins of the first, was destroyed by an earthquake; but a third, the
colonial castle and residence of the governors, stands to this day. It
crowns the summit of the rock, is one hundred and forty feet in length,
seventy feet in depth, two stories with basement and attic, and has a
lookout that commands one of the most romantic and picturesque
combinations of land and sea imaginable.

It is not a handsome edifice, nor is it in the least like a castle, nor
like what one supposes a castle should be. Were it anywhere else, it
might pass for the country residence of a gentleman of the old school,
or for an unfashionable suburban hotel, or for a provincial seminary. It
is built of solid cedar logs that seem destined to weather the storms of
ages. These logs are secured by innumerable copper bolts; and the whole
structure is riveted to the rocks, so that neither wind nor wave nor
earthquake shock is likely to prevail against it.

Handsomely finished within, it was in the colonial days richly
furnished; and as Sitka was at that time a large settlement composed of
wealthy and highbred Russians, governed by a prince or a baron whose
petty court was made up of the representatives of the rank and fashion
of St. Petersburg and Moscow, the colonial castle was most of the time
the scene of social splendor.

The fame of the brilliant and beautiful Baroness Wrangell, first
chatelaine of the castle, lives after her. She was succeeded by the wife
of Governor Kupreanoff, a brave lady, who in 1835 crossed Siberia on
horseback to Behring Sea on her way to Sitka. Later the Princess
Maksontoff became the social queen, and reigned in the little castle on
Katalan's Rock as never queen reigned before. A flagship was anchored
under the windows, and the proud Admiral spent much of his time on
shore. The officers' clubhouse, yonder down the grassy street, was the
favorite lounging place of the navy. The tea-gardens have run to seed,
and the race-course is obliterated, where, doubtless, fair ladies and
brave men disported themselves in the interminable twilights of the
Alaskan summer. In the reign of the Princess Maksontoff the ladies were
first shown to the sideboard. When they had regaled themselves with
potent punch and caviare, the gentlemen followed suit. But the big
brazen samovar was forever steaming in the grand salon, and delicious
draughts of caravan tea were in order at all hours.

What days they were, when the castle was thronged with guests, and those
of all ages and descriptions and from every rank in and out of society!
The presidential levee is not more democratic than were the _fétes_ of
the Princess Maksontoff. To the music of the Admiral's band combined
with the castle orchestra, it was "all hands round." The Prince danced
with each and every lady in turn. The Princess was no less gracious, for
all danced with her who chose, from the Lord High Admiral to midshipmite
and the crew of the captain's gig.

You will read of these things in the pages of Lutka, Sir George Simpson,
Sir Edward Belcher, and other early voyagers. They vouch for the unique
charm of the colonial life at that day. Washington Irving, in his
"Astoria," has something to say of New Archangel (Michael), or
"Sheetka," as he spells it; but it is of the time when the ships of
John Jacob Astor were touching in that vicinity, and the reports are not
so pleasing.

While social life in the little colony was still more enjoyable, a
change came that in a single hour reversed the order of affairs. For
years Russia had been willing, if not eager, to dispose of the great
lands that lay along the northwestern coast of America. She seemed never
to have cared much for them, nor to have believed much in their present
value or possible future development. No enterprise was evinced among
the people: they were comparative exiles, who sought to relieve the
monotony of their existence by one constant round of gaity. _Soirées_ at
the castle, tea-garden parties, picnics upon the thousand lovely isles
that beautify the Sitkan Sea; strolls among the sylvan retreats in which
the primeval forest, at the very edge of the town, abounds; fishing and
hunting expeditions, music, dancing, lively conversation, strong punch,
caviare and the steaming samovar,--those were the chief diversions with
which noble and serf alike sought to lighten the burden of the day.

While Russia was willing to part with the lone land on the Pacific, she
was determined that it should not pass into the hands of certain of the
powers for whom she had little or no love. Hence there was time for the
United States to consider the question of a purchase and to haggle a
little over the price. For years the bargain hung in the balance. When
it was finally settled, it was settled so suddenly that the witnesses
had to be wakened and called out of their beds. They assembled secretly,
in the middle of the night, as if they were conspirators; and before
sunrise the whole matter was fixed forever.

On the 18th of October, 1867, three United States ships of war anchored
off Katalan's Rock. These were the Ossipee, the Jamestown and the
Resaca. In the afternoon, at half-past three o'clock, the terrace before
the castle was surrounded by United States troops, Russian soldiers,
officials, citizens and Indians. The town was alive with Russian
bunting, and the ships aflutter with Stars and Stripes and streamers.
There was something ominous in the air and in the sunshine. Bang! went
the guns from the Ossipee, and the Russian flag slowly descended from
the lofty staff on the castle; but the wind caught it and twisted it
round and round the staff, and it was long before a boatswain's chair
could be rigged to the halyards, and some one hauled up to disentangle
the rebellious banner.

Meanwhile the rain began to fall, and the Princess Maksontoff was in
tears. It was a dismal hour for the proud court of the doughty governor.
The Russian water battery was firing a salute from the dock as the Stars
and Stripes were climbing to the skies--the great continent of icy peaks
and pine was passing from the hands of one nation to the other. In the
silence that ensued, Captain Pestehouroff stepped forward and said: "By
authority of his Majesty the Emperor of Russia, I transfer to the United
States the Territory of Alaska." The prince governor then surrendered
his insignia of office, and the thing was done. In a few months' time
fifty ships and four hundred people had deserted Sitka; and to-day but
three families of pure Russian blood remain. Perhaps the fault-finding
which followed this remarkable acquisition of territory on the part of
the United States government--both the acquisition and the fault-finding
were on the part of our government--had best be left unmentioned. Now
that the glorious waters of that magnificent archipelago have become
the resort of summer tourists, every man, woman and child can see for
his, her and its self; and this is the only way in which to convince an
American of anything.

Thirty years ago Sitka was what I have attempted to describe above.
To-day how different! Passing its barracks at the foot of Katalan's
Rock, one sees a handful of marines looking decidedly bored if off duty.
The steps that lead up to the steep incline of the rock to the castle
terrace are fast falling to decay. Weeds and rank grass trail over them
and cover the whole top of the rock. The castle has been dismantled. The
walls will stand until they are blown up or torn down, but all traces of
the original ornamentation of the interior have disappeared. The carved
balustrades, the curious locks, knobs, hinges, chandeliers, and
fragments of the wainscoting, have been borne away by enterprising curio
hunters. There was positively nothing left for me to take.

One may still see the chamber occupied by Secretary Seward, who closed
the bargain with the Russian Government at $7,200,000, cash down. Lady
Franklin occupied that chamber when she was scouring these waters in the
fearless and indefatigable, but fruitless, search for the relics of the
lost Sir John. One handsome apartment has been partially restored and
suitably furnished for the use of the United States District Attorney.
Two rooms on the groundfloor are occupied by the signal officers; but
the rest of the building is in a shameful condition, and only its
traditions remain to make it an object of interest to every stranger
guest.

It is said that twice in the year, at the dead hour of the night, the
ghost of a bride wanders sorrowfully from room to room. She was the
daughter of one of the old governors--a stern parent, who forced her
into a marriage without love. On the bridal eve, while all the guests
were assembled, and the bride, in wedding garments, was the centre of
attraction, she suddenly disappeared. After a long search her body was
found in one of the apartments of the castle, but life was extinct. At
Eastertide the shade of this sad body makes the round of the deserted
halls, and in passing leaves after it a faint odor of wild roses.

The basement is half filled with old rubbish. I found rooms where an
amateur minstrel entertainment had been given. Rude lettering upon the
walls recorded the fact in lampblack, and a monster hand pointed with
index finger to its temporary bar. Burnt-cork _débris_ was scattered
about, and there were "old soldiers" enough on the premises to have
quite staggered a moralist. The Muscovite reign is over. The Princess is
in her grave on the hill yonder,--a grave that was forgotten for a time
and lost in the jungle that has overgrown the old Russian cemetery. The
Indians mutilated that tomb; but Lieutenant Gilman, in charge of the
marines attached to the Adams, restored it; and he, with his men, did
much toward preserving Sitka from going to the dogs.

Gone are the good old days, but the Americanized Sitka does not propose
to be behind the times. I discovered a theatre. It was in one of the
original Russian houses, doomed to last forever--a long, narrow hall,
with a stage at the upper end of it. A few scenes, evidently painted on
the spot and in dire distress; a drop-curtain depicting an utterly
impracticable roseate ice-gorge in the ideal Alaska, and four
footlights, constituted the sum total of the properties. The stage was
six feet deep, about ten feet broad, and the "flies" hung like "bangs"
above the foreheads of the players. In the next room, convenient in
case of a panic, was the Sitka fire department, consisting of a machine
of one-man-power, which a small boy might work without endangering
anybody or anything.

Suburban Sitka is sweet and sad. One passes on the way to the wildwood,
where everybody goes as often as may be,--a so-called "blarney stone."
Many a fellow has chipped away at that stone while he chatted with his
girl--I suppose that is where the blarney comes in,--and left his name
or initials for a sacred memory. There are dull old Russian hieroglyphs
there likewise. Love is alike in all languages, you know. The truth
about the stone is merely this: it is a big soft stone by the sea, and
of just the right height to rest a weary pilgrim. There old Baranoff,
the first governor, used to sit of a summer afternoon and sip his
Russian brandy until he was as senseless as the stone beneath him; and
then he was carried in state up to the colonial castle and suffered to
sober off.

Beyond the stone, and the curving beach with the grass-grown highway
skirting it, is the forest; and through this forest is the lovers' lane,
made long ago by the early colonists and kept in perfect trim by the
latest,--a lane that is green-arched overhead and fern-walled on either
side, and soft with the dust of dead pine boughs underfoot. There also
are streams and waterfalls and rustic bridges such as one might look for
in some stately park in England, but hardly in Alaska. Surely there is
no bit of wilderness finer than this. All is sweet and grave and silent,
save for the ripple of waters and the sighing of winds.

As for the Siwash village on the other side of Sitka, it is a Siwash
village over again. How soon one wearies of them! But one ought never to
weary of the glorious sea isles and the overshadowing mountains that lie
on every side of the quaint, half-barbarous capital. Though it is dead
to the core and beginning to show the signs of death, it is one of the
dreamiest spots on earth, and just the one for long summer solitude,--at
least so we all thought, for on the morrow we were homeward bound.




CHAPTER XIV.

From the Far North.


Sitka is the turning-point in the Alaskan summer cruise. It is the
beginning of the end; and I am more than half inclined to think that in
most cases--charming as the voyage is and unique in its way beyond any
other voyage within reach of the summer tourist--the voyager is glad of
it. One never gets over the longing for some intelligence from the outer
world; never quite becomes accustomed to the lonely, far-away feeling
that at times is a little painful and often is a bore.

During the last hours at Sitka, Mount Edgecombe loomed up gloriously,
and reminded one of Fugjyamma. It is a very handsome and a highly
ornamental mountain. So are the islands that lie between it and the
Sitkan shore handsome and ornamental, but there are far too many of
them. The picture is overcrowded, and in this respect is as unlike the
Bay of Naples as possible; though some writers have compared them, and
of course, as is usual in cases of comparison, to the disadvantage of
the latter.

Leaving Sitka, we ran out to sea. It was much easier to do this than go
a long way round among the islands; and, as the weather was fair, the
short cut was delightful. We rocked like a cradle--the _Ancon_ rocks
like a cradle on the slightest provocation. The sea sparkled, the
wavelets leaped and clapped their hands. Once in awhile a plume of spray
was blown over the bow, and the delicate stomach recoiled upon itself
suggestively; but the deliciousness of the air in the open sea and the
brevity of the cruise--we were but five or six hours outside--kept us in
a state of intense delight. Presently we ran back into the maze of
fiords and land-locked lakes, and resumed the same old round of daily
and nightly experiences.

Juneau, Douglas Island, Fort Wrangell, and several fishing stations were
revisited. They seemed a little stale to us, and we were inclined to
snub them slightly. Of course we thought we knew it all--most of us knew
as much as we cared to know; and so we strolled leisurely about the
solemn little settlements, and, no doubt, but poorly succeeded in
disguising the superior air which distinguishes the new arrival in a
strange land. It is but a step from a state of absolute greenness on
one's arrival at a new port to a _blasé_ languor, wherein nothing can
touch one further; and the step is easily and usually taken inside of a
week. May the old settlers forgive us our idiocy!

There was a rainy afternoon at Fort Wrangell,--a very proper background,
for the place is dismal to a degree. An old stern-wheel steamboat,
beached in the edge of the village, was used as a hotel during the
decline of the gold fever; but while the fever was at its height the
boat is said to have cleared $135,000 per season. The coolie has bored
into its hollow shell and washes there, clad in a semi-Boyton suit of
waterproof.

I made my way through the dense drizzle to the Indian village at the far
end of the town. The untrodden streets are grass-grown; and a number of
the little houses, gray with weather stains, are deserted and falling to
decay. Reaching a point of land that ran out and lost itself in mist, I
found a few Indians smoking and steaming, as they sat in the damp sand
by their canoes.

A long footbridge spans a strip of tide land. I ventured to cross it,
though it looked as if it would blow away in the first gust of wind. It
was a long, long bridge, about broad enough for a single passenger; yet
I was met in the middle of it by a well-blanketed squaw, bound inland.
It was a question in my mind whether it were better to run and leap
lightly over her, since we must pass on a single rail, or to lie down
and allow her to climb over me. O happy inspiration! In the mist and the
rain, in the midst of that airy path, high above the mud flats, and with
the sullen tide slowly sweeping in from the gray wastes beyond the
capes, I seized my partner convulsively, and with our toes together we
swung as on a pivot and went our ways rejoicing.

The bridge led to the door of a chief's house, and the door stood open.
It was a large, square house, of one room only, and with the floor sunk
to the depth of three feet in the centre. It was like looking into a dry
swimming bath. A step, or terrace, on the four sides of the room made
the descent easy, and I descended. The chief, in a cast-off military
jacket, gave me welcome with a mouthful of low gutterals. I found a good
stove in the lodge and several comfortable-looking beds, with chintz
curtains and an Oriental superabundance of pillows. A few photographs in
cheap frames adorned the walls; a few flaming chromos--Crucifixions and
the like--hung there, along with fathoms of fishnet, clusters of
fish-hooks, paddles, kitchen furniture, wearing apparel, and a
blunderbuss or two. Four huge totem poles, or ponderous carvings,
supported the heavy beams of the roof in the manner of caryatides. These
figures, half veiled in shadow, were most impressive, and gave a kind of
Egyptian solemnity to the dimly lighted apartment.

The chief was not alone. His man Friday was with him, and together we
sat and smoked in a silence that was almost suffocating. It fairly
snapped once or twice, it was so dense; and then we three exchanged
grave smiles and puffed away in great contentment. The interview was
brought to a sudden close by the chief's making me a very earnest offer
of $6 for my much-admired gum ulster, and I refusing it with scorn--for
it was still raining. So we parted coldly, and I once more walked the
giddy bridge with fear and trembling; for I am not a somnambulist, who
alone might perform there with impunity.

It was a bad day for curios. The town had been sacked on the voyage up;
yet I prowled in these quarters, where one would least expect to find
treasure, inasmuch as it is mostly found just there. Presently the most
hideous of faces was turned up at me from the threshold of a humble
lodge. It was of a dead green color, with blood trimmings; the nose
beaked like a parrot's, the mouth a gaping crescent; the eyeless sockets
seemed to sparkle and blink with inner eyes set in the back of the
skull; murderous scalp locks streamed over the ill-shapen brow; and from
the depths of this monstrosity some one, or something, said, "Boo!" I
sprang backward, only to hear the gurgle of baby laughter, and see the
wee face of a half-Indian cherub peering from behind the mask. Well,
that mask is mine now; and whenever I look at it I think of the falling
dusk in Fort Wrangell, and of the child on all-fours who startled me on
my return from the chief's house beyond the bridge, and who cried as if
her little heart would break when I paid for her plaything and cruelly
bore it away.

Some of the happiest hours of the voyage were the "wee sma'" ones, when
I lounged about the deserted deck with Captain George, the pilot. A
gentleman of vast experience and great reserve, for years he has haunted
that archipelago; he knows it in the dark, and it was his nightly duty
to pace the deck while the ship was almost as still as death. He has
heard the great singers of the past, the queens of song whose voices
were long since hushed. We talked of these in the vast silence of the
Alaskan night, and of the literature of the sea, and especially of that
solitary northwestern sea, while we picked our way among the unpeopled
islands that crowded all about us.

On such a night, while we were chatting in low voices as we leaned over
the quarter-rail, and the few figures that still haunted the deck were
like veritable ghosts, Captain George seized me by the arm and
exclaimed: "Look there!" I looked up into the northern sky. There was
not a cloud visible in all that wide expanse, but something more filmy
than a cloud floated like a banner among the stars. It might almost have
been a cobweb stretched from star to star--each strand woven from a star
beam,--but it was ever changing in form and color. Now it was
scarf-like, fluttering and waving in a gentle breeze; and now it hung
motionless--a deep fringe of lace gathered in ample folds. Anon it
opened suddenly from the horizon, and spread in panels like a fan that
filled the heavens. As it opened and shut and swayed to and fro as if it
were a fan in motion, it assumed in turn all the colors of the rainbow,
but with a delicacy of tint and texture even beyond that of the rainbow.
Sometimes it was like a series of transparencies--shadow pictures thrown
upon the screen of heaven, lit by a light beyond it--the mysterious
light we know not of. That is what the pilot and I saw while most of the
passengers were sleeping. It was the veritable _aurora borealis_, and
that alone were worth the trip to Alaska.

One day we came to Fort Tongass--a port of entry, and our last port in
the great, lone land--for all the way down through the British
possessions we touch no land until we reach Victoria or Nanaimo. Tongass
was once a military post, and now has the unmistakable air of a desert
island. Some of us were not at all eager to go on shore. You see, we
were beginning to get our fill of this monotonous out-of-the-world and
out-of-the-way life. Yet Tongass is unique, and certainly has the most
interesting collection of totem poles that one is likely to see on the
voyage. At Tongass there is a little curving beach, where the ripples
sparkle among the pebbles. Beyond the beach is a strip of green lawn,
and at the top of the lawn the old officers' quarters, now falling to
decay. For background there are rocks and trees and the sea. The sea is
everywhere about Tongass, and the sea-breezes blow briskly, and the
sea-gulls waddle about the lawn and sit in rows upon the sagging roofs
as if they were thoroughly domesticated. Oh, what a droll place it is!

After a little deliberation we all went ashore in several huge
boat-loads; and, to our surprise, were welcomed by a charming young
bride in white muslin and ribbons of baby-blue. Somehow she had found
her way to the desert island--or did she spring up there like a wild
flower? And the grace with which she did the honors was the subject of
unbounded praise during the remainder of the voyage.

This pretty Bret Harte heroine, with all of the charms and virtues and
none of the vices of his camp-followers, led us through the jagged rocks
of the dilapidated quarters, down among the spray-wet rocks on the
other side of the island, and all along the dreary waste that fronts the
Indian village. Oh, how dreary that waste is!--the rocks, black and
barren, and scattered far into the frothing sea; the sandy path along
the front of the Indian lodges, with rank grass shaking and shivering in
the wind; the solemn and grim array of totem poles standing in front or
at the sides of the weather-stained lodges--and the whole place
deserted. I know not where the Indians had gone, but they were not
there--save a sick squaw or two. Probably, being fishermen, the tribe
had gone out with their canoes, and were now busy with the spoils
somewhere among the thousand passages of the archipelago.

The totem poles at Tongass are richly carved, brilliantly colored, and
grotesque in the extreme. Some of the lodges were roomy but sad-looking,
and with a perpetual shade hovering through them. We found inscriptions
in English--very rudely lettered--on many of the lodges and totem poles:
"In memory of" some one or another chief or notable red-man. Over one
door was this inscription: "In memory of ----, who died by his own
hand." The lodge door was fastened with a rusty padlock, and the place
looked ghoulish.

I think we were all glad to get out of Tongass, though we received our
best welcome there. At any rate, we sat on the beach and got our feet
wet and our pockets full of sand waiting for the deliberate but
dead-sure boatmen to row us to the ship. When we steamed away we left
the little bride in her desert island to the serene and sacred joy of
her honeymoon, hoping that long before it had begun to wane she might
return to the world; for in three brief weeks we were beginning to lust
after it. That evening we anchored in a well-wooded cove and took on
several lighter-loads of salmon casks. Captain Carroll and the best
shots in the ship passed the time in shooting at a barrel floating three
hundred yards distant. So ran our little world away, as we were homeward
bound and rapidly nearing the end of the voyage.




CHAPTER XV.

Out of the Arctic.


When Captain Cook--who, with Captain Kidd, nearly monopolizes the young
ladies' ideal romance of the seas--was in these waters, he asked the
natives what land it was that lay about them, and they replied:
"Alaska"--great land. It _is_ a great land, lying loosely along the
northwest coast,--great in area, great in the magnitude and beauty of
its forests and in the fruitfulness of its many waters; great in the
splendor of its ice fields; the majesty of its rivers, the magnificence
of its snow-clad peaks; great also in its possibilities, and greatest of
all in its measureless wealth of gold.

In the good old days of the Muscovite reign--1811,--Governor Baranoff
sent Alexander Kuskoff to establish a settlement in California where
grain and vegetables might be raised for the Sitka market. The ruins of
Fort Ross are all that remain to tell the tale of that enterprise. The
Sitkan of to-day manages to till a kitchen-garden that suffices; but his
wants are few, and then he can always fall back on canned provision if
his fresh food fails.

The stagnation of life in Alaska is all but inconceivable. The summer
tourist can hardly realize it, because he brings to the settlement the
only variety it knows; and this comes so seldom--once or twice a
month--that the population arises as a man and rejoices so long as the
steamer is in port. Please to picture this people after the excitement
is over, quietly subsiding into a comatose state, and remaining in it
until the next boat heaves in sight. One feeds one's self mechanically;
takes one's constitutional along the shore or over one of the goat-paths
that strike inland; nodding now and again to the familiar faces that
seem never to change in expression except during tourist's hours; and
then repairs to that bed which is the salvation of the solitary, for
sleep and oblivion are the good angels that brood over it. In summer the
brief night--barely forty winks in length--is so silvery and so soft
that it is a delight to sit up in it even if one is alone. Lights and
shadows play with one another, and are reflected in sea and sky until
the eye is almost dazzled with the loveliness of the scene. I believe if
I were banished to Alaska I would sleep in the daytime--say from 8 a. m.
to 5 p. m.,--and revel in the wakeful beauty of the other hours.

But the winter, and the endless night of winter!--when the sun sinks to
rest in discouragement at three or four o'clock in the afternoon, and
rises with a faint heart and a pale face at ten or eleven in the
forenoon; when even high noon is unworthy of the name--for the dull
luminary, having barely got above the fence at twelve o'clock, backs out
of it and sinks again into the blackness of darkness one is destined to
endure for at least two thirds of the four and twenty! Since the moon is
no more obliging to the Alaskans than the sun is, what is a poor fellow
to do? He can watch the aurora until his eyes ache; he can sit over a
game of cards and a glass of toddy--he can always get the latter up
there; he can trim his lamp and chat with his chums and fill his pipe
over and over again. But the night thickens and the time begins to lag;
he looks at his watch, to find it is only 9 p. m., and there are twelve
hours between him and daylight. It is a great land in which to store
one's mind with knowledge, provided one has the books at hand and good
eyes and a lamp that won't flicker or smoke. Yet why should I worry
about this when there are people who live through it and like it?--or at
least they say they do.

In my mind's eye I see the Alaska of the future--and the not far-distant
future. Among the most beautiful of the islands there will be fine
openings; lawns and flowers will carpet the slopes from the dark walls
of the forest to the water's edge. In the midst of these favored spots
summer hotels will throw wide their glorious windows upon vistas that
are like glimpses of fairy land. Along the beach numerous skiffs await
those who are weary of towns; steam launches are there, and small barges
for the transportation of picnic parties to undiscovered islands in the
dim distance. Sloop yachts with the more adventurous will go forth on
voyages of exploration and discovery, two or three days in length, under
the guidance of stolid, thoroughbred Indian pilots. There may be an
occasional wreck, with narrow escapes from the watery grave--let us hope
so, for the sake of variety. There will be fishing parties galore, and
camping on foreign shores, and eagle hunts, and the delights of the
chase; with Indian retinues and Chinese cooks, and the "swell toggery"
that is the chief, if not the only, charm of that sort of thing. There
will be circulating libraries in each hotel, and grand pianos, and
private theatricals, and nightly hops that may last indefinitely, or at
least until sunrise, without shocking the most prudent; for day breaks
at 2 a. m.

There will be visits from one hotel to the other, and sea-voyages to
dear old Sitka, where the Grand Hotel will be located; and there will be
the regular weekly or semi-weekly boat to the Muir glacier, with
professional guides to the top of it, and all the necessary traps
furnished on board if desired. And this wild life can begin as early as
April and go on until the end of September without serious injury. There
will be no hay fever or prickly-heat; neither will there be sunstrokes
nor any of the horrors of the Eastern and Southern summer. It will
remain true to its promise of sweet, warm days, and deliciously cool
evenings, in which the young lover may woo his fair to the greatest
advantage; for there is no night there. Then everyone will come home
with a new experience, which is the best thing one can come home with,
and the rarest nowadays; and with a pocketful of Alaskan garnets, which
are about the worst he can come home with, being as they are utterly
valueless, and unhandsome even when they are beautifully symmetrical.

Oh, the memory of the voyage, which is perhaps the most precious of
all!--this we bring home with us forever. The memory of all that is half
civilized and wholly unique and uncommon: of sleepy and smoky wigwams,
where the ten tribes hold powwow in a confusion of gutturals, with a
plentiful mixture of saliva; for it is a moist language, a gurgle that
approaches a gargle, and in three weeks the unaccustomed ear scarcely
recovers from the first shock of it; a memory of totem poles in stark
array, and of the high feast in the Indian villages, where the beauty
and chivalry of the forest gathered and squatted in wide circles
listening to some old-man-eloquent in the very ecstasy of expectoration;
the memory of a non-committing, uncommunicative race, whose religion is
a feeble polytheism--a kind of demonolatry; for, as good spirits do not
injure one, one's whole time is given to the propitiation of the evil.
This is called Shamanism, and is said to have been the religion of the
Tartar race before the introduction of Buddhism, and is still the creed
of the Siberians; a memory of solitary canoes on moonlit seas and of
spicy pine odors mingled with the tonic of moist kelp and salt-sea air.

A memory of friends who were altogether charming, of a festival without
a flaw. O my kind readers! when the Alaska Summer Hotel Company has
stocked the nooks and corners of the archipelago with caravansaries, and
good boats are filling them with guests who go to spend the season in
the far Northwest, fail not to see that you are numbered among the
elect; for Alaska outrivers all rivers and out-lakes all lakes--being
itself a lake of ten thousand islands; it out-mountains the Alps of
America, and certainly outdoes everything else everywhere else, in the
shape of a watering place. And when you have returned from there, after
two or three months' absence from the world and its weariness, you will
begin to find that your "tum-tum is white" for the first time since your
baptismal day, and that you have gained enough in strength and energy to
topple the totem pole of your enemy without shedding a feather. There
is hope for Alaska in the line of a summer resort.

As ghosts scent the morning air and are dispersed, so we scented the
air, which actually seemed more familiar as we approached Washington in
the great Northwest; and the spirit of peace, of ease and of lazy
contentment that had possessed our souls for three weeks took flight. It
was now but a day's sail to Victoria, and yet we began to think we would
never get there.

We were hungry for news of the world which we had well-nigh forgotten.
Three weeks! It seemed to us that in this little while cities might have
been destroyed, governments overthrown, new islands upheaved and old
ones swallowed out of sight. Then we were all expecting to find heaps of
letters from everybody awaiting us at Victoria or Port Townsend, and our
mouths fairly watered for news.

We took a little run into the sea and got lost in a fog; but the pilot
whistled for the landmarks, and Echo answered; so that by the time the
fog was ready to roll away, like a snowy drop-curtain, we knew just
where we were, and ran quietly into a nook that looked as if it would
fit us like a bootjack. The atmosphere grew smoky; forest fires painted
the sky with burnt umber, and through this veil the sun shone like a
copper shield. Then a gorgeous moonlight followed. There was blood upon
that moon, and all the shores were like veins in moss-agate and the sea
like oil. We wound in and out, in and out, among dreamy islands; touched
for a little while at Nanaimo, where we should have taken in a cargo of
coal for Portland, whither the _Ancon_ was bound; but Captain Carroll
kindly put us all ashore first and then returned for his freight.

We hated to sleep that night, and did not sleep very much. But when we
awakened it was uncommonly quiet; and upon going on deck--lo! we were at
Victoria. What a quiet, pretty spot! What a restful and temperate
climate! What jutting shores, soft hills, fine drives, old-countrified
houses and porters' lodges and cottages, with homely flowers in the
door-yards and homely people in the doors!--homely I mean in the
handsomest sense, for I can not imagine the artificial long survives in
that community.

How dear to us seemed civilization after our wanderings in the
wilderness! We bought newspapers and devoured them; ran in and out of
shops just for the fun of it and because our liberty was so dear to us
then. News? We were fairly staggered with the abundance of it, and
exchanged it with one another in the most fraternal fashion, sharing our
joys and sorrows with the whole ship's company. And deaths? What a lot
of these, and how startling when they come so unexpectedly and in such
numbers! Why is it, I wonder, that so many people die when we are away
somewhere beyond reach of communication?

But enough of this. A few jolly hours on shore, a few drives in the
suburbs and strolls in the town, and we headed for Port Townsend and the
United States, where we parted company with the good old ship that
carried us safely to and fro. And there we ended the Alaskan voyage
gladly enough, but not without regret; for, though uneventful, I can
truly say it was one of the pleasantest voyages of my life; and one
that--thanks to every one who shared it with me--I shall ever remember
with unalloyed delight.