In to the Yukon
Date: 2013-04-29T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Overland journeys to the Pacific; Klondike River Valley (Yukon) -- Gold discoveries; Yukon -- Description and travel; Pacific Coast (North America) -- Description and travel

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Title: In to the Yukon

Author: William Seymour Edwards

Release date: April 29, 2013 [eBook #42611]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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Transcriber’s Note

Page numbers have been retained, except for those containing photographs, which have been moved to paragraph breaks. The illustrations “Caribou Crossing” and “Early September Snow, Caribou Crossing” which appeared on the same page, are reversed in the list of illustrations, and have been corrected in order to match the order of the photographs themselves.

Spelling is generally retained, with several exceptions which appear to be printer’s errors. Details may be found in an End Note following this text. Hyphenation can be variable and is retained as found. Where the sole instance of a hyphenated word occurs on a line break, modern usage is followed.

The original versions of any corrections may be viewed as you read as mouseover text.

THE AUTHOR AND HIS WIFE UPON THE TRAIL.

In To
The Yukon

BY
WILLIAM SEYMOUR EDWARDS

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
AND MAPS

SECOND EDITION

CINCINNATI
The Robert Clarke Company
1905

COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY
William Seymour Edwards

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1904
REPRINTED JUNE 1905

Press of The Robert Clarke Company
CINCINNATI, U. S. A.

DEDICATION.
TO THE COMRADE WHOSE CHARMING COMPANIONSHIP
ADDED SO GREATLY TO THE DELIGHTS OF MY
TWO MONTHS’ OUTING, THIS LITTLE
VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED.

THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE.

These letters were not written for publication originally. They were written for the home circle and the few friends who might care to read them. They are the brief narrative of daily journeyings and experiences during a very delightful two months of travel into the far north and along the Pacific slope of our continent. Some of the letters were afterwards published in the daily press. They are now put into this little book and a few of the Kodak snapshots taken are given in half-tone prints.

We were greeted with much friendliness along the way and were the recipients of many courtesies. None showed us greater attention than the able and considerate officials of the Pacific Coast S. S. Co., the Alaska S. S. Co. and the White Pass and Yukon Railway Co., including Mr. Kekewich, managing Director of the London Board, and Mr. Newell, Vice-President of the Company.

At Atlin and Dawson we met and made many friends, and we would here reiterate to them, one and all, our warm appreciation of their hospitalities.

William Seymour Edwards.

Charleston-Kanawha, West Virginia,

August, 1904.

CONTENTS

| | PAGE.
I. | The Great Lakes. Cleveland to Detroit | 13
II. | St. Paul, Winnipeg and Banff; the Wheat Lands of the Far Northwest | 20
III. | Banff to Vancouver Across the Rockies and Selkirks | 38
IV. | Vancouver and Skagway; Fjords and Forests | 52
V. | Skagway, Caribou Crossing and Atlin | 75
VI. | The Great Llewellyn or Taku Glacier | 109
VII. | Voyaging Down the Mighty Yukon | 112
VIII. | Dawson and the Golden Klondike | 132
IX. | Men of the Klondike | 170
X. | Dog Lore of the North | 180
XI. | How the Government Searches for Gold | 195
XII. | Seattle, the Future Mistress of the Trade and Commerce of the North | 206
XIII. | The Valley of the Willamette | 224
XIV. | San Francisco | 230
XV. | Los Angeles | 249
XVI. | San Francisco and Salt Lake City | 260
XVII. | A Broncho-busting Match | 282
XVIII. | Colorado and Denver | 300
XIX. | Across Nebraska | 307
XX. | Along Iowa and into Missouri to St. Louis | 314
| Index | 333

ILLUSTRATIONS

| PAGE.
The Author and His Wife Upon the Trail | Frontispiece.
The Waterside, Cleveland | 15
Entrance St. Clair Canal | 15
White Bear Lake, St. Paul | 31
Down the Silver Bow—Banff | 31
A Reach of the Fraser River | 41
Big Douglas Fir—Vancouver Park | 45
Victoria, B. C.—The Harbor | 49
Leaving Vancouver | 53
Awaiting Cargo—Vancouver, B. C. | 57
Totem Poles at Ketchikan | 61
Glaciers on Frederick Sound | 63
Approaching Fort Wrangel | 67
The Pier—Fort Wrangel | 67
The Pier—Skagway | 71
Lynn Canal from the Summit of White Pass | 71
Looking Down White Pass | 73
The Summit—White Pass | 73
Railway Train—Skagway | 77
The International Boundary | 77
Caribou Crossing | 79
Early September Snow, Caribou Crossing | 79
A Vista on Lake Marsh | 83
Woodland Along Lake Marsh | 83
On the Trail at Caribou | 85
View Near Caribou Crossing | 85
The Taku River | 89
Lake Atlin | 91
Dogs, Atlin | 91
Atlin Baggage Express | 95
Atlin City Waterworks | 95
Government Mail Crossing Lake Atlin | 99
Miner’s Cabin on Spruce Creek, Atlin Gold Diggings | 99
Finding “Color,” a Good Strike, Otter Creek, B. C. | 103
Sluicing for Gold, Otter Creek, B. C. | 103
An Atlin Gold Digger | 105
Bishop and Mrs. Bompas | 113
Great Llewellyn or Taku Glacier | 113
Fishing for Grayling, White Horse Rapids | 117
Moonlight on Lake Le Barge | 119
Lake Bennett, from Our Car | 119
A Yukon Sunset | 123
The Upper Yukon | 123
A Yukon Coal Mine | 125
Five Finger Rapids on the Yukon | 125
Coming Up the Yukon | 129
The “Sarah” Arriving at Dawson, 1,600 Miles up from St. Michael’s | 133
The Levee, Dawson—Our Steamer | 133
Dawson City, The Yukon—Looking Down | 137
Dawson and Mouth of Klondike River, Looking Up | 137
Second Avenue, Dawson | 141
Dawson—View Down the Yukon | 141
The Cecil—The First Hotel in Dawson | 143
A Private Carriage, Dawson | 143
Dog Corral—The Fastest Team in Dawson | 147
A Potato Patch at Dawson | 147
First Agricultural Fair Held at Dawson, September, 1903 | 151
Daily Stage on Bonanza | 155
Discovery Claim on Bonanza of the Klondike | 155
Looking Up the Klondike River | 159
The Author at White Horse Rapids | 159
“Mes Enfants,” Malamute Pups | 161
A Klondike Cabin | 161
On the Yukon | 175
Floating Down the Yukon | 175
Approaching Seattle | 181
With and Without | 181
Malamute Team of Government Mail Carrier, Dawson | 187
Breaking of the Yukon—May 17, 1903 | 187
Sun Dogs | 189
Winter Landscape | 189
Lake Bennett | 197
The Height of Land, White Pass | 197
Mt. Ranier or Tacoma | 217
Along the Columbia River | 221
A Big Redwood | 235
Italian Fishing Craft at Santa Cruz | 239
Approaching San Francisco | 239
The Franciscan Garden—Santa Barbara | 243
Our Franciscan Guide | 243
The Sea—Santa Barbara (two views) | 245
Marengo Avenue, Pasadena | 251
Street View, Los Angeles | 251
The Sagebrush and Alkali Desert | 263
The Mormon Temple | 267
The Mormon Tithing House | 271
The Mormon “Lion House” | 271
Great Salt Lake | 277
Nuckolds Putting on the Hoodwink | 285
Nuckolds, “The Broncho Busted” | 285
Grimsby and the Judges | 289
Bunn, Making Rope Bridle | 289
Arizona Moore Up | 293
Arizona Moore | 293
The Crowd at the Broncho-Busting Match | 298
The Dun-colored Devil | 298
On the Great Kanawha | 325
Our Kanawha Garden | 327
Map of Route in the United States | 329
Map of Upper Yukon Basin | 331

In To The Yukon

FIRST LETTER.
THE GREAT LAKES, CLEVELAND TO DETROIT.

Steamer Northwest, on Lake Superior,
August 11, 1903. }

We reached Cleveland just in time to catch the big liner, which cast off her cables almost as soon as we were aboard. A vessel of 5,000 tons, a regular sea ship. The boat was packed with well-dressed people, out for a vacation trip, most of them. By and by we began to pass islands, and about 2 P. M. turned into a broad channel between sedgy banks—the Detroit River. Many craft we passed and more overtook, for we were the fastest thing on the lakes as well as the biggest.

Toward 3 P. M., the tall chimneys of the huge salt works and the church spires of the city of Detroit began to come into view. A superb water front, several miles long, and great warehouses and substantial buildings of brick and stone, fit for a vast commerce.

The sail up the Detroit River, through Lake St. Clair, and then up the St. Clair River to Lake Huron, was as lovely a water trip as any I have made. The superb park “Belle Isle,” the pride of Detroit; the many, very many, villas and cottages all along the water-side, hundreds of them; everywhere boats, skiffs, launches, naphtha and steam, all filled with Sunday pleasure excursionists, the many great pleasure excursion steamers loaded down with passengers, gave a life and liveliness to the water views that astonished and pleased us.

The Lake St. Clair is about twenty miles across, apparently broader than it is, for the reason that its sedgy margins are so wide that the trees and higher land further back seem the real border of the lake. What is called the “St. Clair Flats” are the wide, low-lying lands on each side of the long reaches of the St. Clair River. Twenty miles of cottages, hotels, club-houses, are strung along the water-side, each with its little pier and its boats.

Towards dark—eight o’clock—we came to Sarnia and Port Huron, and pointed out into the great lake, second in depth to Superior—larger than any but Superior—a bit of geography I had quite forgotten.

At dawn on Monday, we were skirting the high-wooded southern shore, and by 11 A. M. sighted the fir-clad heights of Mackinac where Lake Michigan comes in. Here is a beautiful protected bay, where is a big hotel, and the good people of Chicago come to forget the summer heats. After half an hour, we turned again and toward the north, in a half circle, and by 4 P. M. were amidst islands and in a narrow channel, the St. Mary’s River.

THE WATERSIDE, CLEVELAND.

ENTRANCE ST. CLAIR CANAL.

Huron is a deep blue like Superior, and unlike the green of shallow Erie. The channel toward the Soo is very tortuous—many windings and sharp turns, marked by buoys and multitudinous beacon lights. All along we had passed great numbers of steamships and barges—ore carriers, but nowhere saw a large sailing craft, only a sail boat here and there. This entire extensive traffic is a steam traffic, and though we see many boats, they are black and sombre, and burdened with coal and ore.

It was late, nearly seven o’clock, when we steamed slowly into the lock basin at the Soo. High fir-clad hills on either hand; a multitude of channels among wooded islands. A new and vigorous manufacturing community growing up on either shore where the electric power is being harnessed. Many buildings, many new residences, some of them large and imposing, covering the sloping hillsides. The rapids are a mile or more in length and half a mile wide. The American canal with its locks is on the south side. One, the old lock, small; the other, large and deep for modern traffic. We were here delayed more than two hours by reason of the pack of boats ahead of us. It was dark when we came out of the lock—a lift of twenty-one feet. But meantime, the hills on either hand had burst out into hundreds of electric lights, betokening a much greater population than I had conceived. As we entered the American lock, a big black ship, almost as large as ours, crept in behind us to the Canadian lock on the river’s further side—one of the Canadian Pacific line going to Fort William.

It was a full moon as we came out of the upper river and lost ourselves in the blackness of Lake Superior. A keen, crisp wind, a heavier swell than on the lakes below. We were continually passing innumerable craft with their dancing night lights. The tonnage that now goes through the Soo canals is greater than that of Suez. How little could the world have dreamed of this a few years ago!

To-day when I came on deck we were just entering the ship canal that makes the short cut by way of Houghton. A cold mist and rain, fir-trees and birches, small and stunted, a cold land. A country smacking strongly of Norway. No wonder the Scandinavians and Finns take to a land so like their own.

At Houghton we were in the center of the copper region. A vigorous town, many handsome residences. But it has been cold all day. Mercury 56 degrees this morning. A sharp wind from the north. The bulk of the passengers are summer tourists in thin gauze and light clothing, and all day they are shivering in the cabin under cover, while we stay warm out on deck.

The food is excellent, and the famous planked white fish is our stand-by.

This whole trip is a great surprise to me. The splendid great ship, the conveniences and luxury equalling any trans-Atlantic liner. The variety and beauty of the scenery, the differences in the lakes, their magnitude, the islands, the tributary rivers with their great flow of clear water, the vast traffic of multitudinous big boats. The life and vigor and stir of this north country! Many of the passengers are going to the Yellowstone. We will reach Duluth about 10 P. M., and leave by the 11:10 Great Northern train for St. Paul.

SECOND LETTER.
ST. PAUL, WINNIPEG AND BANFF; THE WHEAT LANDS OF THE FAR NORTHWEST.

St. Paul, Minnesota, August 13, 1903.

We have spent two delightful days in St. Paul, great city of the Northwest that it is. We came over from West Superior by the “Great Northern” route, very comfortably in a new and fresh-kept sleeper—a night’s ride. I was early awake and sat for an hour watching the wide flat farming country of Minnesota. Not much timber, never a cornfield, much wheat and oats and hay land. A black, rich soil. Still a good deal of roll to the landscape, and, at the same time, a certain premonition of the greater, more boundless flatness of the land yet further west. And a land, as well, of many picturesque little lakes and pools. I now the more perfectly comprehend why the Indian word “Minne,” water, comes in so often among the names and titles of Minne-sota.

The farm houses and farm buildings we pass are large and well built, and here and there I see a building which might be along the Baegna Valley or the Telemarken Fjords of Norway, it is so evidently Norse. There are, as yet, but few people at the way-stations. We are a through flyer, and the earlier commuters are not yet astir.

About the houses and barns, also, I notice a certain snugness, indicative of winters that are cold.

Now, we are nearing the city, there are more men at the way-stations. It is evident that the early morning local will follow us close behind.

We came into the big Union Depot on time. The air was crisp and dry. There was much bustle and ado. These people move with an alert vigor, their cheeks are rosy, their eyes are snappy, and I like the swing of their shoulders as they step briskly along the streets. Mankind migrates along earth’s parallels of latitude, so ’tis said—and Minnesota and the great Northwest is but another New England and New York. Vermont and New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York have sent her their ablest sons and daughters, while Ontario and Quebec and the Maritime Provinces have contributed to her population of their force and power. Upon and among this matrix of superior American and Canadian stock, has also been superimposed many thousands of the more energetic and vigorous men, women and children of Europe’s ancient warlike breeds—the viking Northmen of Norway and Sweden and of Denmark, of all Scandinavia. A still great race in their fatherlands, a splendid reinforcement to the virtues of Puritan and Knickerbocker; while there have also come cross currents from Virginia and the South. The type you see on the streets is American, but among it, and with it, is prominently evident the Norse blue eyes and yellow hair of Scandinavia.

St. Paul is surely a great city, great in her present, great in her future. St. Paul is builded on several hills, out along which are avenues and boulevards and rows of sumptuous private residences, while down in the valleys are gathered the more part of the big, modern business blocks and store houses and manufacturing establishments, where are centered the energies which direct her industries and commerce. St. Paul is a rich city, a solid city. The wild boom days of fifteen and twenty years ago are quite gone by, the bubble period has been safely weathered, she is now settled down to conservative although keen and active business and trade. She supplies all of that immense region lying west and north of her, even into the now unfolding Canadian Far Northwest. The continent is hers, even to the Pacific and the Arctic Seas. Minnesota and the Dakotas and Montana have already poured their wealth of grains and of ores, of wheat and of oats, of rye and of barley, of iron and of copper, of silver and of gold, into her capacious lap, and now Manitoba and Alberta and Assiniboia and Saskatchewan and Athabaska, and all the unfolding regions between the Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains, the fertile valleys of the Saskatchewan and Peace Rivers, are to contribute even yet more lavishly to her future commercial predominance as unrivalled mistress of the North. She and Minneapolis will have this trade. She and her twin sister city are entitled to it. And if I mistake not the spirit of the men I have talked with upon her streets, in her shops and banks and clubs, she and Minneapolis will secure of it their full and certain share.

Here in the splendid stores of St. Paul we have made the last few purchases of the things we shall need for our going into the distant Yukon. H. has bought a perfectly fitting sweater—a garment that we searched for and ransacked through the town of Antwerp, in Belgium, two years ago, and could not find, while I have laid in some woolen garments, so fit and warm that they make one hanker for an Arctic blizzard just for the joy of trying them on.

And we have been feted and wined and dined as only mortals may be, who have fallen among long-time and well-tried friends. A sumptuous lunch has been given us at the Merchants’ Club, where old chums and classmates of my Cornell College days did make me almost believe that it was but yesterday that we went forth from our Alma Mater’s Halls.

Later in the day we have taken one of the many suburban trains and journeyed down ten miles to the summer country home of another old-time friend, along the shores of White Bear Lake, and all the afternoon have enjoyed a sail in the crack yacht of the fleet that parades these waters. A new design of boat. Conceived and perfected in St. Paul, and which has this summer carried havoc and defeat to every competing yacht club of all the wide country of the western and northern lakes, and even caused perturbation among the proud salt-water skippers of the east. I send you a snap-shot of the prize yacht as she lies floating at her little pier.

And when we came back and landed from our voyage, we found assembled an even greater company than we had yet met, to again give us welcome without stint. We gathered in the commodious dining-hall of our host, a delightful company, these men who once with me were boys, and their cultivated wives! Long and late we sat, and old college songs we sang, until the eastern sky was already lightening with the approach of dawn. Many of us had not met for nigh twenty years, when we had parted to go forth to fight life’s battles and to win or lose.

Then, in the second afternoon, yet other friends, of yet later knowing, have taken us in hand and have trollied and driven us to see St. Paul’s twin sister, Minneapolis. With her monstrous flouring mills along the Mississippi, she is become the wheat milling center of the world, but she has never succeeded in rivalling St. Paul in the reach and volume of her jobbing trade. Once bitter enemies, rivals for the supremacy of the trade and commerce of the Northwest, their borders have now met, their streets have coalesced, and it will not be many years before the two will have fused and melted into one, even as Canada will one day inevitably become knitted and commingled with the great Republic, for there is room for but one nationality, one English-speaking nationality upon the northern continent of the western world.

In the long gloaming of the waning eventide we were driven in an easy victoria behind a pair of spanking bays and threaded our way among and along the lawns and lakes and avenues of the twin cities’ splendid parks. The deciduous trees do not here grow as large as with us further to the south. The conifers, the pines and firs, are here necessarily more frequently employed by the landscape artist to perfect his plans, but the flowers seemed just as big, just as fine in coloring and in wealth of leaf.

The day was ended with another elaborately served dinner, with other intelligent and cultivated friends, and then, before the night quite fully fell, we were driven to the big station which first we had entered, and were bidden a hearty farewell. We have boarded the sleeper for Winnipeg. A white porter now makes up our berths, and tells us we shall travel in his company some sixteen hours, so long is now the journey to Canada’s nearest city in the north.

Winnipeg, August 14, 1908.

We left St. Paul in the Winnipeg sleeper on the Great Northern Railroad at 8:06 P. M. When we awoke this morning we were flying through the wheatfields of North Dakota, passing Grand Forks at about 9 A. M., and reaching Neche, on the Canadian border, at eleven, and arriving at Winnipeg at 1:40 P. M., a longer journey to the north—440 miles—than I had realized. It was my first sight of a prairie—that vast stretch of wheat country reaching 1,000 miles west of St. Paul, and as far to the north of it. In the States it was wheat as far as the eye could reach in all directions—ripening wheat, waving in the keen wind like a golden sea, or cut and stacked wheat in innumerable piles, in countless shocks. A few miles north of the boundary the wheat land gradually changed to meadow and grass land, with many red cattle. Huge hay stacks here and there—the country flat.

Winnipeg holds about 60,000 people, they tell me. Wooden houses mostly, but some fine modern ones of stone and brick. Hundreds of new houses built and houses a-building. Fine electric tramway system, on which we have been riding all the afternoon. Many paved streets, some wood-paved, but mostly the native black earth of all this northland. A vigorous, hustling town, with now a big boom on, owing to the rapid development of the far north wheat lands—“the Chicago of the far Northwest,” they call it. We go on to-night by 6 P. M. train, and should reach Banff in two nights and a day. There we rest a day.

Banff Springs Hotel, Banff, Canada,
August 18, 1903. }

We had intended leaving Winnipeg by the through train called the “Imperial Limited,” which crosses the continent three times a week each way, but to do so we should have had to lie over in Winnipeg a full day and a half longer, and we had already seen the shell of the town in our first afternoon, so we mended our plans, paid our modest dinner bill of fifty cents each at the Clarendon Hotel, and took the ordinary daily through Pacific express which, leaving Winnipeg at 6 P. M., would yet bring us to Banff, even though it would take a half day longer in doing it, earlier than the Imperial Limited train. A good many people seemed to be of our mind, and so the railway people attached an extra sleeper to the already crowded train. We were fixed in this. A sumptuous car, finished in curled maple and brass, longer, wider, higher than even the large cars run on the N. Y. C. & H. R. R., that traverse no tunnels. These Canadian Pacific Railway cars are built by the railway company, owned and run by it. No “Pullman conductor;” the porter, be he white or black, runs the car and handles the tickets and the cash.

The company were mostly Canadians, going out to Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, etc., large towns toward which Winnipeg bears the same relation as does Cincinnati to our country (West Virginia), and many Australians en route to take ship at Vancouver.

For a long distance the track seemed to be perfectly straight, and miles and miles west of Winnipeg, the city still peeped far distant between the rails. We rose a little, too, just a little, but steadily, constantly. And on either hand and before and behind spread out the wonderful flatness of the earth. The real prairie now. Not even a tree, not a bush, not a hill, just as smooth as a floor, like an even sea, as far as the eye could reach and out beyond.

A good deal of wheat grows west of Winnipeg, as well as south and north and east of it. We were still in wheat land when we awoke yesterday morning, though the now intervening patches of green grass grew larger and larger until the grass covered and dominated everything. And then we had miles and miles of a more rolling country. Here and there began to appear pools of water, ponds, even small lakes and deep sunk streams bordered with rushes and scrub willow and stunted alders.

Every bit of water was alive with wild fowl. Each pool we hurried by was seemingly packed with geese, brant and ducks. All the myriads of the north land water birds seemed to be here gathering and resting preparatory to their long flight to the distant south. Many plover, snipe and some herons and even cranes I noted along the margins of the pools and streams. And this prolific bird life cared but little for the presence of man. Our rushing train did not frighten them, none ever took to wing, too much engrossed were they in their own pursuits.

Through the flat wheat land the farmsteads were few and far between, and the towns only at long intervals. Nor is there here the population seen among the many and thrifty towns and villages of Minnesota and Dakota.

In the grass lands we saw no towns at all, nor made many stops, while herds of cattle began to increase in number; of horses, also, as we drew further and further west and north.

Toward evening, through the long twilight, we entered a hill country, where were a great many cattle and horses, and some Mexican cowboys rounding up the stock ere nightfall.

Here, also, the wilder life of the hills came close upon us. Just as we drew beyond the prairie a large grey wolf had crossed our way. He had no fear of the iron horse; he stood and watched us with evident curiosity, lifting one forepaw as he gazed upon the flying train, not fifty feet away. When we were gone by, he turned and trotted leisurely into the bush.

New buildings with added frequency met our view. Sometimes whole new towns. All this I afterward learned is largely owing to the present American immigration.

At dusk we stopped at the bustling town of Dunmore, just where the railway crosses the broad Assiniboia River on a long bridge. Here many of our fellow sleepers left us, and several new passengers got into our car to ride through to Calgary, the largest town in the Northwest Territory—seven or eight thousand inhabitants—and where the Edmonton branch goes off two hundred miles into the north, and will soon go three or four hundred miles further through the opening wheat country which the world is now pouring into.

This morning we were following the Silver Bow River, past a long lake which it widens into in the journey of its waters toward Hudson’s Bay; then we were among fir-clad foot-hills, and then, quite suddenly, as the enveloping mist lifted, there were revealed upon either side of us the gigantic, bare, rocky, snow-capped masses of the real Rocky Mountain chain. I have never yet seen as immense and gigantic masses of bare rock, unless it be the Cordillera of Michoacan, in Mexico.

Here we are at a fine modern hotel kept by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. It is cool, even cold, almost. As cold as on Lake Superior, 54 and 56 degrees, and as in St. Paul the days we were there, but here the air is so much drier that one sits by the open window and does not feel the cold.

WHITE BEAR LAKE—ST. PAUL.

DOWN THE SILVER BOW—BANFF.

Among the passengers on our train I fell in with several of those who now make their homes in this booming land—from Winnipeg west and north, all this vast country is now on what is called a boom—a wheat-land boom, a cattle boom, a town boom! One, a vigorous six-footer from Wisconsin, a drummer for an American harvesting machine, has put and isnow putting all the money he can raise into the buying of these northern wheat lands. And there is no finer wheat land in all the world, he said, than the rich, warm Peace River valley, four hundred or five hundred miles north of Edmonton. A Canadian drummer, who had won a medal fighting in South Africa, also told me much of the awakening up here. The Hudson Bay Company had for years kept secret the fatness of this north land, although they and their agents had (for more than a century) raised great wheat harvests on their own hidden-away farms along the distant Peace River, where their mills made it into flour for their own use, and to feed the fur-trapping Indians. But never a word had they or their close-mouthed Scotch servants said about all the richness of which they so well knew. But little by little had the news of these wheat crops leaked out into the world beyond, and little by little, after the opening of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and cession to Canada of their exclusive rights, had the pioneer settlers quietly crept into the hidden country. Now there were many farmers snugly living on their own lands along the Peace River valley and in that neighboring region. Every year there are more of them. They haul their supplies three hundred miles north from Edmonton, or buy direct of the nearest Hudson Bay Post. Soon the railways will be up among them, soon the greatest export of Canadian wheat will come from that now far-away country. And here is where the hustling American comes in. The Canadian has been slow to “catch on.” The dull farmer of Ontario has scoffed at the notion of good wheat land so far north. He preferred to stay at home and raise peas and barley. The French habitan, too, did not take stock in the tales of a land so far from church and kindred. Nor did the Englishman do more than look blandly incredulous at whatever secret tales he might hear. He would just inquire of the office of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where he always learned that the tale was a joke out of the whole cloth. Not even the bankers of now booming Winnipeg would invest a dollar in buying Government land beyond the already well-defined wheat limits of Manitoba. It was the keen-scented Yankee who caught on. A group of bright men in St. Paul and Minneapolis heard in some way of the possibilities of the far north. They quietly sent their own experienced Minnesota and Dakota farm land experts and practical wheat judges up into Saskatchewan and Assiniboia to look, examine and report. This they did, and then the Americans began to buy direct of the Canadian Government at Ottawa. Their expert investigators also had friends and neighbors who had money, who had made money in farming, and some of them went up. All who went up staid, and sent back word of having got hold of a good thing. The first the world knew, fifty thousand American farmers went in last year, more than two hundred thousand have gone in this year, and the Canadian world and the English world have awakened to the fact that the bulk of the rich wheat lands of the far north are already owned by the American land companies, American banks and American farmers. In St. Paul to-day you can learn more about all this rich far north, and buy its best lands, rather than in Toronto or even in Winnipeg. Now the railroads are also beginning to stir themselves. The Canadian Pacific Railway is to build more north branch lines. The Grand Trunk Pacific is to be built right through the Peace River country to Port Simpson, and everybody is astir to get a chance at the golden future. But the Americans have the cinch. And what is more, they do better and succeed when the Canadians, from Quebec or Ontario, and, above all, the Englishmen, make rank failures. The Americans have been farming on the same sort of land in Minnesota, in Iowa and in the Dakotas. They go into this new land with the same machinery and same methods. They all do well. Many of the Canadians fail, most of the English likewise, and the prospering American buys them out. Now, also, the Americans are beginning to find out that there is much good cattle range in this north land. The American cattle men are coming up with their herds, even with their Mexican cowboys.

No blizzards here, such as freeze and destroy in Montana. No lack of water here the year round. No drouths like those of Texas. Nor is the still, quiet, steady cold of these plains more fatal, not as much so, as the more variable temperatures of the States. Not much snow over these northern plains, rarely more than a foot. The buffalo grass may be always reached through it. The mercury rarely more than fifty below zero, and so dry is the air and so still that no one minds that temperature.

So we have it, that this entire rich wheat-yielding land of the far, far north, that the bulk of these grazing lands, tempered as the winter is by the warm Pacific climate, which here climbs over the rather low barrier of the Rockies, are falling into alert American hands. Even the storekeepers, they tell me, would rather trade with the American—he buys more freely, buys higher-priced machinery and goods; he is better pay in the end. “The Englishman brings out money, but after the first year or two it is gone.” “The American brings some and then keeps making more.” So my Canadian drummer friend tells me, and he gathers his information from the storekeepers in all these northwest towns with whom he deals. “Some even tell me,” he said, “that if it wouldn’t make any disturbance, why they would do better if all this country was part of the States.” So the American is popular here, and he is growing rich, richer than the Canadian and Englishman, and in course of time, I take it, he will even yet the more completely dominate the land. It is strange how the American spirit seems to have an energy and force that tells everywhere, in Canada as well as in Mexico. The information I give you here comes to me from the intelligent fellow-travelers I have chanced to meet, and, I take it, is probably a fair statement.

We are some 4,500 feet above the sea, and the highest summits near us rise to about 10,000 or 11,000 feet. There is none of the somber blackness of the Norwegian rocks, nor the greenness of the Swiss slopes, while the contour of the summits and ridges is much like that of the volcanic, serrated summits of the mountains I saw in Mexico.

THIRD LETTER.
BANFF TO VANCOUVER ACROSS THE ROCKIES AND SELKIRKS.

Hotel Vancouver, Vancouver, B. C.,
August 19, 1903. }

Our day crossing the Rockies was delightful. We left Banff about 2 P. M., following up the valley of the Silver Bow River to its very head. A deep valley, shut in on either hand by gigantic granite mountains, rising to 10,000 and 12,000 feet, their lower slopes covered with small fir, aspen, birch, then a sparse grass, and lichens, and then rising up into the clouds and eternal snows. Snow fields everywhere, and many glaciers quite unexplored and unnamed. The rise was so easy, however, that we were surprised when we actually attained the summit of the divide, where a mountain stream forks and sends its waters, part to Hudson’s Bay, part to the Pacific. But the descent toward the west was precipitous. Since leaving Winnipeg, two days and nights across plains and prairie, and a night and day up the valley of the Silver Bow River, we had steadily risen, but so gradually that we were almost unconscious of the ascending grade, but now we were to come down the 5,000 feet from the height of land and reach the Pacific in little more than a single day. Not so sheer a ride as down the Dal of the Laera River in Norway, 3,000 feet in three hours behind the ponies, but yet so steep that the iron horse crept at a snail’s pace, holding back the heavy train almost painfully, and descending into gorges and cañons and shadowy valleys until one’s hair nearly stood on end. How on earth they ever manage to pull and push the long passenger and short freight trains up these grades for the east-bound traffic, is a matter of amazement; that is, shove them up and make the business pay.

At once, so soon as the divide was crossed, the influence of the warm, moist air of the Pacific was apparent. No longer the bare, bleak, naked masses of granite, no longer the puny firs and dwarf aspen and birches, but instead, the entire vast slopes of these gigantic mountain masses were covered with a dense forest. The tall Douglas firs stood almost trunk to trunk, so close together that the distant slopes looked as though covered with gigantic coverlets of green fur. The trees seemed all about of one height and size. And the slopes were green right up to the snow field’s very edge. Our way wound down the profound cañon of the Kicking Horse River, sometimes sheer precipices below and also above us, the road blasted out of the granite sides, then we swept out into the beautiful Wapta Valley, green as emerald, the white snow waters of the river—not white foam, but a muddy white like the snow-fed waters of the streams of Switzerland—roaring and plunging, and spreading out into placid pools. At last we emerged through a gorge and came into the great wide, verdant valley of the British Columbia, from which the province takes its name. A river, even there on its upper reaches, as wide as the Ohio, but wild and turbulent, and muddy white from the melting snows. Behind us the towering granite masses of the Rocky Mountains—a name whose meaning I never comprehended before—their peaks lost in clouds, their flanks and summits buried in verdure. The valley of the Columbia is wide and fertile. Many villages and farms and saw-mills already prospering along it. Here and there were indications of a developing mine upon the mountain slopes. We followed the great river until we passed through a narrow gorge where the Selkirk Mountain range jams its rock masses hard against the western flanks of the Rockies and the river thrusts itself between, to begin its long journey southward through Washington and Oregon to the Pacific; and then turning up a wild creek called Six Mile, we began again to climb the second and last mountain chain before we should reach the sea. These grades are very heavy. Too heavy, I should say, for a railroad built for business and traffic and not subsidized by a government, as in practical effect the Canadian Pacific is. The pass at the divide is almost as high as that at the source of the Silver Bow, and much more impeded in winter with snowfalls and avalanches, which require many miles of snow-sheds to save the road.

A REACH OF THE FRASER RIVER.

We dined about 8 P. M., in a fine large hotel owned by the railroad company at a station called “Glacier,” for it is right at the foot of one of the most gigantic glaciers of the Selkirks, and many tourists tarry here to see it and climb upon it; Swiss guides being provided by the railway company for these adventures. And then we came down again, all night and half the next day, following the valley of the Fraser River until it debouched into level tidal reaches a few miles from Puget Sound.

The Fraser River is a magnificent stream; as great as the Columbia, as wild as New River of West Virginia. We stood upon the platform of the rear car and snapped the kodak at the flying gorges, tempestuous rapids and cascades. All along, wherever the water grew angry and spume spun, were Indians fishing for salmon, sometimes standing alert, intent, spear in hand poised and ready, or, more often, watching their nets or drawing them in. And every rocky point held its poles for drying the fish, belonging to some individual Indian or tribe, safe from trespass or molestation by immemorial usage. The sands of the river are said to also have been recently discovered to hide many grains of gold, and we saw in several places Chinamen industriously panning by the water-side. Near Vancouver we passed several extensive salmon canneries, and their catch this year is said to be unusually large.

As we came nearer to the sea the air grew warmer, the vegetation more luxuriant, the flowers more prolific, and the Douglas fir more lofty and imposing. A single shaft, with sparse, ill-feathered limbs, down-bent and twisted, these marvelous trees lift their ungainly trunks above every other living thing about. The flowers, too, would have delighted you. Zinnias as tall as dahlias, dahlias as tall as hollyhocks, nasturtiums growing like grape vines, roses as big as peonies, geraniums and heliotropes small trees. Great was the delight of our trainload of Australians. They had never seen such luxuriance of foliage, such wealth of flowers, except under the care of a gardener and incessant laying on of water. We came across with a car full of these our antipodean kin. Most have been “home,” to England, and had come across to Canada to avoid the frightful heats of the voyage by Suez and the Red Sea. And they marveled at the vigor and the activity of both Canada and the States. Some had lingered at the fine hotels up in the mountains now maintained by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. All were sorry to go back to the heats of the Australian continent.

BIG DOUGLAS FIR—VANCOUVER PARK.

The building and maintaining of this railway has been accomplished by the giving of millions of dollars in hard cash, and millions of acres in land grants, to the railway company by the government of the Dominion. Fortunes were made and pocketed by the promoters and builders, and the Canadian people now hold the bag—but although as a mere investment it can never pay, yet as a national enterprise it has made a Canadian Dominion possible. It owns its terminals on the Atlantic and on the Pacific. It owns its own telegraph lines, its own cars, sleeping-cars, and rolling stock; it owns and runs ten, a dozen, a score of fine hotels; it is a vast land-owner. Its stock can never be bought up and owned out of Canadian hands. A Morgan or a Gould can never seize it, manipulate it, or wreck it. It is a good thing for Canada to have it so. It is a good thing for the people of the United States that it is so.

The Canadian Rockies are the most beautiful and picturesque of any section of the mountain chain from Mexico north. The air is cooler in the far northern latitude, keener, more bracing, and the hustling American has begun to find this out. The great hotels of the Canadian Pacific are already best patronized by the American visitor, and this year the sun-baked Californians have come up in swarms and promise another year even greater numbers. And the Canadian Pacific Railroad welcomes them all—all who can pay. At Banff, too, were the advance guard of the English Colony from China, brought over from Shanghai by the sumptuous steamships of the Canadian Pacific Railway, taken to and kept at their great hotels, and carried home again, at so low a round-trip rate that these Rocky Mountain resorts promise to become the summering-place of the Oriental Englishmen as well as Australian and Californian! How these things bring the world together!

Our journey from Kanawha, across Ohio, from Cleveland through the Great Lakes, across the wheatfields of Minnesota and Dakota and Manitoba, and over the wonderful prairies and plains of the opening far Northwest, has had a fit ending in the last few days climbing and plunging over and down the wildest, most picturesque, most stupendous valleys and passes of the Rocky Mountain and Selkirk Mountain ranges. How vast and varied and splendid is the continent we live on, and which one of these days the people of the United States will inevitably wholly possess!

And now the wonders of these Pacific slopes and waters! All the afternoon we have been wandering through Vancouver’s superb Natural Park, among its gigantic trees, and gazing westward over and across the waters of Puget Sound, the most mighty fjord of the Pacific seas, the most capacious land-locked harbor of the world. I must not say more about this now. I have not yet seen enough. I am only beginning dimly to comprehend what is the future power of our race and people in the development of this side of the earth.

VICTORIA A SLEEPY ENGLISH TOWN.

The Driard Hotel, Victoria, B. C.,
August 21, 1903. }

We came over here yesterday, leaving Vancouver by a fine new 1,800-ton steamer “Princess Victoria,” and making the voyage in four hours,—all the way in and out among the islands and straits and inlets. The shores of the mainland high, lofty;—the mountain summits rising right up till snow-capped, six or seven thousand feet in the air, their flanks green with the dense forests of fir that here everywhere abound. The islands all fir-clad, the trees often leaning out over the deep blue waters. Many fishing-boats were hovering about the points and shoals below the mouth of the Fraser River, awaiting the autumnal rush of salmon into the death-traps of that stream. I hope to see one of these salmon stampedes—they often pushing each other high and dry on the shores in their mad eagerness to go on.

VICTORIA, B. C.—THE HARBOR.VICTORIA, B. C.—THE HARBOR.

Tuesday we reached Vancouver. Wednesday we consumed seeing the lusty little city.

Yesterday we spent the morning in picking up the few extra things needed for the Yukon—among others a bottle of tar and carbolic—a mixture to rub on to offend the yet active mosquito.

Vancouver is a city of some 30,000 people, full of solid buildings, asphalted streets, electric car lines, bustle and activity. Much of the outfitting for the Canadian Yukon is done there, though Seattle gets the bulk of even this trade.

To-day we are in Victoria, a town of twelve or fifteen thousand, a fine harbor, and near it the British naval and military station of Esquimault, the seat of its North Pacific war power. The town is sleepy, the buildings low and solid, the air of the whole place very English. The capitol building is an imposing structure of granite, surmounted by a successful dome.

FOURTH LETTER.
VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY; FJORDS AND FORESTS.

First and Second Day Out,
August 23, 1903. }

We arrived in Vancouver by the steamer “Charmer” from Victoria about ten o’clock A. M.—two hours late—a small boat, packed with passengers. We could not get a state-room to ourselves, so were glad of berths, while many people lay on mattresses in the cabin and many sat up. Tourist travel surprises the slow-going Canadian, and he does not catch up with it.

We went to the Hotel Vancouver, where we had been staying, and there breakfasted.

Our boat, “City of Seattle,” is roomy and comfortable. We have a large upper state-room on the starboard side, plenty of fresh air and sunlight. It is loaded down with an immense cargo of miscellaneous freight, from piles of boxes of Iowa butter and fresh eggs, to sheep and live stock, chickens and pigs, vegetables and canned goods, most of it billed to Dawson and even to points below. The Yukon has been so low this year—less snow than usual falling last winter—that the bulk of the freight “going in” has had to be shipped via these Skagway boats and the White Pass Railway, despite the exorbitant freight rates they are charging for everything.

LEAVING VANCOUVER.

The travellers are of two sorts. A good many making the round trip from Seattle to Skagway, and the Yukoner “going in” for the winter. The former are not of much concern to us, but among the latter I have found a number of interesting acquaintances. One, a man who hunts for a business, and is full of forest lore and hunting tales. He is also something of a naturalist and taxidermist, and I have been showing him our volumes of the report of the Harriman Expedition, to his delight. He has also explored along the Kamtschatka coasts of Siberia, and describes it as a land stocked with salmon and fur animals. He says, too, that I have done right to bring along my gun, for there are lots of ptarmigan as well as mountain sheep and goats in the Yukon Valley, and caribou and moose are also plentiful.

Another man has spent a year or more on the Yukon—our chief engineer—and thinks we will have no difficulty in getting a boat down from Dawson, and the scenery he says is grand. Another is a lumber-man of Wrangel—from Pennsylvania—and tells me they have some fine timber there, though most of that of these far northern latitudes is too small to now profitably compete with the big logs of Washington.

Our vis-a-vis at table is going up to the Porcupine Placer district to try his luck with finding gold, and several men are going into Atlin—whither we are bound—to find work at big pay.

The atmosphere of the company is buoyant and hopeful, even the women have a dash of prosperity about them—gold chains and diamonds—of which there are not a few.

From all I can pick up, an immense trade is already developed with Alaska and is still growing with bounds. The United States Government statisticians give thirty-seven millions as the figure for the trade of the past year. Already three or four lines of steamers ply between Skagway alone and Puget Sound ports, and several more run to St. Michaels and Nome.

The sail from Vancouver is most delightful. You come out of a narrow channel through which the tides foam and churn, and then turn north through the “Gulf of Georgia,” twenty or thirty miles wide. Vancouver Island stretches for three hundred miles along the west, fir-clad, backboned by a chain of mountains rising up into the snows. On the east a coast indented with multitudinous bays and deep channels, sharp promontories and islands; the forest coming to the water’s edge, the mountains rising sharply six and seven thousand feet into the snows and clouds, as lofty as the fjelde of Norway, but not so bare and naked, the dense, deep green fir forests growing from water to snow line.

AWAITING CARGO-VANCOUVER, B. C.

We were crossing Queen Charlotte Sound when we awoke this morning, and all day long have been threading our way among islands, through narrow channels, across seemingly shut-in lakes, ten and twelve miles wide, and then no wider than the Kanawha River or even narrower. As we come north the mountains grow higher and come closer to the water we sail upon, and there is more snow on their summits.

You might imagine yourself with Henrik Hudson on his first voyage, when the Hudson valley was covered with primeval forests.

Last evening we saw a number of humpbacked whales, and to-day more. This morning saw my first sea lions and also fur and hair seals. To-morrow, they say, we shall see yet more. Only gulls, a few terns and ducks to-day. No larger birds as yet.

Monday, August 24, 1903.

The greyness of yesterday is vanished. The sky is cloudless, the atmosphere translucent. The mountains are more lofty, the snow patches grown into wide fields, and the air has taken on a certain added keenness, telling of distant snow and ice. To-morrow we shall see more snow and even glaciers. All day we have been going from one broad sound or channel through narrow straits into others as broad. We crossed Dixon’s Channel at breakfast-time, through which the commerce of the Orient will come to Port Simpson, the Canadians hope, when the Grand Trunk Pacific shall have been built.

About noon we came around a wooded island and made our first port of Ketchikan, where there are salmon canneries, and hard by quartz mines yielding gold, and saloons and stores. Here we had our first view of near-by totem poles, and our first sight of the shoals of salmon that make alive these waters. From a foot-bridge crossing a little creek that debouched near our steamer wharf, we looked down into the clear water and saw it fairly swarming with salmon, fish from ten to fifteen pounds, “small ones,” they said. But the waters were choked with them. Dipping a net down, you might haul up a wagon load as easily as one. Yet no one was catching them. So plentiful are the fish that no one wants to eat salmon except as a last resort—“food fit only for dogs,” they say, and the distant tenderfeet whom the canneries supply. And these swarming fish below us shoved each other upon the shallow shore continually, when there would be a great splashing to get back.

From Ketchikan we have come out into the great Clarence Strait, with Belim and Ernest Sounds stretching away into the snow-covered mountains toward the east. The strait is as wide as the Hudson at the Palisades, the shores fir clad, the mountains six to seven thousand feet, up into clouds and snow. The water to-day is like a mirror, and many porpoises are playing about. I have just seen three big blue herons, and awhile ago we passed a loon. Last night just at dusk, we saw several flocks of snipe or plover, small, brown, swift in flight, close above the water.

TOTEM POLES AT KETCHIKAN.

GLACIERS ON FREDERICK SOUND.

We have just looked upon the most superb panorama we have yet beheld. The last four hours the mountains both east and west of us have come closer to the shores, and risen higher, the fir mantle enveloping them has grown a darker green, larger timber than for the last few hundred miles, and then we came round a bend in our great strait—about six to ten miles wide—forty or fifty miles long—and there in front of us, bounding the horizon on the north, stretched an immense mass of jagged, serrated mountain chain, glittering like silver in the slanting sun rays. Not mere snow patches, not mere fields of snow, but vast “fjellen” of snow, snow hiding all but the most ragged rock peaks, and even sometimes enveloping these. Valleys all snow-filled and from which descend mighty glaciers. Below the miles of snow lay the deep green forests of the lesser mountain summits and sloping flanks, and then the dark blue waters of the giant fjord, dotted with many fir-clad islands. We agree that we have seen nothing in our lives so sublimely beautiful. Never yet nature on so stupendous a scale.

The quiet waters of the last two days are now alive with gulls and ducks and grebes and divers, many loons. More bird life than we have yet seen. Just as is told by the Harriman naturalist. Only at Wrangel does the real bird life of the north begin. Curving around another wooded promontory, we beheld the town of Wrangel, at Fort Wrangel, on Wrangel Island, ten miles away, nestling at the mouth of a little valley, below the firs and snow summits behind. We are now tied up to the pier at this port, and shall lie here till 2 A. M., when flood tide will allow us to continue the voyage, and at daylight pass through the narrowest and most hazardous strait of the trip. We mean to be waked at four o’clock so as to see the pass.

In the village, which claims to be the second town in Alaska, we have walked about and seen some of the totem poles which stand before many of the Indian cabins. Grotesque things, surely.

It is now near nine o’clock and yet the lingering twilight permits one to read. At Dawson, they tell me, there is in June no night, and baseball matches are played at 10 P. M.

August 25, 1903.

We did not leave Wrangel till 2 A. M., lying there waiting for the flood of the tide. We were to pass through the very tortuous, narrow and difficult straits and passages between Wrangel Bay and Frederick Sound, through which the tides rush with terrific fury—the tides rise twenty or thirty feet along these shores—and the ship would only venture at flood tide and after dawn. In order to see these picturesque passages, I climbed out between three and four o’clock this morning, wrapped in a blanket shawl above my overcoat, and stood in the ice-chilled air while we threaded slowly our dangerous way. Along sheer mountain-sides, between low wooded islands (all fir), a channel carefully marked with many buoys and white beacons, with many sharp turns, finally entering the great Frederick Sound, where many whales were blowing, and we saw our first real icebergs—masses of ice, blue and green, translucent, with deep, clear coloring.

APPROACHING FORT WRANGEL.

THE PIER—FORT WRANGEL.

All day we have sailed up this great land-locked sheet of blue water, the icebergs and floes increasing in number as we approached Taku Inlet, from whose great live glaciers they are incessantly shed off.

4 P. M.—We have landed at the Treadwell Mines on Douglas Island, where the largest stamp mill in the world crushes a low grade quartz night and day the year around, and where is gathered a mining population of several thousand. Then we crossed the fjord to the bustling port of Juneau, the would-be capital of Alaska, the rival of Sitka. A curious little town of wooden buildings, wooden streets, wooden sidewalks, nestling under a mighty snow-capped mountain, and, like those other towns, largely built on piles, on account of the tides.

Now we are off for Skagway, a twelve hours’ run with our thirteen-knot speed.

To-day we have fallen in with two more fellow-travelers. One a young fellow named Baldwin, attached to the U. S. Fish Commission, who tells me much about the fishing on these coasts, and the efforts now being made to stay the indiscriminate slaughter. Another, a grave-faced, sturdy man from Maine who is panning free gold near Circle City, and has endured much of hardship and suffering. He hopes to win enough this winter and coming summer from his claim to go back to California and make a home for his old mother who waits for him there.

Skagway, Alaska, Wednesday, August 25.

Here we are, safe and sound after a voyage due north four days and four nights, more than 1,500 miles—I do not know just how far. We came out from Juneau last night in a nasty rain, mist (snow-rain almost) and wind driving against the rushing tides. Coming around Douglas Island in the teeth of the gale, we passed over the very spot where a year or two ago the ill-fated S. S. “Islander” struck a sunken iceberg, and went down into the profound depths with all on board. As I heard the moan of the winds, the rain splash on our cabin window, and hearkened to the roar of the whirling tides against whose currents we were entering the great Lynn Canal—fjord we should say—ninety miles or more long—ten to fifteen miles wide—I could not help thinking of the innumerable frail and lesser boats that dared these dangerous waters in the first mad rush to the Klondike but a few short years ago. In the darkness we have passed many fine glaciers, and along the bases of immense snow and ice crested mountains, which we are sorry not to have seen, but so much is now before us that our minds are already bent toward the great Yukon.

We are tied to an immense pier, and mechanical lifters seem to be dragging out the very entrails of the ship. Across the line of the warehouses I see the trucks of the railway, the hackmen are crying out their hotels. “This way, free ’bus to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”

THE PIER, SKAGWAY.

LYNN CANAL FROM THE SUMMIT OF WHITE PASS.

LOOKING DOWN WHITE PASS.

THE SUMMIT—WHITE PASS.

FIFTH LETTER.
SKAGWAY, CARIBOU CROSSING[A] AND ATLIN.

Atlin, British Columbia, August 29, 1903.

Here we are at the mining camp of Atlin, on Atlin Lake. We left Skagway the same morning we arrived. Our boat, the “City of Seattle,” came in early Wednesday morning, and long before we got up we heard them discharging cargo, all hands at work. The day was cloudy, cold, and icy winds swept down from the glaciers. It seemed November. The little town is built on a low sand tongue of detritus carried down from the glaciers by the snow rivers, the river Skagway here pouring out a flood of muddy white water like the Swiss streams.

The railway is a narrow, three-foot gauge, and the cars are low but roomy. Our train consisted of nine freight cars, a baggage, two passenger cars and three locomotives, one in front and two in the middle. The famous ride was all that has been said of it. First, a gradual ascent up the deep valley of the Skagway, then steep climbing and many doubles and winds up through the cañon to the summit, twenty miles away, and 3,200 feet above the sea. In many places the road-bed is blasted out of the granite rock, sheer precipices above and below, a most costly piece of work, and ever down below winds the difficult, dangerous trail, over which fifty to one hundred thousand men and women footed it in the winters of 1897–1898, in the strange, mad world-rush to the fabulous gold fields of the interior. How they got up and through at all is the wonder; yet men tell me that men, pack-laden, footsore, determined, were so closely massed along the trail that it was one continuous line from Skagway to summit and beyond, for months at a time. The various views from our car were magnificent and even appalling; sometimes we seemed to hang in mid-air as we crawled upward. As we approached the summit we came among snow fields and near many glaciers, and then passed through long snow-sheds over which the avalanches often slip and thunder into the abysses below.

Near the divide is the international boundary line, and the customs station for Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada, and where the red-coated Canadian mounted police come first in evidence. Here our bags were examined by the customs. Then we began a gradual descent into wide, open, flat valleys, over bare granite rock masses and through a stunted fir wilderness into the basin of the Yukon, 2,600 miles from the Behring Sea at St. Michaels. Flocks of ptarmigan flew up as the train rolled down, and a few eagles soared high above the snow summits.

Our first stop was at a railway eating-house near the head of Lake Bennett, a sheet of light green water, two to ten miles wide and over thirty miles long, all shut in by gigantic granite mountains whose summits were covered with glittering snow. The railway skirts the water for the entire distance until it crosses at a bridge over a swift current where Lake Bennett flows into Lake Marsh, and where is the station of Caribou.

RAILWAY TRAIN—SKAGWAY.

THE INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY.

CARIBOU CROSSING.

EARLY SEPTEMBER SNOW, CARIBOU CROSSING.

Here we were put off, and here we would, two days later, take the bi-weekly steamer for Atlin, on Atlin Lake, where we now are, and here the railway leaves the lakes and takes a short cut across a low divide to White Horse Rapids, where begins the steamboat navigation on the Yukon River.

Caribou is a collection of cabins and tents, and is the first settlement where, they say, will some day be a city.

It was on Lake Bennett that the weary pilgrims used to camp to build their boats and rafts and begin their long water journey of five hundred miles to Dawson and the golden Klondike.

Our hotel we found surprisingly neat and clean; owned and kept by a famous Indian, “Dawson Charlie,” who was one of the discoverers of the gold of Bonanza Creek in the Klondike, and who had the sense to himself stake out several claims, the gold from which has made him now a magnate worth several hundred thousand dollars, and who lives and entertains like a white man. He housed us in a neat, comfortable room, iron bedstead, wire mattress, carpeted floor. He fed us at fifty cents a meal as well, as abundantly as in West Virginia, and only his Indian daughter, who waited on us, dressed neatly and fashionably, with big diamonds in her ears, made us realize that we were not in our own land. Here we have spent two delightful days. The air is as wonderfully clear as on the table-lands of Mexico, full of ozone, but cold in the shadow even in midday, though the sun is warm.

On the ship we met a delightful naturalist, Mr. Baldwin, of New Haven, artist of the U. S. Fish Commission, and who came with us to try and catch some grayling, in order to make drawings for the Commission, and for two days we have been out in the woods, he with my rod, H—— with your butterfly net, and I with my gun. He caught his grayling, several of them. I shot several mallard ducks, but H—— caught no butterflies, nor saw one. It was too late in the season for that.

On the way up we fell in with a very intelligent Swede, whose partner in the Klondike is a Dane, and who, when he learned H——’s nationality, and she had talked Danish with him, was all courtesy and friendliness. He had come in with the “mushers” (corruption of the French marche), as the early foot-farers are called, and had succeeded. When we get to Dawson he will welcome us.

A VISTA ON LAKE MARSH.

WOODLAND ALONG LAKE MARSH.

ON THE TRAIL AT CARIBOU.

VIEW NEAR CARIBOU CROSSING.

At Caribou we also made acquaintance with the Canadian customs officer, Mr. John Turnure, a fine type of Canadian official, big, bluff, yet courteous, who at first was going to tax all my cartridges and kodak films, notwithstanding I had passed the customs at Winnipeg and had come from Vancouver direct, but who, upon explanation, relented, and afterward called on us and invited H——, Mr. B—— and myself to call on his wife and family at his log cabin mansion near the station, which we did, and were served cake and coffee from dainty china, and sat on a divan covered with priceless furs, near a good piano. His daughters were now at home from school on vacation, and his wife, a cultured woman, was next day going with them on a shopping visit to Dawson, the New York or Cincinnati of this far north.

The Yukon territory is governed from Ottawa by appointees, and policed by the “Northwest Mounted Police,” a fine body of men—including many young Englishmen of good family—in cowboy hats and red coats. While here in Atlin, we are just over the line in the Province of British Columbia, a state with its own laws and civil magistrates.

We left Caribou on a little steamer with a big sternwheel—all of which, timber and machinery, had been carried from Skagway over the White Pass on horses’ backs, and sledges, dragged by men and dogs, and put together on Lake Bennett, before the railway was even thought of. How in the name of heaven a ten-ton boiler, and the engines and big timbers, were got over that foot-path trail, is even yet a standing marvel—the boat is as big as the steamer “Calvert” on the Kanawha River—but it was done, and to-day I have talked with the man who bossed and directed the job, Captain Irving, now a gold hunter of Atlin and a member of the British Columbia Parliament.

We first came slowly through a well-marked track on a little lake, Lake Marsh, for about ten miles, then through a short river, and then out into Lake Taggish, a sheet of water larger than Lake Bennett, and one arm of which is famous for its desperate winds from the glaciers—the “hurricane” arm—another arm of which heads toward the White Horse Rapids, and a third arm, “The Taku Arm,” which extends southerly toward Lake Atlin, a lake more than one hundred miles in length, which empties into it through a short, swift, turbulent river. This southerly portion of the lake is eight or ten miles wide and we were all night steaming on it to Taku, where we landed this morning—a distance of forty or fifty miles—when, taking a little, short, two-mile railway, we were pulled over to Atlin Lake, a yet bigger body of water. There embarking on another steamboat, we were ferried ten miles across to Atlin, a town with a courthouse, several churches, a little hospital, a newspaper, a bank, a dozen hotels, a multitude of restaurants, bicycles, numerous livery stables, and which is the center of a gold-mining region from which already several millions of dollars have been taken since the first pay dirt was found in 1898. We dined at a restaurant where a colored French cook presides, and you may have any delicacy New York could afford. At the bars men preside with diamonds the size of hickory nuts in their shirts, drinks are twenty-five cents each and cigars the same. The hotels are full of keen-faced men; well-gowned and refined women are to be seen on the streets; the baby carriages are pulled by great big dogs, and even the water carts and delivery wagons are hauled by teams of eight and ten dogs—Newfoundland or wolfish Esquimaux.

THE TAKU RIVER.

LAKE ATLIN.

DOGS—ATLIN.

“The Camp,” or city, is now in the midst of a boom, and this morning we were shown several buckets of gold nuggets just brought in last night from a recent “clean up.”

When in the midst of Lake Taggish, yesterday afternoon, we were hailed by a naphtha launch of the Mounted Police, and, on our lying to, three gentlemen climbed in. One face seemed in some way familiar to me, and when I presently heard some one call him Mr. Sutton I recognized one of my old Port Hope schoolmates, who had also been at Cornell, and who had been an especial friend. He was as well pleased as I at the meeting, and is now here with me. He was a brilliant scholar, and is now British Columbia’s most eminent geologist and mining expert. We have been out together to-day, and to have his expert opinion here on what I see is invaluable. We have also met here a Mr. and Mrs. R——, of Philadelphia, to whom I had a letter, a promoter of the largest hydraulic company here, and H—— has been off with Mrs. R—— to-day and panned her first chunks of real, true, genuine gold, of which performance she is not a little proud. The whole country seems to be more or less full of gold; it is in the gravels and sands everywhere, and a number of very large gold-getting enterprises are under way, mostly hydraulic placer mining, but also some fine quartz veins carrying free gold are being opened up, and I have been off with Sutton all the afternoon looking at one.

September 1, 1903.

We have had three days of outing; at least, I have. Saturday morning I made an early start with Sutton and three other men for a visit to some hydraulic mining operations up on Pine Creek, and to the great dredge now being built. At one of these, an operation called “The Sunrise Gold Co.,” I found in charge a Mr. Ruffner, of Cincinnati, a cousin to the Kanawha family, grandson of one of the original Ruffner brothers, who, hating slavery, had freed his slaves and removed to free soil in Ohio. A bright young fellow, managing a large operation. Then we went on further to Gold Run, where an enormous dredge is being built. An experiment in this country, about the final success of which there is yet much question. Here I dined in a tent, which is warmer, they say, than any timber building, even when the temperature is 50 degrees below zero. The valley is a broad, open one, all of glacial formation. It is very level, with Pine Creek cutting deeply between high gravel banks. A black top soil of a foot or two, eight or ten feet of grey gravel, then as much more yellowish sandy gravel, and often a foot or two of black sand at the bottom, lying upon a bed of serpentine rock; and it is in this lowest ten feet of yellow gravel and black sand that the free gold is found, nuggets of a pound or two down to minute gold dust, a red gold of about 22 to 23 carats in combination with copper or silver. Through this gravel are also immense stones and boulders, and these are the gold diggers’ particular bete noir. Most of the digging is done by getting out this gravel, freeing it of the boulders and washing it. Pine Creek is the overflow of Surprise Lake, a sheet of water twenty miles long and one-half to one mile wide; and although a considerable stream, yet its waters are so much needed in these gold-washing operations that a constant water-war among the diggers and digging companies goes on. There is much waste also in the present methods, and it is to prevent the wars as well as to save the fine gold that now largely escapes that the dredging method is to be applied. Then, too, there are only four, or at most five, months in the year when men can work, so that great energy must be expended during the open season. There is no night up here for these four months, and men work all the twenty-four hours in eight-hour shifts; thus, really, more work is done than one would at first imagine. The life of the ideally successful gold digger is to toil with unflagging vigor for the four or five months of daylight and open weather, then “come out” and blow it in leisurely luxury in some comfortable city. But not all are so able to make their summer pile. They may not strike rich pay dirt, but may find it lean, or even barren, and such must just live on through ice and snow and mighty frost, hoping for more luck another year. Many are the tales of hardship and suffering and dire wreck one hears. The little graveyard out along the Pine Creek pike has many graves in it. One man died a natural death, they say, but all the rest went to their graves stark mad from disappointment, poverty and privation. Every train passing out over the White Pass Railway carries its complement of the hopelessly insane, gone mad in the hunt for gold.

ATLIN BAGGAGE EXPRESS.

ATLIN CITY WATER WORKS.

In this little town or “camp,” as it is called, are very many too poor to get away, too broken in health and spirits to more than barely exist. A delicate woman, once the wife of the mayor of an Illinois city, does our washing; her husband, a maimed and frozen cripple, sits penniless and helpless while she earns a pittance at the tub. Our landlady lets rooms to lodgers, her husband’s body lying beneath the deep waters of Teslin Lake.

A Cambridge Senior wrangler passed us yesterday on the road driving two dogs hitched to a little wagon, peddling cabbages and fish. A few strike gold, and, making their piles, depart, but the many toil hopelessly on, working for a wage, or frozen or crippled, weary in spirit and out of heart, sink into penury, or die mad.

GOVERNMENT MAIL CROSSING LAKE ATLIN.

MINER’S CABIN ON SPRUCE CREEK—ATLIN GOLD DIGGINGS.

After our dinner in the tent I joined another party, some of those interested in the building of the dredge, and drove with them twenty miles up into the interior to Otter Creek, where three of them have just started an operation, sluicing for gold. We passed many cabins and small tents, where live the men who are working claims and washing for gold. Some were quite shut down for lack of water, others were eagerly at work. At one point a Mr. S—— and I left the wagon and struck six miles across a great grassy mountain. We must have ascended 2,000 feet or more. An easy ascent over a vast expanse of moss and tufted grass; no trees, no bushes, no hardy herbs, nothing but grass and moss. Only on the south and west was the horizon bounded by jagged peaks and summits of snow-topped mountains. Glacial action has everywhere worn down the surface into rounded rolling domes and slopes, and for hundreds of miles the land is one wide moorland of grass and moss.

Here are many flocks of wild sheep and mountain goats, and here moose and caribou are said to abound. During the day, about the noon hour, a giant bull moose had stalked deliberately through the midst of the camp, neither quickening his pace, nor fearing man. So engrossed were the men in their search for gold, that none dropped pick or shovel to molest him.

On these higher slopes are multitudes of ptarmigan,—the birds breeding close to the permanent snow line, remaining high up during the summer heats, and gradually descending to the valleys as the fresh falling autumnal snows little by little push them down.

In Atlin, the other day, a young Swedish engineer, a graduate of Upsala, showed me a fine pair of ibex horns from one which he had shot high up on the mountains beyond the lake. The animal, though not uncommon, is difficult to get, inhabiting the most inaccessible summits and rarely descending to even the levels where the mountain sheep and goats find pasture.

A superb and seemingly boundless pasture land where great herds of cattle ought also to be feeding, and would be, except for the terror of the winter’s cold. Perhaps the reindeer will some day here find a congenial home.

We sat by fires after nightfall, and when day came icicles a foot long hung all along the drip of the flume, and in the afternoon snow fell, covering every rounded summit with its white mantle.

Returning, I walked another ten miles down the winding valley of Otter Creek. A stretch of open, grassy moorland, where in the winter-time the moose and caribou gather in numbers seeking shelter from the winds, and finding the dried grass through the scraped-off snow.

FINDING “COLOR,” A GOOD STRIKE, OTTER CREEK, B. C.

SLUICING FOR GOLD, OTTER CREEK, B. C.

AN ATLIN GOLD-DIGGER.

To-day H——, Sutton and I have driven for hours along the valley of Spruce Creek, visiting another industrious gold-washing section. We picnicked for lunch in an abandoned miner’s camp, and H—— saw her first real washing for gold. We took the picture of one old man, a Mr. Alfred Sutton, in whose cabin we had sought shelter from a passing rain squall. He had hoped to return to England for the winter—he left there many years ago—but the gold had not come in as rich as he had hoped, so he must delay his going for one more year. Poor old fellow, his beard was long and white, so, too, his uncombed hair. He had not yet made his yellow pile, but was as hopeful as a boy of twenty. I promised to send him a copy of the photograph and he thanked me joyfully, saying, “And I shall send it to my family at home”—in England.

We are here two days longer, when we move on to Dawson and I mail these lines to you.

September 2, 1903.

This is our last day in Atlin. The morning was cold like late November in Virginia, the air keen and frosty. Ice has formed in the pools, though the aspen and scrub willow and a sort of stunted alder are only turned yellow in spots and patches. The mountain-tops are now all whitened with the delicate early snows, extending like blankets of hoar-frost out beyond the margins of the snow fields that never melt.

We dine sumptuously, and all through the gold fields it is the same. The one thing men will and must have is food, good food and no stint. The most expensive canned goods, the costliest preserves, the most high-priced fresh fruits, oranges, bananas, pears and grapes, the finest beef steaks and meats, the most ample variety of vegetables. Such an average as New York gives only in her best hotels, is what the gold digger demands, will have, and freely spends his nuggets to obtain. We are astonished at such lavish eating. At the diggings where men work for wages, $4.50 and $5.00 per day, board is always included and demanded, and only this high-priced, costly food is accepted. The cooks are connoisseurs. Their wages run from $125.00 to $150.00 per month and free board. At the camp high amidst the desolate moorlands of Otter Creek, the men eat beef steaks, thick, juicy, rare, California fresh fruit and lemon meringue pie; with lemons $1.00 per dozen and eggs ten cents apiece! Dundee marmalade is eaten by the ton; the costliest canned cream is swallowed by the gallon—the one permitted, recognized and established extravagance of the gold fields is the sumptuous eating of every man who finds the gold.

This afternoon Sutton and ourselves with a few friends are going down to see the great glacier at the south end of Lake Atlin.

SIXTH LETTER.
THE GREAT LLEWELLYN OR TAKU GLACIER.

Caribou Crossing, September 4, 1903.

We have just come in on the steamboat from Atlin, and are waiting for the train which will take us to White Horse this afternoon, where we will take a river boat to Dawson.

Day before yesterday we took the little steamboat that plies across Atlin Lake, having chartered it with Sutton, and having asked a Mr. Knight, of Philadelphia, and Captain Irving, of Victoria, making a party of five, and went to the head of the lake—forty-five miles. A lovely sail. Up the narrow mountain-locked channel on the west of Goat Island (named from the many wild goats on it). The water a clear, deep blue and light green, according to its depth. The mountains chiefly granite, rising sheer up on either hand four and five thousand feet; the fir forest, dense and sombre, clothing their bases, then running out to ground pine and low shrubs, then the grass and mosses, then the bare rocks and jagged crags and the everlasting snows. The lake channel is everywhere narrow, sometimes widening out to five or six miles, then narrowing into a mile or two, but the air is so wonderfully translucent that ten miles look like one, and distant shores seem close at hand. The further we sailed the narrower grew the channel, until we were among islands and cañons, with sheer snow-capped heights hanging above us, at last slowly creeping through a tortuous passageway of still water out into a long, silent arm, at whose head we tied up to the forest for the night. These clear waters are filled with trout and grayling—the latter chiefly, but of birds there were almost none. Only a belated and startled great blue heron flapped lazily away to the west. Using our glasses, we saw two or three wild goats up on the heights above us, and probably many more saw us far down below.

In the morning we breakfasted early, and started for the glacier—the great Llewellen or Taku glacier, said to be the largest in the British possessions of North America, sixty miles long to where it comes to Taku Bay, near Juneau, and is there known as Taku glacier. We clambered over a mile of trail, through dense, close-growing fir, then out into a wide plain of detritus, once covered by the ice, now two miles long by a mile wide. Difficult walking, all glacial drift, and boulders great and small. The distance to the vast slope of dirty ice seemed only a little way; nothing but the walk would convince one that it was over two miles. The glacier projects in a great bow. On its center, like a hog-back mane, are piled masses of earth and rocks. It is there that the moving ice river is. On either side the ice is almost still and white. For five or ten miles the glacier rises toward an apparent summit and stretches toward the coast, fed by a multitude of lesser ice streams issuing from every mountain gorge and valley, while monstrous masses of rock, granite and porphyry, tower into the snows and clouds above it. We had some difficulty in climbing upon the glacier. Chasms opened on either side, the front was a cracking ice cliff, crevasses yawned everywhere. Though the surface was dirty and blackened, yet down in the cracks and crevasses the wonderful blue ice appeared. From the base of the glacier flows a river, and over its surface coursed a thousand rills.

We walked upon the ice and lingered near it till about noon, when our boat took us back to Atlin through the greater lake, along the east shores of Goat Island, a four hours’ sail.

From Atlin we have returned as we went, and are now spending a few hours here. There were very few birds on Atlin Lake, though I saw a superb loon yesterday near the western shore.

Ice formed on the lake last night. Snow is in the air. We may be too late to go down the Yukon from Dawson.

SEVENTH LETTER.
VOYAGING DOWN THE MIGHTY YUKON.

Dawson, September 5, 1903.

This letter is headed Dawson, for I shall mail it there, but I begin it at White Horse, a thriving town of over 2,000 people, on the west bank of the Fifty Mile River, just below the famous rapids. The streets are wide, of hard gravel, many large buildings. We are in the “Windsor” Hotel, a three-storied wooden structure, iron bedsteads, wire mattresses, modern American oak furniture—very comfortable, but as all the partitions are of paper—no plaster—you can hear in one room all that is said on six sides of you—above and below, too. The city and hotel are electric-lighted. Many churches, a commodious public school, public hall and reading-room supplied with all current American, Canadian and English magazines. The town is up to date. It is at the head of the Yukon navigation, where those “going out” take the White Pass and Yukon Railway for Skagway, and those “going in” take the boats for “Dawson.” Just now the town is half deserted, many of its inhabitants having stampeded to the new Kluhane gold strike, some one hundred and forty miles away. It is here claimed that a new Eldorado as rich as the Klondike has been found, and White Horse now expects to yet rival Dawson. Extensive finds of copper ore of high grade are also reported in the neighborhood.

BISHOP AND MRS. BOMPAS.

THE GREAT LLEWELLYN GLACIER.

We arrived at Caribou yesterday morning on the little S. S. “Scotia,” built on Lake Bennett, after a very comfortable night, and went over to Dawson Charlie’s hotel for a good breakfast. By this time H—— and the Indian housekeeper had become fast friends, and the girl accordingly brought out her store of nuggets and nugget jewelry for H—— to see. A lovely chain of little nuggets linked together, a yard or more long, earrings, breastpins, buckles, and sundry nuggets, large and small. It is Dawson Charlie’s habit, when in a good humor, to give her one of the pocketful of nuggets he usually carries around.

We crossed the bridge over the rushing outflow of Lake Bennett and went down to the Indian village, and called on the man whom all Canadian churchmen affectionately and reverently term the “Apostle of the North,” old Bishop Bompas and his quaint, white-haired wife. For over forty-five years he has wrought among the Indians of the Peace River, the Mackenzie and Yukon watersheds. He is an old man, but as erect as a Cree brave. His diocese is now limited to the Yukon waters, where, he says, are about 1,000 Indians, and, of course, an increasing number of white men. They lived in this back, wild country long before the white men thought of gold, or the Indian knew of its value. I took their pictures and promised to send them copies.

This morning we have walked a few miles up the river to see the celebrated White Horse Rapids, and I went four miles further, and saw also the Miles Cañon, where the waters of Lake Taggish and Fifty Mile River begin their wild six miles before reaching here. The cañon is sharply cleft in trap rock, and the sides rise sheer and pilastered as though cut into right-angled pillars. These cliffs rise up 200 feet or more and go down as deep below the foaming tide. The cleft does not seem more than 100 yards wide, and through it the waters boil and roar. How the early gold hunters ever got through the furious waters alive is the wonder, and indeed very many did lose their lives here, as well as in the dashing rapids below.

On the Yukon, September 7, 1903.

We have boarded the steamer “White Horse,” whose captain is commodore of the Yukon fleet—twenty-odd large steamers owned by the White Pass & Yukon Ry. Co. We have a stateroom at the rear of the texas, with a window looking out behind as well as at the side. I can lie in my berth and see the river behind us. We swung out into the swift blue current about a quarter to seven, yet bright day, the big boat turning easily in the rather narrow channel. The boat is about the size of those running between Charleston, W. Va., and Cincinnati or Pittsburg—165 feet long, 35 feet wide, and draws 2½ feet, with a big stern wheel:—the Columbia River type rather than the Mississippi, such as run from Dawson down—sits rather high in the water and lower parts all enclosed. She has powerful machinery fit for breasting the swift waters; a large, commodious dining salon; a ladies’ parlor in the rear; a smoking-room for gentlemen forward; lighted with electricity, and all modern conveniences. She was built at White Horse, as were also ten of the sister boats run by the railway company. Six years ago no steamboat had traversed these waters. With the current we travel fourteen to twenty miles an hour, against the current only five! The river winds among hills and flats, and mountains all fir-clad and yellowed with much golden aspen, turned by the nightly frosts.

FISHING FOR GRAYLING—WHITE HORSE RAPIDS.

MOONLIGHT ON LAKE LE BARGE.

LAKE BENNETT FROM OUR CAR.

We came down through Fifty Mile River, which is the name given to the waters connecting Lake Taggish and Lake Lebarge. The moon hung full and low in the south, giving a light as white as upon the table-lands of Mexico, so clear is the atmosphere and free from atmospheric dust. We sat upon the upper deck until late in the night, watching the varying panorama. From the window of my stateroom, lying in my berth, I looked an hour or more while we sailed through Lake Lebarge—five or six miles wide, thirty miles long—hemmed in by lofty, rounded, fir-clad limestone mountains, 4,000 or 5,000 feet in altitude—the full moon illuminating the quiet waters. Only the frequent mocking laugh of the loon echoed on the still night air—there seemed to be hosts of them. Once I heard the melancholy howling of a timber wolf among the shadows of a deep bay. From Lake Lebarge we entered the swift and dangerous currents of Thirty Mile River. Here the boats usually tie up till daylight, but with the full moon and our immense electric searchlight, the captain ventured to go down. Again I sat up watching the foaming waters behind us and how deftly we backed and swung round the many sharp bends:—high mountains quite shutting us in, the foaming waters white and black in the moonlight and shadow. At last, when the mountains seemed higher, blacker, more formidable than ever, we suddenly rounded a precipitous mass of limestone and granite and floated out into an immense pool, while away to the east seemingly joined us another river as large as our own, the Hootalinqua, fetching down the yet greater tides of Lake Teslin, and forming with the Thirty Mile, the true Yukon—though the stream is mapped as the Lewes, until joined by the Pelly, many miles below.

We have now been descending this great river all day long; as wide as the Ohio, but swifter and deeper and always dark blue water. The valley is wide like the Ohio; the bottom lands lying higher above the water and the country rising in successive benches till the horizon is bounded by rounded mountains eight or ten miles away. Mountains green with fir, golden yellow with the aspen and the birch, and red and scarlet with the lutestring herb and lichens of the higher slopes. A magnificent panorama, an immense and unknown land, not yet taken possession of by man! The soil of many of these bottoms is rich, and will yield wonderful crops when tilled. Some distant day, towns and villages will be here. We have seen many loons upon the river, and probably twenty or thirty golden eagles soaring high in mighty circles—more than I have seen in a single day before. We caught sight of a black fox in the twilight last evening, and surprised a red fox hunting mussel shells upon a river bar to-day.

A YUKON SUNSET.

THE UPPER YUKON.

A YUKON COAL MINE.

FIVE FINGERS RAPIDS ON THE YUKON.

We have passed several steamers coming up the river and stopped twice to take on firewood and a few times to put off mail at the stations of the Northwest Mounted Police. About four o’clock P. M. we safely passed through the dangerous rocky pass of the Five Fingers, where five basalt rocks of gigantic size tower 100 feet into the air and block the passage of the foaming waters. Just where we passed, the cliffs seemed almost to touch our gunwales, so near are they together. The banks are high slopes of sand and gravel, now and then striped by a white band of volcanic dust. The trees are small and stunted, but growing thickly together, so as scarcely to let a man pass between. We have seen two puny coal banks where is mined a dirty bituminous coal, but worth $30.00 to $40.00 per ton in Dawson. Better than a mine of gold!

We have just now run through the difficult passage known as Hell’s Gates, where on one side a mass of cliff and on the other a shifting sand bar confine the waters to a swift and treacherous chute. So close to the rocks have we passed that one might have clasped hands with a man upon them, yet for a mile we never touched their jagged sides. Clever steering by our Norwegian pilot!

Now we are past the mouth of the great Pelly River, itself navigable for steamboats for some three hundred miles, as far as up to White Horse by the main stream, and are hove to at Fort Selkirk, an old Hudson Bay Company post. Here the mounted police maintain a considerable force. They are standing on the bank, many of them in their red coats, together with a group of the Pelly Indians, a tribe of famous fur hunters.

Passing safely through the treacherous Lewes Rapids above the mouth of the Pelly, we have swung out into the true Yukon, an immense river, wide as the Mississippi at St. Louis, many islands and sand bars. At high water the river must here be two miles across. The moon hangs round and white in the south, not much above the horizon, and we shall slowly steam ahead all night.

September 7, 1903.

We are making a quick trip. We passed the mouth of the Stewart River in the early dawn. Another great stream navigable for 200 miles. By the Pelly Valley or by the Stewart, and their feeding lakes, will some day enter the railroads from the valley of the Mackenzie, coming up from Edmonton and the southeast. There is supposed to be yet much undiscovered gold on both of these streams, and fine grass land and black soil fit for root crops.

COMING UP THE YUKON.

The Yukon, the mighty Yukon, is surely now become a gigantic river, its deep blue waters carrying a tide as great as the St. Lawrence. We are making a record trip, Ogilvie by 11 A. M., and Dawson, sixty miles below, in three more hours! So the captain cheerily avers—the fuller current and deeper tide of waters carrying us the more swiftly.

The mountains are lower, more rounded in outline, fir and golden aspen and now red-leaved birch forests covering them to their summits. The air is cold and keen. Ice at night, grey fogs at dawn, clear blue sky by the time the sun feebly warms at nine or ten o’clock.

We are reaching lands where the ground is frozen solid a few feet below the summer thaws, and the twilight still lingers till nine o’clock. They tell us the days are shortening, but it is hard to credit it, so long is yet the eventime.

I shall mail this letter at Dawson and send you yet another before we go down the river to the Behring Sea.

To-day I saw the first gulls, white and brown, some ducks on wing, many ravens and but few eagles. We are having a great trip, worth all the time and effort to get here—on the brink of the Arctic north, and in one of the yet but half-explored regions of the earth.

EIGHTH LETTER.
DAWSON AND THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE.

Dawson, Yukon Territory,
Thursday, September 10, 1903. }

We came in on Tuesday afternoon, the steamer “White Horse” having had an unusually good run. As we descended the river the stream grew larger, wider, with more water, and when we passed the White River the blue water there changed to a muddy white, discolored by the turgid, whitish tide of that stream. It must flow somewhere through beds of the white volcanic ash, that for so many miles marks the banks of the Yukon with its threadlike white line a foot or two below the surface soil.

As we passed the swift water of Klondike shoals and rounded in toward the landing, our own hoarse whistle was replied to by several steamers lying at the various wharfboats. We were ahead of time;—our arrival was an event.

The town lies well, upon a wide bottom, and now begins to climb the back hill to a secondary flat. It is laid off with wide streets, the chief of which are graveled and fairly kept. There are a few brick buildings, but most are of wood, here and there an old-time (six years old) log building appearing among the more modern ones built of sawed lumber—for logs are now too precious and too costly to squander.

THE “SARAH” ARRIVING AT DAWSON, 1,600 MILES UP FROM ST. MICHAELS.

THE LEVEE, DAWSON. OUR STEAMER.

The town has telephones and electric lights, which latter must pay finely when you realize that for nearly seven months darkness prevails over day. There are two morning daily, and one evening daily newspapers, with all Associated Press telegraphic news. I send you a copy of one of them. Two banks handle the gold, buying the miners’ “dust” and doing a thriving business.

There are half a dozen quite handsome churches, two hospitals, government buildings, the “Governor’s Palace,” and a number of residences that would do credit to any town. There are two large sawmills near the mouth of the Klondike River, which is crossed by two fine bridges, one iron and one wood. Of foundries and machine shops there are many. The stores and shops are many of them pretentious and filled with the most expensive high-class goods and wares—for, in the first place, the gold miner is lavish, extravagant, and will only have the very best, while it costs as much freight to bring in a cheap commodity as an expensive one. You can buy as handsome things here as in San Francisco or New York, if you don’t mind the price. The daily newspapers are sold by newsboys on the streets at 25 cents a copy. Fine steaks and roasts, mutton and veal, are thirty-five to sixty-five cents per pound. Chickens, $2.00 to $3.00 each. A glass of beer, twenty-five cents.

Some elegant drags and victorias, with fine horses, as well as many superb draft horses, are seen on the streets. It only pays to have the best horses; a scrub costs as much to bring in and to keep as a good one, and hay is $60.00 to $150.00 per ton, and oats are sold by the pound, sometimes $1.00 per pound. Cows’ milk is an expensive luxury at the restaurants, and various canned goods form the staple of life.

Many large steamboats ply on the Yukon, and those running down to St. Michael, 1,800 miles below, are of the finest Mississippi type, and are run by Mississippi captains and pilots. We shall go down on one of these, the “Sarah,” belonging to the “Northern Commercial Company,” one of the two great American trading companies. Also large towboats push huge freight barges up and down the river.

Several six-horse stage lines run many times a day to the various mining camps up and adjacent to the Klondike Valley, which is itself now settled and worked for one hundred and fifty miles from Dawson. Probably thirty to thirty-five thousand people are at work in these various diggings, and trade and spend in Dawson. Hence Dawson takes on metropolitan airs, and considers herself the new metropolis of the far north and Yukon Valley.

Two things strike the eye on first walking about the town. The multitude of big, long-haired, wolflike-looking dogs, loafing about, and the smallness of the neat dwelling-houses. The dogs play in the summer and work untiringly through the long seven months of winter—a “dog’s life” then means a volume. Small houses are easier to warm than big ones, when fuel is scarce and wood $16, $20 and $50 per cord, and soft spruce wood at that!

DAWSON CITY, THE YUKON—LOOKING DOWN.

DAWSON AND MOUTH OF KLONDIKE RIVER, LOOKING UP.

But Dawson has an air of prosperity about it. The men and women are well dressed, and have strong, keen faces. Many of them “mushed” across Chilkoot Pass in 1897, and have made their piles. And they are ready to stampede to any new gold field that may be discovered.

It is said that there are 6,000 people here, stayers, and then there is a fluctuating horde of comers and goers, tenderfeet many of them. This year eleven millions of dust has come into Dawson from the neighboring diggings, and since 1897, they say, near a hundred millions have been found! Many men and even women have made their millions and “gone out.” Others have spent as much, and are starting in anew, and the multitude all expect to have their piles within a year or two. A curious aggregation of people are here come together, and from all parts! There are very many whom you must not question as to their past. German officers driven from their Fatherland, busted English bloods, many of these in the Northwest Mounted Police, and titled ne’er-do-wells depending upon the quarterly remittances from London, and Americans who had rather not meet other fellow countrymen;—mortals who have failed to get on in other parts of this earth, and who have come to hide for awhile in these vast, solitary regions, strike it rich if possible and get another start. And many of them do this very thing, hit upon new fortunes, and sometimes, steadied by former adversity, lead new, honorable careers; but most of the black sheep, if luck is kindly to them, only plunge the deeper and more recklessly into vice and dissipation. The town is full of splendid bar-rooms and gilded gambling-hells. Two hundred thousand a night has been lost and won in some of them.

I drove past a large, fine-looking man, but possessed of a weak, dissipated mouth, on Eldorado Creek yesterday. His claim has been one of the fabulously rich, a million or more out of a patch of gravel 1,000 feet by 250, and he has now drunk and gambled most of it away, divorced a nice wife “in the States outside,” then married a notorious belle of nether Dawson, and will soon again be back to pick and pan and dogs. Another claim of like size on Bonanza Creek was pointed out to me where two brothers have taken out over a million and a quarter since 1897, and have been ruined by their luck. They have recklessly squandered every nugget of their sudden riches in drunkenness and with cards and wine and women to a degree that would put the ancient Californian days of ’49 in the shade. On the other hand, there are such men as Lippy, who have made their millions, saved and invested them wisely, and are regarded as veritable pillars in their communities. Lippy has just given the splendid Y. M. C. A. building to Seattle.

SECOND AVENUE, DAWSON.

DAWSON—VIEW DOWN THE YUKON.

THE CECIL—THE FIRST HOTEL IN DAWSON.

A PRIVATE CARRIAGE, DAWSON.

There is now much substantial wealth in Dawson and the Klondike. Most of the large operations are in the hands of Americans, especially of the American companies who have bought up the claims after the individual miner, who just worked it superficially and dug out the cream, has sold the skim milk. And even the major part of the original “stakers” seem to have been Americans. There are many good people in Dawson among these. Then, too, there is the body of Canadian officials who govern the territory of Yukon—political henchmen of Laurier and the Liberal party, many of them French Canadians. The governor himself and the chief of these officials live here, and their families form the inner circle of select society. Very anti-American they are said to be, and they do not mix much with the Americans who, of equal or superior social standing at home, here devote themselves to business and gold getting and let Canadian society and politics altogether alone. But while the alert American has been the first to stake, occupy and extract the wealth of the Klondike, and while by his energy and tireless perseverance he has made the Yukon Territory the greatest placer mining region of the world, yet this acquirement of vast wealth by Americans has not really been pleasing to the Canadians, nor to the government of Ottawa. So these governing gentlemen in Ottawa have put their heads together to discover how they, too, might profit, and especially profit, by the energy of the venturesome American. How themselves secure the chestnuts after he had, at peril of life and fortune, securely pulled the same out of the fire—in this case, frightful frost and ice! And they hit upon this plan: They resolved themselves into little groups, and the government then began granting extensive and exclusive blanket concessions to these groups. Just now a great row is on over some of these private concession grants. One man, Treadgold by name, turns up and discovers himself to be possessed of an exclusive blanket grant to all the water rights of the Klondike Valley and its affluent creeks, as well as the exclusive right to hold and work all gold-bearing land not already occupied, and also to hold and have every claim already staked, or worked, which for any reason may lapse to the crown either for non-payment of taxes or any other reason, thus shutting out the individual miner from ever staking a new claim within this region should he discover the gold, and from taking up any lapsed claim, and from re-titling his own claim, should he be careless and neglect to pay his annual taxes by the appointed day!

DOG CORRAL—THE FASTEST TEAM IN DAWSON.

A POTATO PATCH AT DAWSON.

Another man, named Boyle, also appears with a similar concession covering the famous Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks, where land is valued by the inch, and millions beyond count have in these few years been dug out. Such flagrant and audacious jobbery as the creation and granting of these blanket concessions in the quiet of Ottawa, presents to the world, has probably never before been witnessed, unless it be among the inner circle of the entourage of the Russian Czar. These steals have been so bold and unabashed that this entire mining region has risen as a unit in angry protest. While the miner has been prospecting, discovering, freezing, digging in these Arctic solitudes, the snug, smug politician of Ottawa has fixed up a job to swipe the whole find should the innocent, ignorant prospector happen to make one. So vigorous has been the protest against these daring abuses of a government clique, that this summer what is called a “Dominion Royal Commission”has been sent here to investigate the situation. The papers are full of the matter. The citizens have met in mass-meeting and unanimously joined in the protest against the concessions, calling for their revocation, and Judge—“Justice”—Britton, the head of the commission, is bitterly denounced as a partisan here simply on a whitewashing trip to exculpate Laurier and his friends. And the result of what has unquestionably been crooked jobbery at Ottawa is said to be that hundreds of prospectors and miners are moving out of the Yukon and into Alaska, where they say “there is fair play,”and a man may have what he finds. What I here tell you is the current talk in Dawson—quite unanimous talk—and I should like to have heard the other side, if there is one.

To-day H—— and I have been across the river to visit a characteristic establishment of these far northern lands—a summer “dog ranch”—a place where, during the summer months, the teams of “Huskies” and “Malamutes” may be boarded and cared for till the working-time of winter comes again. Here are some seventy-five dogs in large kennels of rough timber, each team of six dogs having its own private kennel, with a large central yard inside the tiers of pens, into which the whole pack are turned once a day for exercise. We hoped to find the proprietor at home and induce him to give his pets a scamper in the central yard, but he was away. The only visitors besides ourselves were two strange dogs which stood outside, running up and down the line and arousing the entire seventy-five to one great chorus of barks and howls. Some of the groups of dogs were superb. And two teams of Huskies—the true Esquimaux—must have been worth their weight in gold—six dogs—$1,000.00 at the very least. We tried to get some kodak shots, but a cloudy sky and pine log bars made the result doubtful.

FIRST AGRICULTURAL FAIR HELD AT DAWSON—SEPTEMBER, 1903.

We have just returned from an evening at the first annual show of the Dawson or Yukon “Horticultural Society.” The name itself is a surprise; the display of vegetables particularly and flowers astonished me. The biggest beets I have ever seen, the meaty substance all clear, solid, firm and juicy. Potatoes, Early Rose and other varieties, some new kinds raised from seed in three years—large, a pound or more in size. And such cabbage, cauliflower and lettuce as you never saw before! Many kinds, full-headed and able to compete with any produced anywhere. All these raised in the open air on the rich, black bottom and bench land of the Yukon. Squashes and also tomatoes, but these latter, some of them, not fully ripened. Also a display of fine strawberries just now ripe. We bought strawberries in the markets of Cristiania and Stockholm upon the 12th and 13th of September, last year, and now we find a superior ripe fruit here at just about the same degree of north latitude. The wild currants, blueberries and raspberries with which these northern latitudes abound are notorious. And the show of oats, rye, barley, wheat and timothy and native grasses, as well as of red and white clover, was notable, proving beyond a doubt that this Yukon region is capable of raising varied and nutritious crops necessary for man’s food and for the support of stock, horses and cattle. Already a good many thrifty mortals, instead of losing themselves in the hunt for gold, are quietly going into the raising of vegetables and hay and grain, and get fabulous prices for what grows spontaneously almost in a night. And the show of flowers grown in the open air would have delighted you. All of these products of the soil have been grown in sixty or seventy days from the planting of the seed, the almost perpetual sunlight of the summer season forcing plant life to most astonishing growth.

September 11th.

Day before yesterday I took the six-horse stage up Bonanza Creek of the Klondike and rode some thirteen miles over the fine government road to “Discovery” claim, where a Cleveland (O.) company is using a dredge and paying the Indian “Skookum Jim,” whose house we saw at Caribou, a royalty that this year will place $90,000.00 to his credit, I am told.

DAILY STAGE ON BONANZA.

DISCOVERY CLAIM ON BONANZA OF THE KLONDIKE.

The Klondike is a large stream, about like Elk River of West Virginia, rising two hundred miles eastward in the Rockies, where the summer’s melting snow gives it a large flow of water. The valley is broad—a mile or more. The hills are rolling and rounded, black soil, broad flats of small firs and birches. Bonanza Creek, on which Skookum Jim and “Dawson Charlie” and the white man, discovered the first gold in 1897, has proved the richest placer mining patch of ground the world has ever known. For a length of some twenty miles it is occupied by the several claim-holders, who are working both in the creek bed and also ancient river beds high up on the rolling hill slopes, a thing never known before. Here the claims are larger than at Atlin, being 1,000 feet wide and 250 feet up and down the creek. The claim where a discovery is made is called “Discovery Claim,” and the others are named “No. 1 above” and “No. 1 below,” “No. 2 above” and “No. 2 below,” etc., and so entered of record. I had seen the dredge being built on Gold Run at Atlin. I wished to see one working here. I found a young American named Elmer in charge, and he showed me everything. Then he insisted that I dine with him, and took me up to his snug cottage, where I was cordially greeted by his American wife, and taken to the mess tent, where a Japanese cook set a good dinner before us. Then Mrs. Elmer said that if I would like she would be delighted to drive me still further up Bonanza, and up the equally famous Eldorado Fork, and show me the more noted claims. Her horse was a good one, and for nearly three hours we spanked along. At “16 Eldorado below” I saw the yawning gravel pit from which $1,200,000 has already been taken out by the lucky owner. From “28 Eldorado above” I saw where the pay gravel yielded another enormous sum. And all along men were still digging, dumping, sluicing and getting gold. At “18 Bonanza above,” yet another particularly rich strike was shown me, and at “28 Bonanza above,” working in the mud and gravel, were men already enormously rich, who in 1897 owned nothing but their outfit. And up along the hillsides, too, near the tops, were other gashes in the gravel soil where gold in equally fabulous sums has been taken out and is still being got, for all these rich sands are yet far from being worked out or exhausted. The first mad rush is over. Men do not now merely pick out the big nuggets, but are putting in improved machinery and saving the finer dust. Along the roadside we also saw many men digging and “rocking” for gold, who have leased a few square yards or an acre or two on a royalty and who are said to be “working a lay.” After our drive, I caught the returning stage and came home in the long twilight.

To-day I have staged again twenty miles on to the famous Hunker Creek, and then been driven further and home again by Mr. Orr, the owner of the stage line, behind a team of swift bays, over another fine government highway. I have looked at more machinery, steam shovels, hoist and labor-saving apparatus, and seen more millions already made and in the making. The present and potential wealth of this country almost stupifies one, and dollars fall into the insignificance of dimes. The traffic on these fine roads is also surprising. Substantial log “road houses,” or inns, every mile or so, and frequently at even shorter intervals, very many foot-farers traveling from place to place. Young men with strong, resolute faces; bicycle riders trundling a pack strapped to their handle-bars, and many six and eight span teams of big mules and big horses hauling immense loads—sometimes two great broad-tired wagons chained together in a train. Ten or twelve four and six horse stages leave Dawson every day, and as many come in, carrying passengers and mails to and from the many mining camps. In my stage to-day behind me sat two Mormons, a man and a woman, who had never met before, from Utah, and a woman from South Africa, the wife of an expatriated Boer; a Swede who was getting rich and a French Canadian. My host at dinner was from Montreal, a black-eyed, bulldog-jawed “habitan,” whose heart warmed to me when I told him that my great grandmother, too, was French from Quebec, and who thereupon walked me out to the barn to see his eleven Malamute pups, and afterward insisted that I take a free drink at his bar. I took a kodak of him with “mes enfants,” and promised to send him a copy of the same.

LOOKING UP THE KLONDIKE RIVER.

THE AUTHOR AT WHITE HORSE RAPIDS.

“MES ENFANTS” MALAMUTE PUPS.

A KLONDIKE CABIN.

To-night I ventured out to try again the restaurant of our first adventure. Sitting at a little table, I was soon joined by three bright-looking men—one a “barrister,” one a mining engineer, one a reporter. Result (1), an interview; (2), a pass to the fair; (3), my dinner paid for, a 50-cent Havana cigar thrust upon me, and (4) myself carried off to the said fair by two of its directors, and again shown its fine display of fruits and grains and flowers and all its special attractions by the management itself. In fact, the Dawsonite can not do too much for the stranger sojourning in his midst.

Mercury 26 to 28 degrees every morning.

Before arriving in Dawson a big, rugged, government official had said to me, “Go to the hotel —— and give my love to Mrs. ——. She has a red head and a rich heart. She has cheered more stricken men than any woman in the Yukon. She mushed through with her husband with the first ‘sourdoughs’ over the ice passes in ’97. She was a streak of sunshine amidst the perils and heartaches of that terrible human treck. She runs the only hotel worth going to in Dawson. You will be lucky to get into it. Give her our love, the love of all of us. Tell her you’re our friends, and maybe she will take you in.” So we were curious about this woman who had dared so much, who had done so much, who was yet mistress of the hearts of the rough, strong men of the Yukon. We went to her hotel. We asked to see her. We were shown into a cosy, well-furnished parlor. We might just as well have been in a home in Kanawha or New York. We heard some orders given in a firm, low-pitched voice, a quick step, Mrs. —— was before us. An agreeable presence, dignity, reserve, force. Tall, very tall, but so well poised and proportioned you didn’t notice it. A head broad browed and finely set on neck and shoulders. Yes, the hair was red, Venetian red with a glimmer of sunshine in it. I delivered the message straight. She received it coolly. “The house was full, but she would have place for us before night. A party would leave on the 4 P. M. stage for Dominion Creek. We should have his room. Dinner would be served at seven.” The chamber was given us in due time. Plainly furnished, but comfortable. The hotel is an immense log house, chinked with moss and plaster, and paper lined, and all the partitions between the rooms are also paper. But we are learning to talk in low voices, and, between a little French and German and Danish, H. and I manage to keep our secrets to ourselves, although of the private affairs of all the other guests we shall soon be apprised.

The dining-room is large, the whole width of the house, in the center a huge furnace stove from which radiate many large, hot pipes, where in the long winter night-time is kept up a furious fire, and a cord of wood is burned each day—and wood at $25 to $50 per cord! The guests sit at many little tables. The linen is spotless. The china good English ware. The fare is delicious. The cook is paid $300 per month, the maids $125, with board thrown in. Delicate bacon from Chicago. Fresh eggs from Iowa. Chickens from Oregon—no live chickens in Dawson. The first mushers brought in a few, but the hawks and owls, the foxes and minks and other varments devoured many of them, and the surviving ones, after waiting around a week or two for the sun to set, went cackling crazy for lack of sleep, and died of shattered nerves. Caribou steak and tenderloin of moose we have at every meal. And to-day wild duck and currant jelly. The ducks abound along the river, the currants grow wild all over the mountain slopes. And such celery and lettuce and radishes and cabbage! Potatoes, big and mealy, and turnips, and carrots, delicate and crisp, all grown in the local gardens round about. Cabbage here sells at a dollar a head and lettuce at almost as much. But you never ate the like. White and hard as celery, so quickly do they grow in the nightless days! Nowhere in all the world can you live so well as in Dawson, live if only you have the “stuff.” Live if you can pay. We follow the habit of the land and pay up in full after each meal. It is dangerous to trust the stranger for his board. It is well for us we hold fast to this custom, else we might not be able to leave the town—a regulation of the government of the city—no man may leave with bills unpaid. So long as he owes even a single dollar, he must remain! And the N. W. M. P. watch the boats, the river and the mountain passes and enforce this law.

Our hostess takes good care of her guests. Very many young men working for the larger commercial companies board here, all, who are allowed, come for transient meals. And those who are homesick and down in spirit come just for the sake of neighborship to the tall, well-gowned woman whose invariable tact and sympathy, and often motherly tenderness, has given new heart to many a lonely “chechaqua” (tenderfoot), so far away from home!

In this dining-room, too, one sees a type not so often now met in our own great country, but inherent to English methods. The permanent Chief Clerk. The man whose career is to be forever a book-keeper or a clerk, whose highest ambition is to be a book-keeper or a clerk just all his life, and who will be trusted with the highest subordinate positions, but will never be made a partner, however much he may merit it. London is filled with such. The offices of the great British Commercial companies are full of such the world round. Men who know their business and attend to it faithfully, and whose lives are a round of precise routine. Such men sit at tables all about us. In London every morning the Times or Daily Telegraph is laid at their plates. Here the Yukon Sun or Dawson Times is laid before them just the same, and they gravely read the news of the world, while they sip their tea and munch their cold toast, just as though they were “at home.” And they walk in and out with the same stoop-shouldered shuffle gait one sees along the Strand or Bishopsgate Street within, or Mansionhouse Square.

Our hostess greets each guest as he enters, and walks about among them and says a cheery word to every one. One, on her left, has just now been reading to her from a letter which tells of his mother in England, and, I surmise, hints of a waiting sweetheart; and another, an Australian, who is just going away on a prospecting trip far up the Stuart River, is telling her what to write home for him in case he shall never come back.

The two other chief objects of interest in this dining-room, besides Mrs. ——, are—her small boy of six, who is being greatly praised this morning by all the company—he has just licked the big boy across the street, who for a week or two has tried to bully him, on account of which feat his mother is immensely proud—and a wonderful grey and white cat that sits up and begs just like a prairie dog or a gopher. When a kitten, pussy must have gone out and played with some of the millions of gophers that inhabit every hillside, and learned from them how to properly sit up. She visits each guest every morning and sits up and folds her paws across her breast and mews so plaintively that no hand can forbear giving her a tidbit.

“We were among the first. We came up from San Francisco in a waterlogged schooner through the wash of ice and winter gales to Dyea, and then mushed over Chilkoot Pass on snowshoes with the dogs. I shouldered my pack like the men. And John—John would have backed out or died of weariness, if I hadn’t told him that if he quit, I should come on in just all the same. Yes! I carried my gun—I didn’t have to use it but once or twice. Yes! We’ve done very well in Dawson, very well in the Klondike, very well!” And a big diamond glinted as though to reenforce the remark. She spoke rapidly, though easily, in crisp, curt sentences, and you felt she had indeed “mushed” in, that frightful winter, over those perilous snow and ice passes, just sure enough! As I looked into her wide-open, brown eyes, I felt that I beheld there that spirit which I have everywhere noted in the keen faces of the men and women of the Yukon, the yet living spirit of the great West, of the West of half a century ago; of Virginia and New England two hundred years ago; the spirit which drove Drake and Frobisher and Captain Cook and their daring mariners out from the little islands of our motherland to possess and dominate the earth’s mysterious and unchartered seas; the spirit which still makes the name American stand for energy and power and accomplishment in all the world; the spirit, shall I say, which gives the future of the earth to the yet virile Anglo-Saxon race.

NINTH LETTER.
MEN OF THE KLONDIKE.

Yukon Territory, Canada, September 18, 1903.

We lingered in Dawson a week waiting for the steamers “Sarah” or “Louise” or “Cudahy” to come up from the lower river, and though always “coming,” they never came. Meantime the days had begun to visibly shorten, the frosts left thicker rime on roof and road each morning. “Three weeks till the freeze-up,” men said, and we concluded that so late was now the season that we had best not chance a winter on a sand-bar in the wide and shallow lower Yukon, and a nasty time with fogs and floe ice in Behring Sea. So on Wednesday, the 16th, we again took the fine steamer “White Horse,” and are now two days up the river on our way. We will reach White Horse Sunday morning, stay there till Monday morning, when we will take the little railway to Skagway, then the ocean coaster to Seattle and the land of dimes and nickels. We regret not having been able to go down to St. Michael and Nome, and to see the whole great Yukon. My heart was quite set on it, and the expense was about the same as the route we now take, but to do so we should have had to take too great risks at this late season.

While lingering in Dawson we were able to see more of the interests of the community. One day we called on a quite notable figure, a, or rather the, Dr. Grant of St. Andrews Hospital, M. D., and of St. Andrews great church, D. D.! A Canadian Scotchman of, say, thirty-five years, who, although a man of independent fortune, chose the wild life of the border just from the very joy of buffet and conquest. He “mushed” it in 1897 over the Chilkoot Pass. He built little churches and hospitals all in one, and became the helper of thousands whom the perils and stresses of the great trek quite overcame. So now he is a power in Dawson. A large and perfectly equipped hospital, his creation, has been endowed by the government; a fine, modern church holding six hundred; a pretty manse and big mission school buildings of logs. All these standing in a green turfed enclosure of two or three acres. The church cost $60,000. He preaches Sundays to a packed house. He is chief surgeon of the hospital during the rest of the time. He gives away his salary, and the men of these mining camps, who know a real man when they see him, can’t respond too liberally to the call of the preacher-surgeon who generally saves their bodies and sometimes their souls. I found him a most interesting man—a naturalist, a scientific man, a man of the world and who independently expounds a Presbyterian cult rather of the Lyman Abbott type. He showed us all through the hospitals; many surgical accident cases; very few fevers or sickness. The church, too, we inspected; all fittings within modern and up to date; a fine organ, the freight on which alone was $5,000, 40 per cent. of its cost; a furnace that warmed the building even at 80 below zero, and a congregation of 400 to 500 people, better dressed (the night we attended) than would be a similar number in New York. There are no old clothes among the well-to-do; gold buys the latest styles and disdains the cost. There are few old clothes among the poor, for the poor are very few. So as I looked upon the congregation before Dr. Grant, I might as well have been in New York but for a pew full of red coats of “N. W. M. P.” (North West Mounted Police).

The succeeding day Dr. Grant called upon us, and escorted us through the military establishment that polices and also governs the Yukon territory as well as the whole Canadian Northwest. Barracks for 250 men, storerooms, armory, horse barn, dog kennel—150 dogs—jail, mad-house and courtrooms. The executive and judicial departments all under one hand and even the civil rule as well. Everywhere evidence of the cold and protection against it. A whole room full of splendid fur coats, parquets, with great fur hoods. Such garments as even an Esquimaux would rejoice in.

Later, we attended the fine public school, where are over 250 children in attendance; all equipment the latest and up to date; kindergarten department and grades to the top, the teachers carefully picked from eastern Canada. The positions are much sought for by reason of unusually high salaries paid. The new principal had just come from Toronto. He told us that these were the brightest, most alert children he had ever taught. Keen faces, good chins, inheriting the aggressive initiative of the parents who had dared to come so far. In the kindergarten a little colored boy sat among his white mates. In Canada, like Mexico, there is no color line.

It now takes us four days to creep up the river against the strong current and through the many shallows to White Horse. On the boat there are all sorts. I have met a number of quaint figures. One a French Canadian trapper, on his way to a winter camp on McMillan Creek of the Pelly River. He will have three or more cabins along a route where he will set his traps. About two hundred he keeps a-going, and sees as many of them as he can each day. Mink and marten and otter and beaver, as well as wolves and foxes, lynx and bears. For meat he prefers caribou to moose. For many years he trapped for the “H. B. C.” (Hudson Bay Company) over east of the Rockies. But they paid him almost nothing and there were no other buyers. Now he sells to Dawson merchants and gets $6.00 for a marten skin “all through”—the whole lot. The fur merchant in Victoria asked $30.00 for just such, and said we might buy them as low as $10.00 in the Yukon country, so he had heard. Another man to-day has sat on the wood-pile with me and told me of the great North—a man with a well-shaped face, who used language of the educated sort, yet dressed in the roughest canvas, and who is raising hay here along the Yukon which he “sells at three cents a pound in Dawson, or one cent a pound in the stack,” wild, native hay at that. And he had “mushed” and “voyaged” all through the far north. He had set out from Edmonton, he and his “pardner,” and driven to “Athabasca landing” in their farm wagon, three or four hundred miles over the “Government road;” had passed through the beautiful, wide, gently sloping valley of the Peace River, and through the well-timbered regions north of the Peace. At Athabasca landing they had sold the wagon and built a stout flatboat, and in this had floated down some three hundred miles to Athabasca Lake, Indian pilots having taken them through the more dangerous rapids. The Athabasca River enters the lake among swamps and low, willowy spits of land, where grows wild hay and ducks abound, and the “Great Slave” River flows out of it into the body of water of that name. These two rivers enter and depart near together, and the voyager escapes the dangers of a journey on the great and shallow Athabasca, where the surf is most dangerous. Three or four hundred miles of a yet greater river, with many rapids through which you are guided by Indian pilots, who live near the dangerous waters, carry you into the Great Slave Lake, the largest body of fresh water in Canada. Steamboats of the Hudson Bay Company run upon it and ply upon the inflowing rivers, and even go up and down the McKenzie to Herschell Island at its mouth, and where the “N. W. M. P.” have a post, chiefly to protect the natives from the whalers who gather there to trade and smuggle in dutiable goods. The McKenzie is greater than the Yukon, is wider and much deeper and carries a much greater volume of water. Great Slave Lake, while shallow and flat toward the eastern end, is deep and bounded by great cliffs and rocks on the west. Storms rage upon it, and at all times the voyagers count it dangerous water. Both it and Athabasca are full of fish, so, too, the adjacent rivers and the McKenzie. Floating down the McKenzie, passing the mouth of the Nelson River, they came at last to the Liard, and up this they canoed to within half a mile of the waters of the Pelly, down which they floated to the Yukon. The French trapper had also “come in” by this route. “Two seasons it takes,” he said, “an easy trip,” and you can winter quite comfortably in the mountains. East of the mountains there is much big game, “plenta big game;” musk ox are there, and moose and caribou. But the Indians and wolves kill too many of them. The Indians catch the caribou on the ice and kill them for their tongues. “Smoked caribou tongue mighta nice.” They leave the carcasses where they fall, and then come the foxes for the feast. “Thousands of fox, red fox, silver fox, black fox, white fox. Mr. Fox he eat caribou, he forget Indian—Indian set the trap and fox he caught. The wolf, too, he creep up upon the caribou, even upon the moose when he alone, when he lying down; the wolf he bites the hamstring. He kill many moose. That a grand country for to trap, but the Hudson Bay Company it pay nothing for the fur. A sack of flour I see them give one Indian for a black fox. Now since Hudson Bay lose his exclusive right, no man trade with him or sell him fur except he must for food.”

ON THE YUKON.

FLOATING DOWN THE YUKON.

We have just passed a little log cabin beneath great firs and amidst a cluster of golden aspen. Its door and solitary window are wide open. No one occupies it, or ever will. Wild things may live in it, but not man. Near the cabin, where the Yukon makes a great sweeping bend, and the swift water purls round into bubbling eddies, a narrow trail cut from the river bank leads up among the trees. The dweller in the cabin could see far up the great river; he could espy the raft or skiff or barge descending and mark its occupants; then he used to take his trusty rifle, step across to the opening in the trees at the point, and pick off his victims. Sometimes their bodies fell into the deep, cold, swift-running waters. The wolves and foxes picked their bones on the bars below. Sometimes he captured the body as well as the outfit, and sunk and buried them at leisure. The pictures of the three last men he murdered hang in the office of the chief of the Northwest Mounted Police, at Dawson, beside his own. It took three years to gather the complete chain of circumstantial evidence, but at last they hanged him, two years ago. In the beginning there were many other crimes quite as atrocious committed in this vast region of the unknown north, but soon the efficiency and systematic vigilance of the Northwest Mounted Police broke up forever the bandits and thugs who had crowded in here from all the earth, and Uncle Sam’s dominion in particular. Many were hanged, many sent up for long terms, many run out. Life sentences were common for robbery. To-day the Yukon country is more free from crime than West Virginia, and Dawson more orderly than Charleston.

TENTH LETTER.
DOG LORE OF THE NORTH.

White Horse, Sunday, September 20, 1903.

We arrived about nine o’clock this morning. The voyage up the Yukon from Dawson has taken us since Wednesday at 2:30, when we cast off and stemmed the swift waters—twenty-four hours longer than going down. During the week of our stay at Dawson the days grew perceptibly shorter and the nights colder. There is no autumn in this land. Two weeks ago the foliage had just begun to turn; a week ago the aspens and birches were showing a golden yellow, but the willows and alders were yet green. Now every leaf is saffron and golden—gamboge—and red. In a week or more they will have mostly fallen. As yet the waters of the Yukon and affluent rivers show no ice. In three weeks they are expected to be frozen stiff, and so remain until the ice goes out next June. The seasons of this land are said to be “Winter and June, July and August.” To me it seems inconceivable that the Arctic frosts should descend so precipitately. But on every hand there is evident preparation for the cold, the profound cold. Double windows and doors are being fastened on. Immense piles of sawed and cut firewood are being stored close at hand. Sleighs and especially sledges are being painted and put in order; the dogs which have run wild, and mostly foraged for themselves during the summer, are being discovered, captured and led off by strings and straps and wires about their necks. Men are buying new dogs, and the holiday of dogkind is evidently close at an end. Women are already wearing some of their furs. Ice half to a full inch forms every night, and yesterday we passed through our first snow storm, and all the mountains round about, and even the higher hills, are to-day glistening in mantles of new, fresh, soft-looking snow. The steamers of the White Pass and Yukon Railway Company will be laid up in three weeks now, they tell us, and already the sleighs and teams for the overland stage route are being gathered, the stage houses at twenty-four-mile intervals being set in order, and the “Government road” being prepared afresh for the transmission of mails and passengers.

APPROACHING SEATTLE.

WITH AND WITHOUT.

We have just seen some of the magnificent Labrador dogs, with their keeper, passing along the street, owned by the Government post here—immense animals, as big as big calves, heifers, yearlings, I might say. They take the mails to outlying posts and even to Dawson when too cold for the horses—horses are not driven when the thermometer is more than 40 degrees below!

As I sat in the forward cabin the other night watching the motley crowd we were taking “out,” two bright young fellows, who turned out to be “Government dog-drivers” going to the post here to report for winter duty, fell into animated discussion of their business, and told me much dog lore. The big, well-furred, long-legged “Labrador Huskies” are the most powerful as well as fiercest. A load of 150 pounds per dog is the usual burden, and seven to nine dogs attached each by a separate trace—the Labrador harness is used with them, so the dogs spread out fan-shaped from the sledge and do not interfere with each other. The great care of the driver is to maintain discipline, keep the dogs from shirking, from tangling up, and from attacking himself or each other. He carries a club and a seal-hide whip, and uses each unmercifully. If they think you afraid, the dogs will attack you instantly, and would easily kill you. And they incessantly attack each other, and the whole pack will always pounce on the under dog so as to surely be in at a killing, just for the fun of it, ripping up the unfortunate and lapping his blood eagerly, though they rarely eat him. And as these dogs are worth anywhere from $100 up, the driver has much ado to prevent the self-destruction of his team. And to club them till you stun them is the only way to stop their quarrels. Then, too, the dogs are clever and delight to spill the driver and gallop away from him, when he can rarely catch them until they draw up at the next post house, and it may be ten or twelve or thirty miles to that, unless it be that they get tangled among the trees or brush, when the driver will find them fast asleep, curled up in the snow, where each burrows out a cozy bed. The Malamutes, or native Indian dog, usually half wolf, are driven and harnessed differently—all in a line—and one before the other. They are shorter haired, faster, and infinitely meaner than the long-haired Huskie (of which sort the Labrador dogs are). Their delight is to get into a fight and become tangled, and the only way out is to club them into insensibility, and cut the leather harness, or they will cut the seal-hide thongs themselves at a single bite if they are quite sure your long plaited whip will not crack them before they can do it. These Malamutes are the usual dogs driven in this country, for few there are to afford or know how to handle the more powerful Labrador Huskie. And the Malamute is the king of all thieves. He will pull the leather boots off your feet while you sleep and eat them for a midnight supper; he delights to eat up his seal-hide harness; he has learned to open a wooden box and will devour canned food, opening any tin can made, with his sharp fangs, quicker than a steel can-opener. Canned tomatoes, fruit, vegetables, sardines, anything that man may put in, he will deftly take out. Even the tarpaulins and leather coverings of the goods he may be pulling, he will rip to pieces, and he will devour the load unless watched with incessant vigilance night and day. Yet, with all their wolfish greed and manners, these dogs perform astonishing feats of endurance, and never in all their lives receive a kindly word. “If you treat them kindly, they think you are afraid, and will at once attack you,” the driver said; “the only way to govern them is through fear.” Once a day only are they fed on raw fish, and while the Malamute prefers to pilfer and steal around the camp, the Huskie will go and fish for himself when off duty, if given the chance. Just like the bears and lynx of the salmon-running streams, he will stand along the shore and seize the fish that is shoved too far upon the shallows. Seventy miles a day is the rule with the Indians and their dog teams, and the white man does almost as much. Forty miles is it from here to Caribou Crossing, and the Northwest Mounted Police, with their Labrador teams, take the mails when the trains are snowbound and cover the distance in four to five hours. Great going this must be!

And then the conversation turned to the great cold of this far north land, when during the long nights the sun only shows for an hour or two above the horizon.

When the thermometer falls below fifty degrees (Fahr.), then are the horses put away, what few there may be, and the dogs transport the freight and mails along the Government road between White Horse and Dawson, as well as from Dawson to the mining camps to which the stage lines usually run. Indeed, throughout all of this north land, with the coming of the snow, the dogs are harnessed to the sledges and become the constant traveling companions of man.

MALAMUTE TEAM OF GOVERNMENT MAIL-CARRIER—DAWSON.

BREAKING OF THE YUKON—MAY 17, 1903.

SUN DOGS.

WINTER LANDSCAPE.

The air is dry in all this great interior basin of the continent, and, consequently, the great cold is not so keenly felt as in the damper airs nearer to the sea. The dogs can travel in all weathers which man can stand, and even when it becomes so cold that men dare not move. The lowest Government record of the thermometer yet obtained at Dawson City is eighty-three degrees below zero. These great falls of temperature only occasionally occur, but when the thermometer comes down to minus sixty degrees, then men stay fast indoors, and only venture out as the necessity demands; then the usually clear atmosphere becomes filled with a misty fog, often so thick that it is difficult to see a hundred yards away.

When traveling with a dog team, or, indeed, when “mushing” upon snow-shoes across streams and forests, men go rather lightly clad, discarding furs, and ordinarily wearing only thick clothes, with the long canvas parquet as protection against the wind rather than against the temperature; then motion becomes a necessity, and to tarry means to freeze. The danger of the traveler going by himself is that the frost may affect his eyesight, freezing the eyelids together, perhaps dazing his sight, unless snow-glasses are worn. And the ice forms in the nostrils so rapidly, as well as about the mouth, and upon the mustache and beard, that it is a constant effort to keep the face free from accumulating ice. In small parties, however, men travel long distances, watching each other as well as themselves to insure escape from the ravages of the frost. When the journey is long and the toil has become severe, the Arctic drowsiness is another of the enemies which must be prevented from overcoming the traveler, and the methods are often cruel which friends must exercise in order to prevent their companions from falling asleep.

During this long period of Arctic winter and Arctic night, there seems to be no great cessation in the struggle for gold; the diggings in the Klondike and remoter regions retain their companies of men toiling to find the gold. The frozen gravels are blasted out and piled up to be thawed the next summer by the heat of the sun and washed with the flowing waters.

While the Arctic night prevails for twenty-two or twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, yet so brilliant are the stars and so refulgent are the heavens with the lightening of the aurora borealis, that men work and travel and carry on the usual occupations, little hindered by the absence of the sun. Sometimes, in the very coldest days, is beheld the curious phenomenon of several suns appearing above the horizon, and these are called the “sun dogs,” the sun itself being seemingly surrounded by lesser ones. I was fortunate enough to obtain a fine photograph taken on one of these days, which I am able to send you.

The freezing of the Yukon comes on very suddenly, the great river often becoming solid in a night. The curious thing of these northern lakes and rivers is, that the ice forms first upon the bottom, and, rising, fills the water with floating masses and ice particles, which then become congealed almost immediately.

Early in last October our steamer “White Horse,” on which we are now traveling, became permanently frozen in when within one hundred miles of Dawson City, the apparently clear river freezing so quickly that the boat became fast for the winter, and the passengers were compelled to “mush” their way, as best they might, across the yet snowless country, a terrible and trying experience in the gathering cold.

You may be in a row-boat or a canoe upon ice-free waters, and, as you paddle, you may notice bubbles and particles of ice coming to the surface. Great, then, is the danger. The bottom has begun to freeze. You may be frozen in before you reach the shore in ice yet too thin to walk upon or permit escape.

For the greater part of the winter season the frozen streams become the natural highways of the traveler, and the dog teams usually prefer the snow-covered ice rather than attempt to go over the rougher surface of the land.

Another curious thing, friends tell me, affects them in this winter night-time, and that is the disposition of men to hibernate. Fifteen and sixteen hours of sleep are commonly required, while in the nightless summer-time three and four and five hours satisfy all the demands nature seems to make—thus the long sleeps of winter compensate for the lack of rest taken during the summer-time.

And yet these hardy men of the north tell me that they enjoy the winter, and that they perform their toils with deliberation and ease, and take full advantage of the long sleeping periods.

The Yukon freezes up about the 10th of October, the snow shortly follows, and there is no melting of the ice until early June. This year the ice went out from the river at Dawson upon June 10th; thus, there are seven to eight months of snow and ice-bound winter in this Arctic land.

ELEVENTH LETTER.
HOW THE GOVERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD.

Steamer Dolphin, September 22, 1903.

We left White Horse by the little narrow-gauge railway, White Pass & Yukon Railway, at 9:30—two passenger cars, one smoker, mail and express and baggage hung on behind a dozen freight cars. Our steamer brought up about one hundred passengers from Dawson and down-river points, and together with what got on board at White Horse, the train was packed. Many red-coated Northwest Mounted Police also boarded the train, and just as it pulled out, a strapping big, strong-chinned, muscular woman came in the rear door and sat down. She was elegantly gowned, dark, heavy serge, white shirt waist, embroidered cloth jacket, and much gold jewelry, high plumed hat. Presently a big man called out that all the men must go forward into the next car, and the big woman announced that she would proceed to examine all the ladies for gold dust. The paternal government of the Yukon Territory exacts a tax of 2½ per cent. of all gold found, and examines all persons going out of the territory, and confiscates all dust found on the person. Women are said to be the most inveterate smugglers, and the big woman goes through them most unmercifully. She bade the lady next her to stand up and then proceeded to feel her from stockings to chemise top, and did the same by the others. Those who wore corsets had a tough time, and some had to undo their hair. As the first victim stood up and was unbuttoned and felt over, she was greeted with an audible smile by the other ladies, but silence fell as the next victim was taken in hand. Meanwhile, during this pleasant diversion, a big red-coat stood with his back to each door, and the men were being similarly though not so ruthlessly gone through in the other cars. This trip no dust was found, I believe, but last week one woman was relieved of $1,800 sewed into the margin of her skirts and tucked deep into the recesses of her bosom. Stockings and bosom are the two chief feminine caches for gold, and when a culprit is thus discovered and relieved, many are the protestations and unavailing the clamors raised. During the past year I am told that the examiners have seized in these searches some $60,000 in dust, so I presume the happy custom will for some time continue. Detectives are kept in Dawson, travel on the boats, and so watch and scrutinize every traveler that by the time the final round-up and search takes place, the probable smugglers are all pretty well spotted. As each is examined, his or her name is checked off in a little book.

We were close to Caribou Crossing when the ceremony was over, and I with others of my sex was permitted to re-enter the rear car and rejoin the company of the much beflustered ladies.

LAKE BENNETT.

THE HEIGHT OF LAND, WHITE PASS.

All along the advance of winter was apparent. The green of a fortnight ago had turned into the universal golden yellow, and the fresh snow lay in more extended covering upon all the mountain summits and even far down their slopes. So it is in this far north, each day the snow creeps down and down until it has caught and covered all the valleys as well as hills.

At Caribou we met old Bishop Bompas and his good little wife, who, with a big cane, came all the way into the car to see us and say good-by. A charming couple who have given their lives doing a noble work.

Lake Bennett was like a mirror, and Lake Lindemann above it, too, seemed all the greener in contrast to the encroaching snows. We were at the White Pass Summit by 3 P. M., and then for an hour came down the 3,200 feet of four per cent. grade, the twenty miles to Skagway. The increase of snows on all the mountains seemed to bring out more saliently than ever the sharp, jagged granite rock masses. It even seemed to us that we were traversing a wilder, bolder, harsher land than when three weeks ago we entered it. And the views and vistas down into the warmer valleys we were plunging into were at times magnificent. Snow around and above us, increasing greenness of foliage below us, and beyond recurring glimpses of the Lynn fiord, with Skagway nestling at its head. In every affluent valley a glacier and a roaring torrent.

One of the newest and best boats in the trade, “The Dolphin,” was awaiting us. Our stateroom was already wired for and secured. We took our last Alaska meal at the “Pack Train Restaurant,” where we snacked sumptuously on roast beef, baked potatoes and coffee for seventy cents (in Dawson it would have been an easy $3.00), and walked down the mile-long pier to the boat. The tides are some twenty feet here, and the sandy bars of Skagway require long piers to permit the ships to land when the tides are out.

We cast off about 10 P. M., with the tide almost at its height, and only awoke to-day just as we were steaming out of Juneau. Now we are approaching the beautiful and dangerous Wrangel Narrows, and see everywhere above us the fresh snows of the fortnight’s making.

WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS.

Wednesday, September 23rd.

It is the middle of the afternoon and we are just safely through the—to-day—tempestuous passage of “Dixon’s Entrance,” the thirty-three-mile break in the coast’s protecting chain of islands and the outlet for Port Simpson to the open sea. Yesterday we passed through the dangerous twenty miles of the Wrangel Narrows just before dark, and only the swift swirls of the fighting tides endangered us; they fall and rise seventeen feet in a few hours, and the waters entering the tortuous channels from each end meet in eddying struggle somewhere near the upper end. The boats try and pass through just before the flood tide or a little after it, or else tie up and wait for the high water. If we had been an hour later, we should have had to lie by for fifteen hours, the captain said. As we turned in from Frederick Sound, between two low-lying islands all densely wooded with impenetrable forests of fir, the waters were running out against us almost in fury, but in a mile or two they were flowing with us just as swiftly.

To-day we saw a good many ducks, chiefly mallard and teal, and small divers, and my first cormorant, black, long-necked and circling near us with much swifter flight than the gull. In the narrows we started a great blue heron and one or two smaller bitterns.

From the narrows we passed into Sumner Strait, and then turning to the right and avoiding Wrangel Bay and Fort Wrangel, where we stopped going up, passed into the great Clarence Strait that leads up direct from the sea. A sound or fiord one hundred miles or more long, ten or fifteen miles wide.

The day had been clear, but, before passing through the narrows, clouds had gathered, and a sort of fierce Scotch mist had blown our rain-coats wet. On coming out into wider waters, the storm had become a gale. The wildest night we have had since twelve months ago in the tempest of the year upon the Gulf of Finland. To-day, until now, the waters have been too boisterous to write. All down Clarence Strait, until we turned into Revilla and Gigedo Channels—named for and by the Spanish discoverers—and across the thirty-three miles of Dixon’s Entrance, we have shuttlecocked about at the mercy of the gale and in the teeth of the running sea. The guests at table have been few, but now we are snug behind Porcher Island and passing into the smooth waters of Greenville Channel, so I am able to write again. The Swedish captain says the storm is our equinoctial, and that may be, and now that the sun is out and the blue sky appearing, we shall soon forget the stress, although to-night, as we pass from Fitzhugh Sound into Queen Charlotte Sound, we shall have a taste of the Pacific swell again, and probably yet have some thick weather in the Gulf of Georgia. Considering the lateness of the season, we are, all in all, satisfied that we rightly gave up the St. Michaels trip, though it has sorely disappointed us not to have seen the entire two thousand miles of the mighty Yukon.

Already we notice the moderation of the temperature and the greater altitude of the sun, for we are quite one thousand miles south of Dawson, while the air has lost its quickening, exhilarating, tonic quality.

We are becoming right well acquainted with our sundry shipmates, particularly those who have “come out” from the Yukon with us. Among them we have found out another interesting man. Across the table from us on the steamer “White Horse” sat a shock-headed man of about thirty years, tall, very tall, but muscularly built, with a strong, square jaw and firm, blue eyes. A fellow to have his own way; a bad man in a mix-up. A flannel shirt, no collar, rough clothes. Possibly a gentleman, perhaps a boss tough. We find him a graduate of the University of Michigan. He has lived in Mexico, and now for five straight years has been “mushing it,” and prospecting in the far north; has tramped almost to the Arctic Sea, into the water-shed of the Mackenzie, and bossed fifty to one hundred men at the Klondike and Dominion diggings. His camera has always been his companion, and for an hour yesterday he sat in our cabin and read to us from the MSS. some of the verse and poems with which his valise is stacked. Some of the things are charming and some will bring the tears. This far north land of gold and frost has as yet sent out no poet to depict its hopes, its perils, its wrecks. It may be that he is the man. His name is Luther F. Campbell, and you may watch for the name. And so we meet all sorts.

Friday, September 25th.

Yesterday was a “nasty” day, as was the day before. Early, 2 or 3 A. M., we passed through the ugly waters of Millbank Sound, where the sweeping surge of the foam-capped Pacific smashes full force against the rock-bound coast. We were tossed about greatly in our little 400-ton boat, until at last, passing a projecting headland, we were instantly in dead quiet water and behind islands once more. About 10 A. M. we came again into the angry Pacific, and for fifty miles—four hours—were tossed upon the heavy sea, Queen Charlotte Sound. The equinoctial gales have had a wild time on the Pacific, and the gigantic swell of that ocean buffeted our little boat about like a toy. But she is a fine “sea boat,” and sat trim as a duck, rolling but little, nor taking much water. Toward middle afternoon we were in quiet waters again, and by nightfall at the dangerous Seymour Narrows, where Vancouver Island leans up against the continent, or has cracked off from it, and a very narrow channel separates the two. Here the tides—twelve feet—rise, rush and eddy, meet and whirl, and only at flood stage do boats try to pass through.

In 1875, a U. S. man-of-war tried to pass through when the tides were low, and, caught in the swirling maelstrom, sank in one hundred fathoms of water. In 1883, a coastwise steamer ventured at improper moment to make the passage, was caught in the mad currents, and was engulfed with nearly all on board; half a dozen men alone were saved. Hence the captains are now very careful in making the passage, and so we lay at anchor—or lay to—from seven to twelve, midnight, waiting for the tide.

To-day we are spinning down the Gulf of Georgia and Puget Sound, the wind direct astern, and have already left Vancouver and Victoria to the north. The sun is clear and soft, not hard and brilliant as in Dawson. Whales are blowing at play about the ship, gulls skimming the air in multitudes. All our company are over their seasickness and now mostly on deck. We are repacking our bags and the steamer trunk, taking off heavy winter flannels and outer wear, and preparing to land at Seattle clad again in semi-summer clothes.

TWELFTH LETTER.
SEATTLE, THE FUTURE MISTRESS OF THE TRADE AND COMMERCE OF THE NORTH.

The Portland Hotel,
Portland, Oregon, October 3, 1903. }

Just one week ago to-day the steamer “Dolphin” landed us safely at the pier at Seattle. The sail on Puget Sound, a body of deep water open for one hundred miles to the ocean, was delightful. We passed many vessels, one a great four-masted barque nearing its port after six or eight months’ voyage round the Horn from Liverpool.

Seattle lies upon a semi-circle of steep hills, curving round the deep waters of the Sound like a new moon. An ideal site for a city and for a mighty seaport, which some day it will be. Many big ships by the extensive piers and warehouses. The largest ships may come right alongside the wharves, even those drawing forty feet. The tracks of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railways bring the cars along the ship’s side, and there load and unload. All this we noted as our boat warped in to her berth. A great crowd awaited us. Many of our passengers were coming home from the far north after two and three years’ absence. Friends and families were there to greet them; hotel runners and boarding-house hawkers; citizens, too, of the half world who live by pillage of their fellowmen were there, and police and plain clothes men of the detective service were there, all alike ready to greet the returning Klondiker with his greater or lesser poke of gold. It was exciting to look down upon them and watch their own excitement and emotion as they espied the home-comers upon the decks. We, as well, had all sorts of people among our passengers. Mostly the fortunate gold-finders who had made enough from the diggings to “come out” for the winter, and some, even to stay “out” for good. A young couple stood near me; they were on their wedding trip; they would spend the winter in balmy Los Angeles and then return to the far north in the spring. An old man stood leaning on the rail. Deep lines marked his face, on which was yet stamped contentment. He had been “in” to see his son who had struck it rich on Dominion Creek, who had already put “a hundred thousand in the bank,” he said. He had with him a magnificent great, black Malamute, “leader of my boy’s team and who once saved him from death. The dog cost us a hundred dollars. I am taking him to Victoria. I couldn’t let him go. His life shall be easy now,” the old man added. Just then I noted a tall man in quiet gray down on the dock looking intently at two men who stood by one another a little to my left. They seemed to feel his glance, spoke together and moved uneasily away. They were a pair of “bad eggs” who had been warned out of the Yukon by the Mounted Police, and who were evidently expected in Seattle. One, who wore a green vest and nugget chain, played the gentleman. The other, who worked with him, did the heavy work and had an ugly record. He was roughly dressed and wore a blue flannel shirt and a cap. A bull neck, face covered with dense-growing, close-cropped red beard, shifty gray eyes. He had been suspected of several murders and many hold-ups. Detectives frequently travel on these boats, keeping watch upon the “bad men” who are sent out of the north. We probably had a few on board. In the captain’s cabin, close to our own, were piled up more than half a million dollars in gold bars; the passengers, most of them, carried dust. But the pair, and any pals they may have had along, had kept very quiet. They were spotted at the start. They knew it. Now they were spotted again, and this, too, they discerned.

Seattle is the first homing port for all that army of thugs and scalawags who seek a new land like the far north, and who, when there discovered, are summarily hurried back again. It is said to be the “nearest hell” of any city on the coast. The hungry horde of vampire parasites would make a fat living from the pillage of the returned goldseeker if it were not for the vigilance of the police. A strong effort is now being made by the authorities of Seattle to stamp out this criminal class and drive it from the city.

Our impression, as we crowded our way through the pressing throngs upon the pier and pushed on up into the city, was that we were in another Chicago. Tall buildings, wide streets, fine shops, great motion of the crowds upon the streets, many electric tram-cars running at brief intervals, and all crowded.

On our trip up the Yukon we had made the pleasant acquaintance of a Mr. S—— and a Mr. M—— of Columbus, O. Keen and agreeable men who had been spending a month in Dawson puncturing a gold swindle into which an effort had been made to lead them and their friends by unscrupulous alleged bonanza kings. They had cleverly nipped the attempt in the bud, and were now returning, well satisfied with their achievements. We had become fast comrades and resolved to keep together yet another few days. We found our way to the Grand Rainier Hotel, one of Seattle’s best, and now kept by the old host of the Gibson House in Cincinnati.

Our favorable impressions of Seattle were confirmed that night when our friends introduced us to the chief glory of Puget Sound, the monstrous and delicious crab, a crab as big as a dinner plate and more delicate than the most luscious lobster you ever ate. They boil him, cool him, crack him and serve him with mayonnaise dressing. You eat him, and continue to eat him as long as Providence gives you power, and when you have cracked the last shell and sucked the last claw, and finally desist, you contentedly comprehend that your palate has reflected to your brain all the gustatory sensations of a Delmonico banquet, with a Sousa band concert thrown in.

Saturday, after we had spent the morning in seeing the shops and wandering along the fine streets of the choicer residence section of the city, we all took the tourist electric car, which, at 2 P. M., sets out and tours the town with a guide who, through a megaphone, explains the sights.

Seattle now claims one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and probably has almost that number. A distinctly new city, yet growing marvelously, and already possessing many great buildings of which a much larger town might well boast.

Toward evening, at 4:30 P. M., we took the through electric flyer, and sped across a country of many truck gardens and apple orchards, some thirty-five miles to Tacoma, that distance farther up the Sound, and once the rival of Seattle. A city more spread out and less well built, the creation of the promoters of the Northern Pacific Railway Co., in the palmy days of Henry Villard. Tacoma, too, possesses superb docking facilities and a good two miles of huge warehouses and monstrous wharves, where, also, great ships are constantly loaded and unloaded for the Orient, South Africa and all the world, but whence few or no ships depart for the Northern Continent of Alaska. Tacoma seemed less alive and alert than Seattle, fewer people on the streets, smaller shops and business blocks, and the people moving more leisurely along the thoroughfares. In Seattle the houses mostly fresh painted; in Tacoma the houses looking dingy and as though not painted now for many a month. Seattle is noted for the public spirit of its citizens; they work and pull together for the common weal, but Tacoma is so dominated by the railway influence which created it, that the people are lacking in the vigor of the rival town.

As our electric train came to a standstill, W—— rode up on his bicycle, and he was surely glad to see us. Messrs. S—— and M—— had come over with us for the ride, and we all five set right off to find our dinner. “Cracked Crabs” was again the word, and W—— added, “Puget Sound oysters broiled on toast.” A delicate little oyster about the size of one’s finger nail, and most savory. When our party left the table, we were as contented a group as ever had dined.

We lodged with W——, and were delightfully cared for—a large, sunny room overlooking such a garden of roses and green turf as I never before have seen. Roses as big as peonies and grass as green and thick as the velvet turf of the Oxford “quads.” Our host gave us each morning a dainty breakfast, and then we foraged for ourselves during the day.

In the morning of Sunday we attended the Congregational Church, and in the afternoon rode on the electric car to the park, a few miles—two or three—out of the city, along the shores of one of the fine bays that indent the Sound. Not so fine a park as Vancouver’s, but one that some day will probably rank among the more beautiful ones of our American cities.

On Monday we wandered about the town, visited its museum, saw the fine public buildings, and spent several hours in going over and through the most extensive sawmill plant on the coast—“in the world,” they say. The big business originally instituted by one of the early pioneers, is now managed by his four sons, all graduates of Yale. We met the elder of them in blue overalls and slouch hat, all mill dust. A keen, intelligent face. He works with his men and keeps the details of the business well in hand. How different, I thought, from the English manner of doing things. These men are rich, millionaires; college bred, they work with their men. In England they tell you that no man who would give his son a business career would think of sending him to college. Oxford or Cambridge would there unfit him for business life. He would come out merely a “gentleman,” which there means a man who does nothing, who earns no bread, but who lives forever a parasite on the toil of others.

In these great mills the monstrous fir and pine logs of Washington are sawed up, cut, planed, and loaded directly into ships for all the markets of the earth—Europe, South Africa, Australia, China, South America and New York, wherever these splendid woods are in demand. The forests of Washington and British Columbia are said to possess the finest timber in the world, and all the world seems to be now seeking to have of it.

Many fishing-boats were in the harbor and along the water-side, and many of the big sixty-foot canoes, dug out of a single immense log, paddled by Indians, were passing up and down the bay. Throughout the States of Washington and Oregon the Indians are the chief reliance of the hop growers for the picking of their crops, and every summer’s-end the various tribes along the coast gather to the work. They come from everywhere—from Vancouver’s Island, from British Columbia and even from Alaska. They voyage down the coast in their immense sea canoes, stop at the ports, or ascend the rivers, pushing as far as water will carry them. They bring the children and the old folks with them, they buy or hire horses, and they push hundreds of miles inland to the hop fields, where a merry holiday is made of the gathering of the hops. They were now returning, and many were passing through Tacoma. They were here outfitting, and spending their newly earned wages in buying all those useful and useless things an Indian wants—gay shawls and big ear-rings for the squaws, gaudy blankets, knives and guns for the bucks; even toys for the papooses. On the side the women were also selling baskets made in their seasons of leisure. In the shelter of the long pier one afternoon we came upon a group of several family canoes preparing for the long voyage to the north. A number of pale-face women were bargaining for baskets; one had just bought a toy canoe from an anxious mother, and I was fortunate in buying another. Near by a man was carefully cutting out the figures of a Totem pole. They were evidently from Alaska. Alaska and a thousand miles or more of sea lay between them and home. They looked like a group of Japanese and spoke in gutteral throat tones. The Indians we lately met at Yakima were wholly different, being redskins of the interior, not the light yellow of the coast. When in Caribou Crossing, old Bishop Bompas, who has spent more than forty years among the Indians of the north, told me that in his view the coast Indians had originally come over from North Asia and were allied to the Mongolian races, while he believed that the red-tinged, eagle-nosed Indian of the interior was of Malay origin and of a race altogether distinct. Be this as it may, the coast Indian, according to our preconceived ideas, is no Indian at all, but rather a bastard Jap. He fishes and hunts and works, and his labor is an important factor in solving the agricultural problems of the Pacific Coast. The enormous and profitable hop crops could not be gathered without him.

We had hoped while in Tacoma to have had the chance of visiting some of the primeval forest regions of the State, where the largest trees are yet in undisturbed growth, but the opportunity of taking advantage of a railway excursion to Yakima, there to see the State Fair, was too good to be lost, and we accordingly made that journey instead. Mr. S—— had joined us in Tacoma, so we four bought excursion tickets, and climbed into one of eleven packed passenger coaches of a Northern Pacific special, and made the trip. Eight hours of it, due east and southeast, across the snow-capped Cascade Mountains and down into the dry, arid Yakima River basin to the city—big village—of North Yakima. An arid valley, but yet green as an Irish hedge, a curious sight. The hills all round sere and brown, tufted and patched with dry buffalo grass and sage brush; the flat bottom lands mostly an emerald green; all this by irrigation, the first real irrigation I had yet seen. The river is robbed of its abundant waters, which are carried by innumerable ditches, and then again divided and sub-divided, until the whole level expanse of wide valley is soaked and drenched and converted into a smiling garden. Here and there a piece of land, unwatered, stretched brown and arid between the green.

North Yakima, named from the Indian tribe that still dwells hard by upon its reservation, is a thriving little place, the greenest lawns of the most velvety turf, roses and flowers abounding where the water comes. Trees shading its streets, which are bounded on each side by flowing gutters, and the driest, dustiest, vacant lots on earth. The fair is the annual State show of horses, cattle, sheep and fruits, and these we were glad to see. All fine, very fine, and such apples as I never before set eyes on. Thousands of boxes of Washington apples are now shipped to Chicago, and even to New York, so superior is their size and flavor.

Returning, we had an instance of the insolence of these great land grant fed railway corporations. While the Northern Pacific had advertised an excursion to Yakima and hauled eleven carloads of men, women and children to the fair, it yet made no extra provision to take them back, so that when next day several hundred were at the station in order to board the train for home, only a few dozen could get in, and the very many saw with dismay the train pull away without them! We had got into a sleeper on the rear, fortunately, and thus escaped another twelve hours in the overcrowded little town.

Yesterday we boarded the night express for Portland. The country between this city and Tacoma is said to be rough and unsettled, and not fit for even lumbering or present cultivation, so we did not regret the travel at night. On the other hand, we saw much fine forest in crossing the Cascade Mountains, although the finest timber in the State is, I am told, over in that northwestern peninsula on the slopes of the Olympia Mountains, between Puget Sound and the Pacific. There the trees grow big, very big, and thence come the more gigantic of the logs, fifty and one hundred feet long and ten to twenty-five feet in diameter at the butt.

MT. RANIER OR TACOMA.

The Puget Sound cities are destined to become among the chief marts of commerce and of trade upon the Pacific Coast, and they are filled with an energetic, intelligent population of the nation’s best. The climate, too, though mild, is cool enough for the preservation of vigor. Roses bloom all the winter through in Tacoma, they tell me. And the summers are never overhot. The humidity of the atmosphere is the strangest thing to one of us from the East. “More like England than any other is the climate,” they say, and the exquisite velvet turf is the best evidence of this. But the most wonderful sight of all to my Kanawha eyes was the ever-present snow-massed dome of Mt. Rainier, lifting high into the sky, sixty miles away, but looking distant not more than ten.

The third great center of the life of this northwest coast is Portland. Solid, slow, rich, conservative. A hundred and twenty miles from the sea, but yet a seaport. Situated on the Willamette River, six miles from its confluence with the mighty Columbia. Already Seattle outstrips it in population, so a Portland man admitted to me to-day, yet Portland will always remain one of the great cities of the coast. It possesses many miles of fine docks; the waters about their piles are not quiet and serene, but swift and turbulent, sometimes mad and dangerous. It has a complete and extensive electric tramway system, and this evening we have ridden many miles about the city, and up by a cable road onto the heights, a straight pull four hundred feet in the air. Below us lay the city, level as a floor, the Willamette winding through it, crossed by many steel draw-bridges, while distant, to the north, we could just make out the two-mile-wide Columbia. Portland is a wealthy and substantial city—a city for the elderly and well-to-do, while Seattle is the city for the young man and for the future.

The lesson we have really been learning to-day, however, is not so much of Portland as of the river Columbia, the really “mighty Columbia.”

At 9:30 we took a train on the Oregon Shortline Railway up along the Columbia—south shore—to the locks at the Cascades, a three hours’ run, and then came down again upon a powerful steamboat of the Yukon type, though not so large. It took us about four and one-half hours with only three landings and with the current. The last fifteen or twenty miles of the trip the river was fully two miles wide, although at the Cascades it had narrowed to be no broader than the Kanawha. On either side the valley was generally occupied by farms and meadows, grazing cattle, many orchards, substantial farmsteads. A long-time settled country and naturally fertile. And along either shore, at intervals of not more than a quarter of a mile, were the fish-traps, the wheels, the divers handy contrivances of man, to catch the infatuated salmon. Until I saw the swarming waters of that creek of Ketchikan, my mind had failed to comprehend the fatuity of these fish. This year, owing, they say, to the influence of the hatcheries established by the Government, the catch of salmon here has been enormous; so great, in fact, that “hundreds of tons” of the salmon had to be thrown away, owing to the inability of the canneries to handle them before they had spoiled.

ALONG THE COLUMBIA RIVER.

The Portland people whom I have met and talked with all tell me that even though Seattle secures the Alaskan trade, even though Seattle and Tacoma obtain the lion’s share of the waxing commerce of China and Japan, yet will Portland be great, because she must ever remain the mistress of the trade of that vast region drained by the Columbia and the Willamette, all of whose products come to her by water, or by a rail haul that is wholly downgrade. And when I realize that the Columbia is plied by steamboats even up in Canada, a thousand miles inland, where we traversed its valley on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and that when Uncle Sam has built a few more locks, these same boats can then come down to Portland, and Portland boats ascend even to the Canadian towns, as well as traverse Washington and enter Idaho and Montana, then is it that I realize that the future of this fine city is most certainly well assured.

THIRTEENTH LETTER.
THE VALLEY OF THE WILLAMETTE.

State of Oregon, the Valley of the Willamette,
October 3, 1903. }

From Portland to San Francisco. Written while moving thirty miles an hour on the Southern Pacific Railway.

Here we are flying due south from Portland, crossing the entire State of Oregon. We have left Portland on the 8:30 morning train—“The Southern Limited”—and shall be in “Frisco” at eight o’clock to-morrow night. We are now ascending the beautiful valley of the Willamette, “Will-am-ett;” with a fierce accent on the am. Flat and level as a table—ten to twenty miles wide and two hundred miles long, lying between the Coast Range on the west and the higher Cascade Mountains on the east. A land of perfect fertility, so gracious a country as I have never yet beheld. In winter, rarely any snow, plenty of rain and very much moist Scotch air. In summer, a sunshine that ripens fields of wheat, a moisture that grows the biggest apples and prunes and small fruits. Everywhere neat, tidy farmhouses, big barns. Great stacks of wheat straw and as big ones of hay, and these generally tented in with brown canvas. We are passing, too, extensive fields of hop vines, an especially lucrative crop at present prices—twenty-five cents a pound, while seven cents is reckoned as the cost. Everywhere we see flocks of chickens, turkeys and some geese plucking the stubble fields, for the crops are all cut and harvested. And every now and then we espy a superb Mongolian pheasant in gorgeous plumage, for they have become acclimated and multiply in this salubrious climate. Herds of fine cattle and sheep are grazing in the meadows, and the horses are large and look well cared for. A rich, fat land, filled with a well-to-do population. I have just fallen into talk with a young lawyer who lives at the port of Toledo, where Uncle Sam is dredging the bar at the mouth of the Yaquina River, and to which city new railroads are coming from the interior, and where they expect a second Portland to grow up. He tells me that east of the Cascade Mountains lie other fertile valleys west of the Rockies, and where also is the great cattle and stock raising region of the State, and where moisture is precipitated sufficient to save the need of irrigation.

Now we are just coming to the Umpqua River and the town of Roseburg—a garden full of superb roses blooming by the station—where stages may be taken to the coast at Coos Bay, another growing seaport section, where extensive coal mining and timbering prevail. And as the dusk grows we are passing over the divide to Rogue River and its verdant valley, which we shall traverse in the night. Oregon is green and the verdure much like that of England—the same moist skies, with a hotter summer sun urging all nature to do its best.

In the night we shall climb over the Siskiyou Mountains, and by dawn will be in sight of Mount Shasta. At Portland we were amidst mists and fogs and drizzling rain, so we caught no glimpses of Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helena and Mt. Jefferson, all of whose towering snow-clad cones may be seen on a clear day. We hope that to-morrow Mt. Shasta will be less bashful and not hide her white head.

Sunday A. M., October 4th.

In California! We were called at six o’clock that we might see Mt. Shasta, and also have a drink from the famous waters of Shasta Spring. Mt. Shasta we did not see, so great were the fog masses and mists enshrouding her, but we have had a drink from the elixir fountain. A water much like the springs at Addison, in Webster County, W. Va., but icy cold.

Now we are coming down the lovely valley of the Sacramento. A downgrade all the way to “Frisco.” The verdure is growing more tropical. The undergrowth of the forests is more and more luxuriant. I see big, red lilies by the swift water-side. The air is milder. We have descended already 1,600 feet since passing Shasta Spring. We have five hundred feet more to drop to Oakland. We are now in a ruggedly volcanic mining country, many iron, lead and copper mines and once placer diggings for gold, these latter now pretty much worked out, only a few Chinese laboriously washing here and there.

Now we are at Keswick and see our first groves of figs and almonds and some wide-reaching palms and the spreading umbrella-trees, and many prune orchards. The valley is widening, the air is warmer than we have known it for many days. We are surely in California.

I have just been talking with the brakeman. He has been in Dawson and on the Klondike. “Mushed” through the White Pass, but, after reaching Dawson, he lost heart and came back again without a stake. The man who failed! Another, a big man, with a strong jaw and keen eye, has just climbed on the rear platform. He, too, has been in Dawson, stayed one day, bought a claim in the morning for $1,000, and sold it in the evening for $15,000, and then came right back to his almond groves to invest his make and thereafter rest content with California. The man who won.

Near us sits a black-eyed Russian woman, young and comely, whose husband was one of the discoverers of gold in Nome, and with her the loveliest blue-eyed Norwegian maiden just arrived from Hammerfest. “My husband’s sister who is come to America to stay,” the Russian says in perfect English. She is learning to talk American, and wonders at the huge cars, the multitude of people, the distances—“only a few hours from Trondhjem to Kristiania, but over four days and nights from New York to Seattle!” she exclaims. And her blue eyes grow big with wonder at the half-tropical panorama now unrolling before us.

I am writing this letter by bits as we travel. We are now on a straight track, as from my improved handwriting you may detect. A stretch of thirty-seven miles straight as the crow flies. We are past the smaller fruit farms of the upper Sacramento Valley; we are out on the interior plain that from here extends all down through California, a thousand miles almost to Mexico. We are in the wonderful garden land of the State. On either side of us stretches away, as far as the eye can see, a flat, level plain. It is one monstrous wheat field, and fences only at rare intervals mark it into separate holdings. On the east, far on the sky line, extend the snow-tipped summits of the Sierra Nevada Mountains; on the west, the Coast Range. We have passed out of the region of mists and clouds, and are now in a clear, warm sunshine, the heavens an arching vault of cloudless blue. As clear as on the Yukon almost, but with many times the warmth. This is the region of the Mammoth Bonanza wheat farms you have so often read about. And one feels that man hereabouts does things in a big way.

In Oregon, they tell me, the climate is so equable that a single blanket keeps you warm of night the year round. You need it in summer; you do not need more in winter. Here, I fancy, you scarcely need any at all, so much further south have we already come.

Even yet we are passing through the wide stretches of wheat lands, wheat now milled in California and sent in many big ships to the Orient. The Chinaman is just learning the joy of an American flap-jack or a loaf of wheat bread—and he can’t get enough.

Dusk has come down upon us before we have reached Carquinez Strait, over which our train—a long train—is carried by a monstrous ferry boat, and then, skirting San Francisco Bay, we are soon among the suburban illuminations of Oakland. Across the five miles of water lies San Francisco, its million glittering electric lights stretching several miles and covering the hills on which the city is built, while far out on the right flashes the intermittent gleam of the light-houses marking the entrance of the Golden Gate. The ferry-boat taking us across is said to be the largest in the world, and the Norwegian lass’s big blue eyes grow all the bigger as she looks about her on the multitude of fellow-passengers. And then we are ashore and are whirling through broad, well-lighted streets to our hotel, “The Palace,” where now we are.

FOURTEENTH LETTER.
SAN FRANCISCO.

Los Angeles, October 12, 1903.

We slept in the old, famous, and yet well-patronized Palace Hotel, and on which the Fair estate has just renewed a mortgage for another term of years.

In the morning we essayed to have a look at the city, and so took a long, wide electric car devoted to that purpose. A ride of thirty miles, and all for the price of only “two bits”! We circled around the city, we traversed its streets and avenues, climbed and descended its multitude of hills, went everywhere that an electric car might dare to go, and were given the chance to try the cable trams when the declivity was too steep for anything to move that did not cling.

The sunshine was delicious, the watered lawns and watered flowers superb, the unwatered, blistered sand spaces, vacant lots and dust-laden winds dreadful.

The city pleased and disappointed me. It is an old city—half a century old—old for the driving West, and mainly built of wood. Miles and miles of small, crowded, two-story, wooden dwellings, sadly needing a coat of paint, and mostly constructed thirty or forty years ago. A town once replete with vigor, that has slumbered for several decades, and is now reviving into life again. The vast mansions of the bonanza kings, the railway lords on “Nob Hill,” are now all out of date and mostly empty of their former occupants. The Fairs, the Mackeys, the O’Briens are dead, their heirs scattered to the winds. The Crokers, the Stanfords, the Huntingtons are reminiscences. The street urchins know them no more. Fashionable San Francisco has moved to another hill. The tenement quarter of the town has crept to their very doors. But the business section of the city has not moved as it has in New York. It stands just where it always stood. The Palace Hotel, once the glory and boast of the Pacific Slope, is still the chief hostelry of the town; and yet the city is instinct with a new life. Its lively, hustling thoroughfares are full of a new vigor; a new tide of Asiatic and Oriental commerce has entered the somewhat somnolent city. All this, the magic result of the battle of Manila Bay, and the new relation of the United States to the far east. Where the Pacific Mail S. S. Co. sent a single monthly ship across the Pacific five years ago, now six lines of great freight and passenger steamships are unable to satisfy the increasing demands of trade. Now twenty steamers and a multitude of sailing craft come to deliver and take cargoes, where few or none came six years ago. On the land side, too, there is progress. The A. T. & Santa Fe Railway has broken through the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railway Company, so cleverly and firmly fastened by Huntington and his friends; and there are hopes that other lines may yet establish independent relations with the city. Along with this new growth of commerce have come a new throng of energetic men, and new fortunes are being made—and more widely distributed. The city, the commercial center, the ocean port, are all growing at a steadier, healthier gait than in the ancient feverish days of bonanza kings and railroad magnates. For awhile, San Francisco was “in the soup,” so to speak. Its rich men were leaving it, did leave it; its sand-lots proletariat threatened to gain the upper hand; its middle class, the people making and possessing only moderate incomes, were doubtful of a success that to them had not yet come. To the north, sleepy Portland had wakened up; Seattle and Tacoma had been born; and in the south, Los Angeles had risen, like a phœnix, from the torrid sands. But San Francisco did not stir. Then Dewey sank the fleet of Montejo; the nation quickened with a consciousness that she was a world-power; that the trade and commercial dominance of the Pacific lands and isles and seas were rightly hers, and in a night San Francisco found herself re-endowed with new life.

After the tramway ride, we spent an afternoon strolling about through the business streets and along the docks and wharves, viewing the many new shops, splendid modern stores, quite equaling, in the sumptuous display of their wares, the great trading centers of New York and Chicago, and noting the volume of wholesale traffic on the down-town streets, the jobbing center, and the busy stir along the waterfront for several miles.

No finer sight have we seen than when we stood near the surf-washed rocks, famous as the home of the sea-lions, and, turning our gaze toward the wind-tossed billows of the Pacific Ocean, beheld eight or ten full-rigged ships and four-masted barques converging on the narrow entrance of the Golden Gate, coming in out of the west, laden with the teas and silks and commerce of the Orient, their multitudinous sails all set before the breeze, like a flock of white-winged sea birds, while slipping among them a steamer from Honolulu and another from Nome came swiftly in.

Another day we were ferried five miles across the wide bay toward the north, to the pretty suburban residence section of Sausalito, and there taking an electric road were brought to the foot of Mount Tamalpais, and then changing to a climbing car were pushed ten miles up near 4,000 feet into the air, to the top of a volcanic cone that rises out of sea and bay, and dominates the landscape for many miles. Below us, at our feet, lay the great Bay of San Francisco and the city itself, with its green, garden-like suburban villages, the many islands, the ships of war and of commerce, the narrows of the Golden Gate; and, westward, the Pacific Ocean, with the distant Farallon Islands, outposts of the Orient, while far to the east, peeping above the clouds, gleamed the snow-capped summits of the Sierra Nevadas.

Another day, we visited the Presidio, and rejoiced to see the blue uniform of Uncle Sam after the many weeks of red coats upon the Yukon. Say what you may, it quickens the blood to catch a glimpse of our boys in blue. I well remember how good it seemed when we met them in command of the fortress of El Moro, at Havana, two years ago.

We also spent a night in Chinatown—or part of the night—for we were bound to see its horrors and its joys. The opium dens—a picture of Hop Sing and his cat, the beast also a victim of the habit—I bring home to you; the theatre, where the audience and the actors were equally interesting; the Joss house or temple; the lady with the tiny feet, one of whose midget shoes I took off and have to show you; the barber shop where they shave the head and scrape out the ears and nose; the many handsome shops and almost priceless curios; and the swarms of bright-eyed, laughing, friendly, gentle children.

A BIG REDWOOD.

While the Chinese upon the Pacific Coast, and in San Francisco more particularly, have been greatly lessened in number the last few years, it is interesting to note how many of the more progressive Japanese are now to be seen in all of the great cities along the Pacific coast. In Vancouver, all of the bell boys and elevator boys in the large Hotel Vancouver were bright-eyed Japs. Keen, intelligent, wide-awake little fellows, speaking good English, dressed in American style, and seeming to know their business perfectly. We saw them at Seattle and Tacoma and Portland, and now we find them in large numbers in San Francisco. They get along well with the white man. They dress like him, eat like him, walk like him, and try to look as much like him as possible. They seek employment as servants, as day laborers, and are also getting extensively into trade in a small way. They keep prices up like a white man and join labor unions like the white man, and sympathetically act with him to a degree that eliminates the prejudice that hedges in and drives out the Chinaman. The Japanese seem to supply a genuine want in the Pacific slope. I learned, also, that Japanese capital is now coming into California and making substantial investments, the expenditure of their money giving employment to American white labor.

Coming down the Sacramento Valley the other day, I noticed that all the labor gangs employed by the Southern Pacific Railroad were Greeks, dull-looking Greeks who could speak no English. It seemed to me as I looked into their semi-Oriental faces, that they gave less promise of satisfactory American citizenship than did the up-to-date, alert, intelligent Japanese. The one represented a semi-Oriental country, whose greatness was destroyed by Rome two thousand years ago; the other expressed the awakened intelligence of the new Orient, the new Japan whose great modern navy to-day ranks first upon the Pacific.

That night when we first crossed the bay toward the long line of glittering city, the tall Norwegian said to me: “I have sailed all about this world and visited many cities, but San Francisco suits me the very best of them all.” And his black-eyed Tartar wife from Moscow exclaimed: “Ah, I will never leave here till I die.” All who visit San Francisco feel this subtle charm. There is a certain something in the air that soothes as well as stirs. Its lawns and flowers where water is applied; its sunshine, never too hot, for it is tempered by the breezes from the sea; no winter, rarely a dash of snow; no torrid sun; an atmosphere almost gentle, yet not destroying energy.

Leaving San Francisco, we took the little narrow-gauge railway that leads out south of the city, skirts the bay and climbs the Coast Range through the famous grove of immense redwood trees that comes down to the sea at Santa Cruz. A pretty village among gardens and orchards of prunes and apricots and almonds, famous for its flowers and its fish. On the long pier we watched the Italian fishermen mending their nets and loading them into their lateen-sailed boats. Here the rainbow-hued Barroda is caught in the deep sea and shipped to the city; while, sitting all along the pier, were old folks and young catching smelts with hook and line. An old man with long, white beard said to me, as he took off a smelt and put it in his creel, “If a man has nothing to do but just to live, this is the most salubrious spot along this coast. I’ve tried them all.”

ITALIAN FISHING CRAFT AT SANTA CRUZ.

APPROACHING SAN FRANCISCO.

From Santa Cruz we went over to the quaint old Spanish town of Monterey, once California’s capital, now the barrack sanitarium of Uncle Sam’s soldier boys, and upon whose quiet main street still dwells the Mexican-Spanish beauty to whom Tecumseh Sherman once made love, and in whose garden yet grows the pomegranate he planted in token of their tryst. She has never wed, but treasures yet the memory of her soldier lover.

Near Monterey is that marvelously lovely park, surrounding the great Del Monte Hotel, built by Crocker and Stanford and Huntington in their days of power, and where, among groves and lawns and gardens, winds the seventeen-mile drive of which the world has heard so much. Imagine the parks of Blenheim and Chatsworth and Windsor all combined, but filled with palmettos and palms and semi-tropical verdure—giant live oaks and Norfolk pines and splendid redwood, with all the flowers of the earth, with ponds and fountains, and you will have some faint conception of the beauty of Del Monte, an object-lesson of what the landscape gardener may do in California. We regretted leaving this superb place, but were glad to have had even a glimpse of it.

All the day we now hastened south on the flying “Coast Limited,” bound for Santa Barbara. First ascending the broad valley of Salinas River, the Coast Range close on our right, a higher range of mountains on our left, until, converging, we pierced the barrier by a long tunnel and slid down to San Louis Obispo and then to the sea. Many monstrous fields of sugar beet, miles of prune and almond and apricot trees, thriving orchards all of them; then mile after mile of wheat stubble, stacks of wheat straw, piles of sacked wheat at the by-stations; then herds of cattle and many horses as we reached the head of the valley. A rich and fecund land, held originally in big estates, now beginning to be cut up into the smaller farms of the fruit growers.

Toward the end of the afternoon we were skirting along by the breaker-lashed coast of the Pacific. A clear sky, a violent wind and tempestuous, foam-covered sea. We sat with the windows open, not minding the heat of the sun. The tide was at ebb, and upon the sand we saw many sea birds, gulls in myriads, snipe, plover, yellow-legs, sand-pipers in flocks, coots and curlew. We also passed a number of carriages driving close to the receding waters.

THE FRANCISCAN GARDEN—SANTA BARBARA.

OUR FRANCISCAN GUIDE.

THE SEA—SANTA BARBARA.

THE SEA—SANTA BARBARA.

The country grew constantly warmer, the soil responding to cultivation with more and more luxuriant crops; among these, fields of lima beans, miles of them, which are threshed out and shipped in enormous quantity. It was dark when we drew in at Santa Barbara, and we did not know what hotel to go to, but, tossing up, chose the Potter. Many runners were calling their hostelries; the Potter porter alone was silent. As we drove in his ’bus through the palm-bordered streets, a cozy home showing here and there in the glare of an electric street light, we wondered what our luck would be. Imagine our delight when we drew up at the stately portal of a modern palace, built in the Spanish style and right on the borders of the sea. The moon was almost full, the tide near flood, the sunset breeze had died, the sea air soft and sweet, and the palace ours! A new hotel, two millions its cost, no finer on the Pacific Coast. And in this off season the prices were most moderate. Nowhere yet have we been so sumptuously housed. In the lovely dining-room we sat at supper by a big window looking out over the moonlit sea.

In the morning we wandered far down upon the beach, watching the breakers beyond the point, and later went up to the famous old Franciscan Monastery, a mile beyond the town. A shrewd yet simple father in brown monk’s robe who asked many questions of the outside world, showed us all about, and in the garden stood for his photograph, quite pleased at the attention. No more charming wintering spot have we yet come to than Santa Barbara.

In the late evening we entrained again and took the local for Los Angeles. For quite an hour and a half we ran close to the ocean, the perpetual breaking of the crested waves upon the shore sounding above the roar of the moving train. A yet greener land we now passed through, everywhere watered by irrigation, everywhere responding with seemingly greater luxuriance. It was just dusk as we turned inland, and quite dark when we came through the big tunnel into the head waters of the Los Angeles Valley. Just then a bright young fellow sat down beside me, and, talking with him, I was pleased to find him from West Virginia. A. Judy, from Pendleton County. A few years ago the family had come to this southern land and all have prospered. He was full of the zest of the life that wins.

Presently we came to many lights among shade trees, mostly palms, then houses and more lights, wide streets showing themselves. We were in Los Angeles, the metropolis of Southern California, the furthest south that on this journey we shall go.

FIFTEENTH LETTER.
LOS ANGELES.

Los Angeles, October 13, 1903.

We slept in Los Angeles with our windows wide open and felt no chill in the dry, balmy air, although a gentle breeze from seaward sifted through the lace curtains all night long. The sun was streaming in when at last we awoke to the sound of New England church bells. We breakfasted on plates piled high with big, red, sweet strawberries, dead ripe, evenly ripe, but not one whit over ripe. A ripeness and sweetness we have never before tasted, even in Oxford. In Seattle and Tacoma we met the royal crab of the Puget Sound, and found him big and bigger than the crabs of England and of France—big as dinner plates, all of them, and now we find in the great, luscious strawberry of Los Angeles another American product as big as those that grow in the gardens of merrie England.

Los Angeles! How can I tell you of it and of the lovely region of the American Riviera all round about it? My ideas of Los Angeles had been indefinite. I had only heard of it. I only knew that up in Dawson and in Alaska the frost-stung digger for gold dreams of Southern California and the country of Los Angeles, and when, during his seven long months of winter and darkness, he assures himself of his stake and his fortune, he talks of the far south and prepares to go there and to end his days among these orange groves and olive orchards and teeming gardens. And when he dies—so it is said—every good Yukoner and Alaskan has no other prayer than to be translated to Southern California! So I had imagined much for this perhaps most charming of all regions of the semi-tropics, within the immediate borders of the United States. But I had not yet conceived the fine, modern city among all of this delight of climate and of verdure. A city with broad, asphalted business streets, built up on either side with new, modern sky-scrapers far exceeding in bigness those of San Francisco. The edifices bordering Market Street in San Francisco are fine, but old in type—most or all erected thirty or forty years ago—while the many huge blocks of Los Angeles are as up to date as those of New York. It possesses two hundred miles of modern electric tramways, and H. E. Huntington has sold out his holdings in the Southern Pacific left him by his uncle, C. P. Huntington, and has put and is now putting his millions into the electric tramway system of Los Angeles.

MARENGO AVENUE—PASADENA.

STREET VIEW—LOS ANGELES.

During the morning we rode some thirty miles upon the tourist’s car, seeing the city, its many fine parks, its public buildings, its business blocks, its extraordinary extent of imposing residences. And when we might ride no longer, we strolled on through Adams Street and Chester Place and St. James Place, and among those sections of the residence quarter where no tramways are allowed to profane the public way. And here among these modern palaces, perhaps, we learned to comprehend the real inwardness of Los Angeles’ astonishing growth, for many of these superb homes are not built and owned by the business men making fortunes out of the commerce of the city, but are built and owned by those who have already acquired fortunes in other parts of the United States and of the world, and who by reason of the genial climate of Southern California, have come here to live out the balance of their days. Their incomes are derived from sources elsewhere than in California, and they spend freely of those incomes in the region of their new homes. The exquisite lawns, the flowering shrubs, the tropical and semi-tropical palms and palmettos, all kept and cared for by means of the constant use of water and expert gardeners’ skill, give to the city a residence section of marvelous charm. Water does it all, and man helps the water.

Los Angeles possesses many fine churches and schools and two flourishing colleges. One run by the Methodist Church; the other under the control of the State. From a city of twenty-five thousand in 1890, Los Angeles is now grown to one hundred and twenty-five thousand, and is still expanding by leaps and bounds. It is the center of the gardens and orchards and citrus fruit trade of Southern California, and is the Mecca toward whose environs comes in perpetual procession the unending army of the world’s “One Lungers,” and their friends.

Of an afternoon we rode out to Pasadena in the swift, through electric train. Once a separate community, now already become a suburb of the greater growing city. “The finest climate on the earth,” they say, and mankind from all parts of the earth are there to prove it. A large town of residences, each standing apart in its own garden; many surrounded by oranges and pomegranates and figs. Lovely homes and occupied by a cultivated society.

We did not tarry to see the celebrated ostrich farm, which is one of the famous sights of Pasadena, but went on toward the mountain chain beyond and north of Pasadena to the base of towering Mount Low, and climbed right up its face a thousand feet on an inclined plane steeper than any of Kanawha’s, and then another thousand feet by five miles of winding electric railway. A wonderful ride into the blue sky, with a yet more wonderful panorama stretching for many miles beneath our feet. All the valley of the Los Angeles, the innumerable towns and villages and farms and groves and orchards and vineyards stretching far as the eye could see until bounded by the mountains of Mexico to the south, and the shimmering waters of the Pacific to the west, and to the north and east a limitless expanse of scarred and serrated volcanic mountain ranges, like the gigantic petrified waves of a mighty sea. Below us the perfect verdure of irrigated land, the patches and masses of greenness everywhere threaded and interspersed by the irrigating ditches and pools and ponds whereby the precious water is impounded and distributed when used.

Los Angeles lies very near the center of an immense cove, whose sea line marks the great indenture on the southwest of the United States, where the coast bends in from Cape Conception and curves southeastward to the borders of Mexico, a total coastal frontage on the Pacific Ocean of near three hundred miles.

On the north, the mountains of the Coast Range, and the westward jutting spurs of the Sierra Nevada come together and form a barrier against the cold northern airs. Eastward their extension forms a high barrier against the colder airs of the Rocky Mountain region. Los Angeles lies at about the point where these protecting mountain ranges recede to near sixty miles from the sea, itself some twenty and thirty miles from the twin ports of Santa Monica and San Pedro, and is the commercial center of this rich alluvial and sheltered region, of which Santa Barbara, on a lovely bay, is the chief northern center, and San Diego, one hundred and fifty miles to the south, upon the second finest harbor in California, is the most southern port and trade outlet. A vast “ventura,” as the Spaniards called it, upon this fertile plain and rolling upland anything will grow if only it has water. For three or four months in the year, from early November to March, the skies pour down an ample rainfall, and the world is a garden. During the other eight months, man—the active American—now irrigates the land with water stored during the rainy season, and thus a perpetual and prolific yield is won from the fecund soil. Here the famous seedless orange was discovered, perpetuated, and has become the most coveted citrous fruit. Fortunes have been made from the raising of these oranges alone. The immense and fragrant strawberries ripen every month the year round. Figs and pomegranates abound. Apples, pears, olives and grapes yield enormous and profitable crops. No frosts, no drouths. Last year Los Angeles and its contributing orchards shipped twenty-five thousand carloads of citrous fruit. This year they reckon to do yet more. Their capacity is only limited by the markets’ demand, and both seem boundless.

The air is dry like that of the Yukon Valley, and similarly, extremes of temperature are easily borne. It is never unpleasantly hot in Southern California, they say, just as the Yukoner vows he never suffers from the cold. “Only give us water to wash our gold;” “water to irrigate our crops,” cries each, “and we will become richer than the mind of man can think.” But the types of men and women are somewhat different in the two extremes. A sturdier race wins fortune from the soil in the Klondike land; there the children have rosier faces and are more alert. On the crowded streets of the southern city the pale presence of the “one lungers” is at once remarked. But for this, the people might be the same.

We left this gracious garden land, with its gentle climate, by the midday train, this time leaving the coast and following the interior San Joaquin Valley route. Just at the outskirts of the city our train halted a moment, and, looking from the window, I saw a most astonishing spectacle—an extensive enclosure with a large, wide-roofed building in its midst, and enclosure, roof and air all thick with myriads of pigeons. Here is the greatest pigeon roost of the world, where an enterprising bird lover raises squabs by the thousands, cans them in his own factory, and sends them all over the earth to the delight of the epicure. Just why such myriads of birds should not fly away, I do not know, but there they were covering the ground, the roof, and filling the air in circular flights, and seemed rarely or never to leave the borders of the enclosure.

For a few hours we retraced our way and then turned eastward across the edge of the great Mojave Desert. Crossing the barrier of the San Fernando Mountains on the north, through a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel, we left the greenness of olive grove and orange orchard behind, and came out into a continually more and more arid country. Cactus and yucca began to appear and to multiply, the dwarf shrunken palmetto of the Mexican plains grew more and more plentiful, and then we came through dry, parched gulches and cañons, out onto a dead flat plain stretching away toward the eastern horizon as far as the eye could see—sand and sage brush and stunted cactus; a hundred miles or more away a faint blue mountain range showing in the slanting sunlight against the eastern sky. Dry and arid and hopeless to man and beast. A terrible waste to cross, or even to enter, and lifeless and desolate beyond concept.

During the night we crossed over the high, arid Tehachapi Mountains and descended into the San Joaquin Valley, traversing that wonderfully fertile garden land until in the morning we were at Oakland. We then crossed the five miles of wide harbor and took our last breakfast in the city of the Golden Gate.

After night had fallen and I sat with my cigar, I chanced to fall in with an interesting young Jap, “R. Onishi,” on his first visit to America, correspondent of the “Jije Shimpo,” Tokio’s greatest daily newspaper. He had come over to investigate the growing rice plantations of Texas, with a view to Japanese capital becoming interested in development there. He had been much impressed with the opportunity there offered, and should report favorably on the proposed enterprise. Not to use Japanese labor, but for Japanese capital under Japanese management to use American labor. So does the opportunity and natural wealth of our country begin to attract the investment of the stored wealth of Asia as well as of Europe. Like the rice dealer I met on the “Kaiser Frederich,” crossing the Atlantic two years ago, Mr. Onishi said that American rice brings the highest price of any in the markets of the world, and he looks for a large export trade to Asia of American rice, as well as wheat. And America, how vast and rich and hopeful a land it seemed to him!

I have now seen almost the entire Pacific Coast of our Northern American Continent. From Skagway, from Dawson to the sight of Mexico. Its old and its new towns and cities, its ports and trade centers have I visited, and greatly has the journey pleased and profited me. The dim perception of our future Pacific power that first dawned upon me at Vancouver has now become a settled conviction. We are just beginning to comprehend the future dominance and potency of our nation in Oriental trade, in commerce, in wealth, in enlightened supremacy. And it fills the imagination with boundless sweep to contemplate what are the possibilities of these great Pacific States.

Among the cities of the future upon the Pacific Coast, Seattle and Los Angeles are the two that impress me as affording the wider opportunity and certainty of growth, wealth and controlling influence in trade, in commerce, in politics. If I were a young man just starting out, I should choose one of them, and in and through Seattle I believe there is the larger chance. Or if I were on life’s threshold and, say, twenty-five and vigorous, I would pitch my tent within the confines of the continent of Alaska, and by energy, thrift and foresight, become one of its innumerable future millionaires.

SIXTEENTH LETTER.
SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY.

Salt Lake City, Utah, October 14, 1903.

We left San Francisco on the “Overland Limited” train, taking the ten o’clock boat across the bay to Oakland and there entering our car. It was a lovely morning; the sky, blue, without a cloud; the sun, brilliant, and not so hot as at Los Angeles. The city, as we receded from it, lay spread before us, stretching several miles along the water and quite covering the range of hills upon which it is built. Many great ships were at the quays, many were anchored out in the blue waters awaiting their turn to take on cargo, and among these several battleships and cruisers of our navy and one big monitor. Above the city hung a huge black pall of smoke, for soft coal—very soft—and thick asphaltic oil are the only fuels on this coast. We had come to San Francisco by night, and marveled at the myriad of electric lights that illumined it; we now left it by day, and yet more fully realized its metropolitan and commercial greatness.

The ride, this time, was not along the northern breadth of the Sacramento Valley, but by the older route through the longer settled country to the south of it. Still many immense wheatfields, hundreds of sheep browsing among the stubble, and yet more of the orchards of almonds, prunes, apricots, figs and peaches. A monstrous fruit garden, for more than one hundred miles; and everywhere fruit was drying in the sun, spread out in acres of small trays.

At Sacramento, we crossed the river on a long iron bridge, and noted the many steamboats along the wharves—the river is navigable thus far for steamboats—boats about the size of our Kanawha packets, and flows with a swift current.

After leaving San Francisco, we began that long ascent, which at last should carry us over the passes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains some 6,000 feet above the sea. The grades are easy, though persistent, the track sweeping around mountain bases and along deep valleys in wide ascending curves. All the day, till evening, we were creeping up, up, up, following one long ridge and then another, the distant snow summits always before us and seemingly never much nearer than at first. The lower slopes were, like the Sacramento Valley, everywhere covered with well-kept orchards, and everywhere we noted the universal irrigation ditches of running water, constantly present beside us or traversing our way.

As we climbed higher we began to see evidences of present and past placer mining, many of the mountain-sides being scarred and riven by the monitor-thrown jets of water.

Just as the shadows began to fall aslant the higher valleys, we commenced that long and irksome journeying through the snowsheds that, for so many miles, are necessary on this road. Coming over the Canadian Pacific, we met few snowsheds through the Rockies, and not more than two or three of them in the Selkirks, but here they buried us early and held on until long after the fall of night.

This road, you know, was originally the Central Pacific, remaining so until swallowed by its stronger rival of the south, the Southern Pacific, which now owns and operates it.

As we rode along, I could not help recalling its early history, the daring of its projectors, Huntington, Crocker, Stanford and Hopkins, and how it never could or would have been built at all but for the aid of the thousands of Chinese who, under their Irish bosses, finally constructed it.

This morning, when we awoke, we had long passed Reno in Nevada, and were flying down the Sierras’ eastern slopes through the alkali deserts of the interior basin, and all day long we have been crossing these plains of sand and sage brush and eternal alkali. We read of things, and think we are informed, but only when we see the world face to face do we begin to comprehend it. Only to-day have I learned to comprehend that Desert and Death are one.

THE SAGEBRUSH AND ALKALI DESERT.

On the Canadian Pacific Railway we had beheld the great Columbia River plunge between the facing cañon cliffs of the Rocky Mountains and the Selkirks where they almost touch, the very apex of that vast interior arid basin that stretches thence all across the United States and on into Mexico. At Yakima, in Washington State, we had crossed the Cascade range and found the arid valley made to bloom and blossom into a perpetual garden by means of the melting snows that there fed the Yakima River and adjacent streams. Now we were again descending from the crests of the Sierra Nevadas, down into this same vast basin where no Columbia cuts it through and no Yakima irrigates its limitless and solitary aridness. For more than three hundred miles have we now been traversing this expanse of parched and naked waste. No water, no life, no bird, no beast, no man. Two thousand miles and more it stretches north and south, from Canada into Mexico. Five hundred and forty miles is its narrowest width. We beheld a spur of it the other evening when we crossed the edge of the Mojave desert in Southern California; we should have traversed it two days or more if we had taken the Southern Pacific route through Arizona. As wide in its narrowest part as from Charleston to New York, or to Chicago! What courage and what temerity did those early pioneers possess who first ventured to cross it with their lumbering prairie-schooners or on their grass-fed bronchos from the Eastern plains! And how many there were who perished in the attempt! Yet water will change even these blasted wastes, and, at the one or two stations where artesian wells have been successfully sunk, we saw high-grown trees and verdant gardens.

Late in the afternoon we began to approach high, barren hills and mountain spurs, all brown and sere, save the sage brush. No cactus or even yucca here, and after climbing and crossing a long, dry ridge, we found ourselves descending into flat, sandy reaches, that bore even no shrubs or plants whatsoever, save a dead and somber sedgy grass in sparse, feeble bunches, and while the land looked wet we saw no water. Then far to the southeast glimmered a silver streak, so faint that it seemed no more than mist, and the streak grew and broadened and gleamed until we knew it to be, in fact, Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Later, we came yet nearer to it for a few miles, and then lost sight of it again. But the face of the land had changed. We saw cattle among the sage brush; cattle browsing on the sweet, dry grass that grows close under the sage-brush shadow on the better soils. Then we came to an occasional mud dugout hut and sometimes a wooden shack, and the country grew greener, grass—buffalo bunch grass—became triumphant over the sage brush, and then, right in the midst of a waste of sere yellowness, was an emerald meadow of alfalfa and a man driving two stout horses hitched to a mowing-machine cutting it, two women raking it and tossing it. We were in the land of Mormondom, and beheld their works. Now, the whole country became green, irrigating ditches everywhere, substantial farmhouses, large, well-built barns and outhouses, and miles of thrifty Lombardy poplars, marking the roadways and the boundaries of the fields.

THE MORMON TEMPLE.

At Ogden, where we were three hours late, our sleeper was taken off the through train to Cheyenne and attached to the express for Salt Lake City. We made no further stops, but, for an hour, whirled through a green, fruitful, patiently-tilled landscape, whose fertility and productiveness delighted eye and brain. Many orchards, large, comfortable farmsteads; wide meadows, green and abundant, as in Holland, with cattle and horses feeding upon them; stubble wheatfields, with flocks of sheep; great beet fields and kitchen gardens in full crops; and water—water in a thousand ditches everywhere! Big farm wagons, drawn by large, strong horses, we saw upon the highways; and farmers, in well-found vehicles, returning from the city to their homes.

Then, far away, towering above all else, loomed a group of gray spires, like the distant view of the dominating pinnacles of the minsters and cathedrals of England and of France, and of Cologne. They were the spires of the great towers of the Mormon temple, that strange, imposing and splendid creation of the brain of Brigham Young.

It was dusk when we reached the city. Electric lights were twinkling along the wide streets as we drove to our hotel. We have not yet seen the city, except for a short stroll under the glaring lights. But already it has made an indelible impression on our minds. Only two cities upon this continent—cities of magnitude—have ever been created and laid out, by systematic forethought, before being entered and occupied by men. One, Washington, laid out according to a comprehensive and well-digested plan; the other, Salt Lake City, the creation—as all else here—of Brigham Young.

The streets of Salt Lake City are all as wide as Pennsylvania Avenue. The blocks, of ten acres each, immense. But these streets—the chief ones are perfectly asphalted; running water flows in every side gutter; great trees, long ago planted, shade every wide sidewalk; the electric tram-cars run on tracks along the middle of the thoroughfare; and the two wide roadways, on either side, are quite free from interfering wires and poles. Many great blocks of fine buildings now rise along the business sections, and the stores present as sumptuous displays of goods and fabrics as anything we have seen in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York. The town bears the marks of a great city. Great in its plan, great in its development, great in its destiny. Truly, a capital fit for the seat of power of the potent and comprehending Mormon church.

THE MORMON TITHING-HOUSE.

THE MORMON “LION HOUSE.”

All the morning we have been viewing concrete, practical Mormondom, and the sight has been most instructive. High above the buildings of the city tower the imposing spires and pinnacles of the Temple, the most immense ecclesiastical structure on the North American continent. Thirty years was it in building, all of native granite, and costing more than four millions of dollars. It stands in the central square of the city, surrounded by a high adobe wall, and a Gentile may view only the exterior.

Then we visited the famous Tabernacle beneath whose turtle-shaped roof 10,000 worshipers may sit, and whose acoustic properties are unrivaled in the world. You can hear a whisper and a pin drop two hundred feet away. In it is the immense organ possessing five hundred and twenty stops, which, like the two great structures, was conceived and constructed by the genius and patience of the Mormon architects. We were shown about the grounds of the ecclesiastical enclosure—though not permitted to enter the Temple—by a courteous-mannered lady whose black eyes fired with religious enthusiasm as she explained the great buildings. “My son is a missionary in Japan, giving his life to the Lord. He preaches in Japanese, and is translating our holy books into the Japanese tongue,” she said, turning to an intelligent Japanese tourist who was of our party.

We also bought some Mormon literature in the fine, modern sky-scraper buildings of the Deseret News, and the bright young man, selling us the books, showed us with evident pride the stores of elegantly printed and bound volumes, all done here in Salt Lake City. They print their books in every modern tongue, and their missionaries distribute them all over the world.

Later, we viewed the fine college buildings where higher education is given to the Mormon youth. We also saw the famous “Lion House,” over whose portal lies a sleeping lion, once the offices of Brigham Young, now occupied by the ecclesiastical managers of the church. And also we viewed the “Beehive House,” where once Brigham dwelt; the Tithing House, where is received and stored the ecclesiastical tithe tax of ten per cent. of all crops raised and moneys earned by the devoted Mormon believers; and the great bank run in connection with it.

All these evidences of practical, organized, devoted religious world zeal have we beheld gathered and centrally grouped in the great city founded and raised by these curious yet capable religious delusionists.

I asked about Mormonism of a Gentile stranger from another State, and he replied in deferential tones: “No man in his senses now throws stones at the Mormons; they are among the most industrious, most thrifty and most respected people of the West.”

To wander along and through the residence section of the city is also a thing to surprise. Street after street of fine private dwellings, each mansion standing in its own garden, upon its own lawn. Many of them very modern, and many of them far exceeding in cost and imposing elegance any residence Charleston, West Virginia, can yet boast—equal to the most sumptuous homes of Pittsburg and St. Louis—and most of them owned and lived in by cultivated families of the Mormon cult. And how the zeal and faith and religious ardor of this strange sect even now to-day burns in the atmosphere of this their Holy City! It is the same spirit that we met in Holy Moscow, Russia’s sacred capital—but more enlightened, more practical.

And Mormonism is already a political as well as religious power in the West. In Idaho, in Colorado, in Nevada, in Arizona, the Mormon vote is to be considered and even catered to. In Alberta, the Mormon settlement is said to be the most prosperous in the province. In Mexico, the Mormon settlements, their astonishing productivity and fertility, are already teaching the wonder-struck Mexican what irrigated agriculture may do. And as I beheld this and the evident success of a religious sect which mixes fanatical zeal with astute practical management, I asked myself what is the real secret of their accomplishment and their power! Is it the theory and practice of polygamy. Did or does polygamy have anything to do with the unquestioned success and prosperity of the Mormon people? I think not. Polygamy has been merely an incident, and the disappearance of polygamy has in nowise lessened the formidable growth of Mormon power. The secret, I think, is the secret of the amazing growth and spread of early Christianity, the putting into actual practice the Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of man—with them the brotherhood of the Mormon man in particular. Once a Latter-day Saint, and all other Saints are ready to lend you a hand, and the organized and ably administered mechanism of the church lends the new Saint a hand as well, and those hands once extended are never withdrawn except for powerful and well-merited cause. The Mormon farmer feels that back of his success is the ever helpful and protecting eye of his church in material as well as spiritual things. The Gentile farmer may succeed or may fail, and who cares; but the Mormon must succeed. If he do not himself possess the innate power and force of character and judgment to get on, then men will guide and aid him who do possess that power, and so he gets on even in spite of himself. In a certain sense, the Mormons practice the doctrine of collective socialism, and that collective unity is the secret, I think, of their wonderful accomplishment.

The creed of the brotherhood of man, and of man within the Christian pale, has been the secret of Christianity wherever it has won success. The failure to heed it and obey it is the cause of failure to every religious movement that has come to naught. And so long as the Mormon Church adheres to this fundamental principle, just so long will it continue to be a power, and a power of increasing weight.

And this cardinal principle is also the secret of their missionaries’ success. All over the world they are, in every State of the Union, in nigh every land, and they serve without recompense, without pay even, as did the early missionaries of the Christian Church.

GREAT SALT LAKE.

There is and always has been a good deal of cleverness in the leadership of the Mormon Church. It is an old adage that “The blood of her martyrs is the seed of the church,” and the Mormon leaders have comprehended this from the start. Not only have they cultivated the Christian socialism of the early church, but they have also never fled from, but they rather have greatly profited by, a real good case of martyrdom. The buffets and kicks of the Gentile world have helped, have been essential in welding the Mormon believers into that political, religious and social solidarity so much sought by the leaders. They were driven from New York, from Ohio, from Missouri, then from Nauvoo. They have been shot, stoned, murdered by scores. They have been imprisoned and harried by the federal laws (very justly, perhaps). But the effect of all this has been only to make them stand together all the closer.

Just now the attack upon Senator Smoot is profiting them immensely. He sits by and smiles. He has only one wife. He is no more oath-bound to his own church than is every Roman or Greek Archbishop vowed to his. A matter of conscience only. The effort to oust him will probably fail, but it’s a good thing for the church to have him hammered. The more martyrs, the fewer backsliders. The faithful line up, stand pat, the church grows.

On the streets of Salt Lake City we have noted the very few vehicles of fashion anywhere to be seen, and, on the other hand, the many substantial farm wagons which generally seem to be driven by a woman accompanied by one or more children, more usually a half-grown boy. The men would seem to be working on the farms, while the women come into town with the loads of produce. The faces, too, of these women were generally intelligent and contented.

In our own country we frequently hear the Mormons denounced as polygamists. In Utah and the neighboring States you hear nothing about polygamy, and, upon inquiry, I was told that while once this tenet of the church had been urged and practiced, yet that under modern social conditions, which have come in with the railways, the younger Mormon of to-day finds that one woman is all that he can take care of, and shows no disposition to load himself up with the burden of half a dozen. To my observation, the strength and danger of Mormonism is not in polygamy, but rather in their social and political solidarity, the Mormon president of the church wielding political influence over his followers similar to, although in nowise so vast as, that of the Roman Pope.

Be these things as they may, it is at any rate worth while for a modern Gentile to visit this center of the Mormon power, and gather from ocular evidence of its vital, living, forceful presence such lessons as he may.

This afternoon we took a little railway and journeyed twelve miles to Saltair, the Atlantic City or Virginia Beach of this metropolis, and there we bathed in the supersaturated brine. I could swim on it, not in it, so buoyant was the water, and my chief difficulty was to keep my head out and my feet in. The lake is sixty miles wide by ninety miles long, with several islands of high, barren hills. A few boats ply on it. No fish can live in it, and the chief use of it is to evaporate its waters for supply of salt. After dipping in it we came out quite encrusted with a white film of intense salt.

To-night we go on to Denver, through the cañon of the Grand River.

SEVENTEENTH LETTER.
A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH.

Glenwood Springs, October 16, 1903.

We left Salt Lake City by the express last night over the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, starting three hours late. When we awoke, we were coming up the canyon of the Green River, one of the head streams of the Colorado, and had passed through the barren volcanic lava wastes of the Colorado Desert during the night. The Green River flows between sheer, naked volcanic rock masses, not very high, but jagged, no green thing growing upon them. But the scanty bottom lands were often green with alfalfa meadows and well-kept peach and apple orchards, the result of irrigation.

From the valley of the Green River we crossed, passing through many deep cuts and tunnels, to the Grand River, the eastern fork of the Colorado, and followed up this stream all day. Very much the same sort of country as before. The bare, ragged, verdureless cliffs and rock masses, dry and plantless, only the red and yellow coloring of sandstone relieving the monotony, and everywhere upon the scant bottom lands the greenness and agriculture of irrigation. The aspen and maples, all a bright yellow, but not so splendid a golden hue as the forests of the valley of the Yukon.

Just before coming to Glenwood Springs, about noon, I had wandered beyond my sleeper into the smoking-car, thinking to have a view of the sort of men who got in and out at the way stations, and, seating myself in a vacant place, picked up a conversation with my neighbor. Imagine my surprise when I found him to be a fellow West Virginian, from Clarksburg, taking a little summer trip in the West, himself a Mr. Bassel, nephew of the well-known lawyer, John Bassel, of upper State fame. He was going to stop off at Glenwood Springs to see one of Colorado’s most popular sports, a “broncho-busting” match, where were to be gathered some of the most eminent masters of the art in the State. I consulted my time-tables, ascertained that we might spend the afternoon there and yet reach Denver the next morning, and when the train pulled into the station, we were among the expectant throng who there detrained.

The little town was all astir. A pile of Mexican saddles lay on the platform, and a crowd of big, brawny men in wide felt hats, leathern cowboy leggings and clanking spurs, were shouldering these, their belongings, and moving up into the town.

The streets were full of people come in from the surrounding highlands, where, high up on the “mesas” or plateaus above the valleys, lie some of the finest cattle ranges in the State. Big, raw-boned, strong-chinned men they were, bronzed with the sun and marked with a vigor bespeaking life in the open air. The ladies, too, were out in force, well dressed, not much color in their cheeks, but, like the men, possessing clean-cut, clear-eyed faces. And up and down the wide streets were continually galloping brawny riders, evidently arriving from their distant ranches.

The crowd stuck to the sidewalk and seemed expectant. We did not know just what was going to happen, but stuck to the sidewalk, too, and well for us it was that we did so. There were rumors of a parade. A number of ranch maidens, riding restive bronchos, some sitting gracefully astride, drew their horses to one side. The crowd was silent. We were silent, too. Just then a cloud of dust and a clatter of hoofs came swirling and echoing down the street. A troop of horses! They were running like mad. They were bridleless, riderless; they were wild horses escaped. They ran like things possessed. No, not all were riderless, for behind them, urged by silent riders, each man with swinging lasso, came as many cowboys hot on the chase. Had the wild horses broken loose? Could they ever be headed off? We wondered. Was the fun for the day all vanished by the accident? Not so, we found. This was part of the game. Every broncho buster, if he would take part in the tests of ridership, must first catch a wild horse, that later an opponent should master. And the way those lassos swung and reached and dropped over the fleeing bronchos was in itself a sight worth stopping to see. Then, as each rider came out of the dust and distance leading the wild-eyed, terrified beast by his unerring lasso, great was the acclaim given him by the hitherto silent multitude. Every loose horse was caught before he had run half a mile, and thus haltered—the lariat around the neck—was led to the corral near the big meadow, where the man who should ride most perfectly would win the longed-for prize—a champion’s belt and a purse of gold.

NUCKOLDS, PUTTING ON THE HOODWINK.

NUCKOLDS, THE BRONCHO “BUSTED.”

Many famous men were met there to win the trophy—the most coveted honor a Coloradan or any ranchman may possess.

There was Marshall Nuckolds, of Rifle City, swarthy and black as an Indian, who had won more than one trophy in hard-fought contests—his square jaw meaning mastery of any four-footed thing that bucks. There was Red Grimsby, long, and lank and lithe as a Comanche, with a blue eye that tames a horse and man alike. There was big, loose-limbed Arizona Moore, a new man in Glenwood, but preceded by his fame. He it was who won that cowboy race in Cheyenne, not long since, when his horse fell, and he underneath—dead, the shuddering audience thought him—and who shook himself loose, re-mounted his horse and won the race amidst the mad cheers of every mortal being on the course. He rode a fiery black mustang, and was dressed in gorgeous white Angora goat’s hair leggins, a blue shirt, a handkerchief about his neck. Handy Harry Bunn, of Divide Creek, was there too, a dapper little pile of bone and sinew, whom broncho, buck as he might, never yet had thrown. And Freddy Conners, solid and silent, and renowned among the boys on the ranches all ’round about. And the two Thompson brothers, of Aspen, home boys, the youngest, Dick, the pride of Grand River, for hadn’t he won the $100 saddle in the big match at Aspen last year, and then carried off the purse of gold at Rifle City on the Fourth of last July! Slim and clean-muscled, and quick as a flash he was, with a piercing black eye. The crowd on the streets were all betting on Dick, and Dick was watching Arizona Moore like a hawk. The honors probably lay between the two.

The big meadow in the midst of the mile track was the place. H—— sat in the grandstand, my field-glasses in hand. I was invited to the judges’ stand, and even allowed with my kodak out in the field among the judges who sat on their horses and followed the riders, taking points.

GRIMSBY AND THE JUDGES.

BUNN, MAKING ROPE BRIDLE.

Swarthy Nuckolds was the first man. He came out into the meadow carrying his own saddle and rope and bridle. To him had fallen a wiry bay, four-year old, never yet touched by man. First the horse was led out with a lasso halter around its neck, then, when it came to a standstill, Nuckolds, with the softness of a cat, slipped up and passed a rope halter over its head, which he made cleverly into a bitless bridle, then he stealthily, and before the horse knew it, hoodwinked it with a leather band, and then when the horse could not see his motions, he gently, oh, so gently, laid the big Mexican saddle on its back, and had it double girt fast before the horse knew what had happened. Then he waved his hand, the hoodwink was pulled off by two assistants, and instantly he was in the saddle astride the astonished beast. For a moment the horse stood wild-eyed, sweating with terror—and then, and then—up it went like a bent hook, its head between its legs, its tail down, its legs all in a bunch, and down it came, stiff-kneed, taut as iron, and then up again, and so by leaps and bounds across the wide field and back again right through the scrambling crowd. All the while Nuckolds rising and falling in perfect unison with the mad motions of the terrified horse—his hat gone, his black hair flying, his great whip and heavy spurs goading the animal into subjection. At last he rode it on a trot, mastered, subjugated, cowed, up to the judges’ stand. The horse stood quietly, trembling, sweating, wet as though having swum Grand River. Wild were the yells that greeted Nuckolds. He had but added to a reputation already made.

“Grimsby next,” was the command. His horse was a short-backed, spindle-tailed sorrel, with a sort of a vicious gait that boded a bad temper and stubborn mind. Again the halter was deftly put on and made into a bitless bridle, the hoodwink slipped on, the saddle gently placed, and man and horse were furiously rushing, bucking, leaping, rearing across the meadow, and right straight at the high board and wire fence. The horse, if it couldn’t throw him, would jam and scrape him off if it ever reached that merciless mass of pine and barbed wire. Could Grimsby turn him, and without a bit? Great riding that was, and greater steering, for just before the seeming inevitable crash, the horse swerved, turned and was bucking across and then around the field again. Grimsby never failed to meet every wild movement, and sat in the saddle as though in a rocking-chair. The horse, at last conquered, stood quiet as a lamb, and the cheers for the sturdy rider quite equaled the plaudits given his raven-maned predecessor.

Now the crowd had its blood up. Two native champions had proved their grit, what could the Arizonian do against such as these? “He’s too big and awkward,” said one onlooker. “He’s not the cut for a King buster,” grunted another. “The h—l he ain’t. Ain’t he the man who won that Cheyenne race after his horse fell on him?” exclaimed one who knew, and the scoffers became silent.

ARIZONA MOORE, UP.

ARIZONA MOORE.

Arizona Moore strode clumsily under the weight of his big saddle, but his black eye shone clear and masterful, and I felt he was sure enough a man. His horse was a dark blood bay, well knit, clean limbed, short-barreled, full mane and tail, a fighter with the grit of a horse that dies before it yields. I stood quite near with my camera. It was difficult to get the rope bridle on, it was more difficult to put on the hoodwink, it was nigh impossible to set and cinch the saddle. But Moore did it all, easily, deftly, quietly. The hoodwink dropped, and instantly the slouchy, awkward stranger was riding that furious, leaping, cavorting, bucking, lunging creature as though horse and man were one. I have never beheld such riding. He sat to his saddle and every muscle and sinew kept perfect time to the fiery, furious movements of the horse. And he plied his whip and used his spurs and laughed with glee, as though he were on the velvet cushions of a Pullman car. The horse was stronger, more active, more violent than the two before. It whirled ’round and ’round until you were dizzy looking. It went up all in a bunch, it came down spread out, it came down with stiff legs, it reared, it plunged, it ran for the fence. Nothing could mar the joy of the rider nor stir that even, easy, tenacious seat. “You’ve beat ’em all.” “Nor can the others beat you,” roared the crowd, as he rode the conquered animal on a gentle trot up to the judges’ stand and leisurely dismounted. It was the greatest horsemanship I have ever seen, nor shall I again see the like for many a day.

Bunn rode next. His horse was in full and fine condition. It leaped, it bucked, it raced for the fence, it reared, it even sat down and started to roll backwards, a terrible thing to happen, and often bringing death to an incautious rider. But Bunn never lost his seat, nor did the horse stay long upon its haunches, for, stung by rawhide and spur, it sprang to its feet and tore across the meadow, actually leaping clean and sheer the impounding fence. And Bunn, vanquishing at last, walked his quiet horse peacefully up and dismounted.

The Thompson boys each covered themselves with glory. Dick’s first horse was tamed so quickly—a big, bright bay—that they brought him a second one to ride again—a long, lean, dun-colored, Roman-nosed cayuse, with scant mane and tail. A mean beast, the sort of a horse that other horses in the bunch scorn to keep company with and hate with natural good horse sense. He stood very quiet through bridling, hoodwinking and saddling. He had seen the others in the game. His mind was quite made up. And when Dick vaulted into the saddle, he at first stood stock still, and then, as I set my kodak, I could see nothing but one great cloud of dun-colored dust and Thompson’s head floating in the upper levels of the haze. The horse was whirling and bucking all at the same instant, a hump-buck, a flat buck, an iron-legged buck, a touch-ground-with-belly buck, and a swirling-whirl and tail-and-neck twist at one and the same moment. Enough to throw a tender seat a hundred feet and crack his bones like pipe stems. And then, like the flight of an arrow from a bow, that dun-colored devil bolted straight for the wickedest edge of the fence. I thought Dick would be killed certain, but there he sat and drew that horse down on its hams three feet from sure death. It was a long battle, vicious, mean, fierce, merciless—the beast was bleeding, welts stood out on flanks and shoulders, its dry, spare muscles trembled like leaves shaken by wind.

THE CROWD AT THE BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH.

THE DUN-COLORED DEVIL.

The boy hero of Aspen was hero still, and the dun horse walked quietly up to the judges’ horses and allowed himself to be unsaddled without as much as a flinch, and he, too, was drenching wet, as well as bloody.

I did not see the last rider, for my train was soon to leave, and I barely had time to get aboard. But I got some fine kodak photographs, and have promised to send a set to the old, gray-headed rancher who stood near me and who almost cried for joy to see how these men rode. “I’ve seven boys,” he said, “and every one of ’em’s a broncho buster; even the gals can bust a broncho, that they can.”

I have not learned who got the coveted prize belt, but I should divide it between Arizona Moore and Dandy Dick.

EIGHTEENTH LETTER.
COLORADO AND DENVER.

Denver, October 19th.

After leaving Glenwood Springs we wound up the gorge of the Grand River, the castellated, crenelated, serrated, scarped and wind-worn cliffs towering many thousand feet into the blue sky. The valley narrowed sensibly and the sheer heights imposed themselves more and more upon us as we approached the tunnel at the height of land 10,200 feet above the sea, and where part the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from those of the Pacific. On the Canadian Pacific Railway, the interoceanic divide between the waters of Hudson Bay and the Pacific is only some 5,300 feet above tide level, so now we were nearly a mile higher in the air. Yet the long journey of 2,000 miles from San Francisco, the crossing of the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch ranges, had brought us to this final ascent almost unperceived.

Traversing the divide and coming out from the long tunnel which bows above the continental height of land, we diverged from the main line and crept yet higher right up into Leadville, where the air was thin and keen and as chill as in December. Thence we descended through the wonderful cañon of the Platte River that has made this journey on the Denver and Rio Grande Railway famous the world round.

We came to Denver early in the morning; the metropolis of the middle West, the chief railroad center west of the Missouri, the mining center of all the Rocky Mountain mineral belt, and now claiming to be equally the center of the great and rapidly growing irrigated agricultural region of the inter and juxta mountain region of the continent. Essentially a business place is Denver. Its buildings are as elegant as those of New York City, many of them almost as pretentious as those of Chicago, as solid as those of Pittsburg, and as new as the fine blocks of Los Angeles. She is altogether a more modern city than San Francisco, is Denver. Her residences are also up to date, handsome, substantial. The homes of men who are making money. Her one hundred and eighty miles of electric tramways are good, though not quite as good as the two hundred miles of Los Angeles. Her schools are probably unexcelled in the Union. Denver is new, and in the clear, translucent atmosphere looks yet newer; she is neat, she is ambitious, and she is gathering to herself the commerce, the trade, the manufacturing pre-eminence, the mining supervision of all that vast section of our continent from Canada to Mexico, from the great plains to the snowy summits of the Cascades and Sierra Nevadas. All this is Denver, while at the same time she is the capital of Colorado, a State four times as big as West Virginia, though with only half the population. And Denver is so fast seated in the saddle of state prosperity that no section of Colorado can prosper, no interest can grow nor develop, neither the gold and silver mining with its yield of forty millions a year, nor the iron and coal fields—30,000 square miles of coal fields—nor the agriculture and grazing interests, worth eighty millions a year (now exceeding the value of the gold and silver produced twice over), none of these can grow and gain, but they immediately and permanently pay tribute to Denver.

Yet this very up-to-dateness of Denver robs it of a certain charm. You might just as well be at home as be in Denver. The people look the same, they dress the same, they walk the same, they talk the same. Just a few more of them, that’s all.

There are none of the lovely lawns and gardens of Los Angeles and Tacoma in Denver, nor can there ever be. Roses do not bloom all the winter through, nor in Denver does the turf grow thick and velvety green as in Seattle, nor can they ever do so—only a few weakly roses in the summer-time and grass—only grass when you water each blade with a hose three times a day. And then, too, men do not go to Denver to make homes; they go there the rather to make fortunes, and, if successful, then to hurry away and live in a more congenial clime.

Denver is not laid out with the imposing regalness of Salt Lake City, nor can it ever possess the dignity of that place. It is just a big, hustling, commercial, manufacturing, mine-developing center, where the well man comes to work and toil with feverish energy in the thin air; and the sick man—the consumptive—comes to live a little while and die—“One Lungers” do not here hold fast to life as in the more tender climate of southern California—nor can they survive long in Denver’s harsh, keen air.

The loveliest, grandest part of Denver is that which it does not possess. It is the splendid panorama of the Rocky Mountain chain that stretches, a monstrous mass of snow-clad summits, along the western horizon, eighteen to thirty miles away. Across a flat and treeless plain you behold the long line of lesser summits, and then lifting behind them, towering skyward, the splendid procession of snow-clad giants, glittering and flashing in the translucent light of the full shining sun. The panorama is sublime, as fine as anything in Switzerland, and of a beauty worthy of a journey—a long journey—to behold. In Canada, the Rockies come so slowly upon you that they seem almost insignificant compared with their repute. But here, one realizes in fullest sense the dignity of this stupendous backbone of the continent. And the pellucid atmosphere of the mile-high altitude, gives renewed and re-enforced vision to the eye. The gigantic mountains stand forth with such distinctness that the old tale of the Englishman who set out to walk to them before breakfast—thinking them three instead of thirty miles away—is likely enough to have more than once occurred.

The great “Mountain Empire State” of Colorado is vastly rich in deposits of gold and silver and lead and antimony and copper and coal and iron, yet very few there are, or ever can be, who do or may amass fortunes therefrom. Her coal beds exceed in area the entire State of West Virginia nearly twice over, yet thousands of acres lie unworked and are now practically unworkable. Her oil fields are promising, a paraffine oil of high grade, yet no oil producer has made or can make any great stake out of them. Her agriculture and grazing interests already exceed the enormous values of her gold and silver, yet few farmers or cattle men make more than a living. Colorado is rich, fabulously rich, yet the wealth that is wrung from her rocks and her pastures and her tilled fields passes most of it into hands other than those who produce it.

The great railroad corporations get the first whack. It has cost enormously to build them; they are expensive to maintain; they are safe from competition by reason of the initial cost of their construction. They are entitled to consideration, and they demand it and enforce it to the limit. The freight rates are appalling, and so adjusted as to squeeze out of every natural product the cream of profit it may yield—sometimes only very thin skim milk is left. The passenger fares are high, usually four cents to ten cents per mile. The cost of living is onerous in Colorado; all freights brought there pay excessive tribute to the railways. So much for the general conditions. With mining it is yet more serious. The Rockefeller-Gugenheim Smelter combine now controls mercilessly all the smelting business of the State, and, as for that, of the mining country. And unless you have an ore that “will yield more than $20 per ton, you might as well not go into the mining business,” experienced mining men repeatedly observed to me.

Colorado boasts enormous agricultural and grazing wealth. She claims that the present values of her herds of cattle and horses, and flocks of sheep, of her orchards and irrigated crops already exceed that of her gold and silver and mineral production. This may be so, and yet after the cattle and sheep and horses are transported to distant markets and converted into cash, after her farmers have paid the enormous irrigation charges to the private corporations that control the water springs, the man on the soil makes little more than a bare living, the fat profits, if any there be, having passed into the capacious pockets of the water companies, of the transportation companies, of the great meat-packing and horse-buying companies. The farmers and grazers with whom I have talked tell me that if they come out even at the end of the year, with a small and moderate profit, they count themselves fortunate. Here and there, of course, a fortune may be amassed by an unusual piece of good luck by the man who raises cattle or fruit, or crops, but as a rule the undoubted profits of these industries are absorbed by the great corporate interests at whose mercy they lie.

Just what will be the outcome of these crushing industrial conditions it is difficult to forecast, but we already see the first expressions of popular dissatisfaction in the extensive labor strikes now prevailing in the Cripple Creek region, and threatening to spread to and include all of the mining camps and operations of the State and adjoining States. Corporate greed and unscrupulous selfishness arouse opposition, and then ensues corresponding combination, and too often counter aggression quite as unreasonable and quite as inconsiderate in scope and action. Men are but mortal, and “an eye for an eye” is too ancient an adage to have lost its force in this twentieth century.

Just how these transportation, mining, agricultural and industrial problems will be finally solved I dare not predict, but we will trust that the ultimate good sense of American manhood will work out a reasonable solution.

NINETEENTH LETTER.
ACROSS NEBRASKA.

On Burlington Route Express,
October 20, 1903. }

We left Denver upon the night express over the Burlington Railway system, and all day to-day are flying eastward across flat, flat Nebraska.

At dawn the country looked parched and treeless; expanses of buffalo grass and herds of cattle. Here and there the course of a dried-up stream marked by straggling cottonwood trees and alders, their leaves now turned a dull yellow brown. A drear land, but yet less heart-sickening than the stretches of bleak and barren landscape we have so often gazed upon through Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Despite the dry and parched appearance of this immediate region, it is yet counted a fine grazing country, and the cattle range and thrive all the year round upon the tufted bunches of the sweet, nutritious buffalo-grass that everywhere here naturally abounds.

By middle morning we are entering the more eastern farming section of the State, though still in western Nebraska. The land is all fenced, laid out in large farms, the fences and public roads running north and south and east and west. The farmhouses are neat, mostly, and set in tidy yards with groves of trees planted about. Large red barns, many hay and wheat stacks, illimitable fields of thick-growing wheat stubble, and miles of corn, the stalks bearing the large ears yet standing in the hill, while, as a general thing, the roughness has all been gathered in—the Southern way of handling the corn crops. No shocks standing like wigwams in the fields.

Fall plowing is also under way. We have just passed a man sitting on a sulky plow, driving four big horses abreast, his little six-year old daughter on his knee. A pretty sight. There are many windmills, one near each house and barn, some out in the wide fields, all pumping water, turned by the prairie winds that forever blow.

We are passing many small towns. All just alike. The square-fronted stores, the steepled churches, the neat residences, rows of trees planted along either side of the streets. “That dreadful American monotony,” as foreign visitors exclaim!

The country looks just like the flat prairie section of Manitoba, Assiniboia and Alberta, in Canada, that we traversed in August, except that this is all occupied and intelligently tilled, while the most part of that is yet open to the roaming coyote, and may be yet purchased from the Canadian Government or from the Railway Company, as is rapidly being done. And this country here looks longer settled than does northern Minnesota and North Dakota through which we passed.

The planting of trees in Nebraska seems to have been very general, and along the roadways, the farm division lines, and about the farmsteads and in the towns are now multitudes of large and umbrageous trees. And sometimes large areas have been planted, and are now become veritable woodland.

At the town of Lincoln, Mr. W. J. Bryan’s home city, we have stopped quite awhile, and in the distance can see the tall, white, dome-hooded cupola of the State Capitol through the yellow and brown foliage of autumnal tinted cottonwood.

Sitting in the forward smoker and falling into conversation with a group of Nebraska farmers, I found a number of substantial Democrats among them, admirers but no longer adherents of Mr. Bryan—“Our crops have never been so good and gold never so cheap and so plenty as during the last few years,” they said. And they were not surprised when they saw by the quotation of silver in the Denver morning paper that silver had never risen to so high a price in the open market as it holds to-day, sixty-eight cents per ounce. And they spoke of Grover Cleveland with profound respect. In Nebraska, they tell me, all possibility of a recrudescence of the Bryan vagaries is now certainly dead, and that this fine agricultural State is as surely Republican as is Ohio. The farmers are all doing well, making money and saving money. They are fast paying off such land mortgages as remain. Also, there are now few, very few, unoccupied lands in Nebraska. The State is practically filled up, and filled up with a permanent and contented population. As families grow, and sons and daughters come to manhood and womanhood, the old farms must be cut up and divided among them, or the surplus young folk must seek homes elsewhere. And of this surplus some are among the great American trek into the Canadian far north.

We reached Omaha, the chief city of Nebraska, late in the afternoon, coming into the fine granite station of the Burlington Railway system.

While in the city we were delightfully taken care of by our old school and college friends, to whom the vanished years were yet but a passing breath. We were sumptuously entertained at a banquet at the Omaha Club. We were dined and lunched and driven about with a warm-hearted hospitality which may only have its origin in a heart-to-heart friendship, which, beginning among young men at life’s threshold, comes down the procession of the years unchanged and as affectionately demonstrative as though we were all yet boys again. It carried me back to the days when we sat together and sang that famous German student song: “Denkt Oft Ihr Brueder an Unserer Juenglingsfreudigheit, es Kommt Nicht Wieder, Die Goldene Zeit.”

Omaha, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, forms, together with Kansas City on the south and St. Paul, and Minneapolis on the north, the middle of the three chief population centers between St. Louis, Chicago and Denver. It is the chief commercial center of Nebraska and of South Dakota, southern Montana and Idaho, and controls an immense trade.

In old times it was the chief town on the Missouri above St. Louis and still maintains the lead it then acquired. I was surprised to find it situated on a number of hills, some quite steep, others once steeper, now graded down to modern requirements. Its streets are wide and fairly well paved, and its blocks of buildings substantial. The residence streets we drove through contain many handsome houses, light yellow-buff brick being generally used, while Denver is a red brick town. The parks, enclosing hill and dale, are of considerable natural beauty, here again having advantage over Denver, where the flattened prairie roll presents few opportunities for landscape gardening.

The extensive stockyards and abattoirs of Armour, Swift and several other companies have made Omaha even a greater center of the meat trade than Kansas City. In company with W—— I spent the morning in inspecting these extensive establishments. The volume of business here transacted reaches out into all the chief grazing lands of the far West. The stockyards are supposed to be run by companies independent of the packing-houses, and to be merely hotels where the cattle brought in may be lodged and boarded until sold, and the cattle brokers are presumed to be the agents of the cattle owners who have shipped the stock, and to procure for these owners the highest price possible. But, as a matter of fact, the packing-houses control the stockyards, dominate the brokers, who are constantly near to them and far from the cattle owners, and the man on the range who once ships his cattle over the railroads, forthwith places himself at the mercy of the packer—the stock having been shipped must be fed and cared for either on the cars or in the yards, and this takes money—so the quicker the sale of them is made the better for the owner. Hence, inasmuch as the packer may refuse to buy until the waiting stock shall eat their heads off—the owner, through the broker, is compelled to sell as soon as he can, and is compelled to accept whatsoever price the packer may choose to offer him. So the packing companies grow steadily richer and their business spreads and Omaha increases also.

The other chief industry of Omaha is the great smelter belonging to the trust. Incorporated originally by a group of enterprising Omaha men as a local enterprise, it was later sold out to the Gugenheim Trust, whose influence with the several railroads centering in Omaha has been sufficient to preserve the business there, though the smelter is really far away from ores and fluxes.

These two enterprises, the cattle killing and packing and ore-reducing, together with large railway shops, constitute the chief industrial interests of Omaha, and, for the rest, the city depends upon the extensive farming and grazing country lying for five hundred miles between her and the Rocky Mountains. As they prosper, so does Omaha; as they are depressed, so is she. And only one thing, one catastrophe does Omaha fear, far beyond words to tell—the fierce, hot winds that every few years come blowing across Nebraska from the furnace of the Rocky Mountains’ alkali deserts. They do not come often, but when they do, the land dies in a night. The green and fertile country shrivels and blackens before their breath, the cattle die, the fowls die, the things that creep and walk and fly die. The people—the people flee from the land or die upon it in pitiful collapse. Then it is that Omaha shrivels and withers too. Twice, twice within the memory of living man have come these devastating winds, and twice has Omaha suffered from their curse, and even now Omaha is but recovering her activity of the days before the plague, forgetful of a future that—well! men here say that such a universal catastrophe may never again occur.

And the handsome city is prosperous and full of buoyant life.

We now go on to St. Louis and thence to Cincinnati and so home.

TWENTIETH LETTER.
ALONG IOWA AND INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS.

Charleston, W. Va., October 23, 1903.

Our journey from Omaha to St. Louis was down the valley of the Missouri, a night’s ride. We crossed the mighty river over an enormously high bridge and then followed the crest of an equally lofty embankment across several miles of wide, rich bottoms to Council Bluffs, in the State of Iowa. “Nobody dares fool with the Missouri,” a man said to me in Omaha, as he pointed out where the voracious river was boldly eating up a wide, black-soiled meadow in spite of the square rods of willow mats and tons of rocks that had been laid down to prevent it. “When the Missouri decides to swallow up a bottom, or a village, or a town, she just does it, there is no escape.” And even the citizens of Omaha do not sleep well of nights when the mighty brown tide fumes too angrily. Hence the extraordinarily high bridge and enormous embankment we traversed when we sought to cross over to dry land in Iowa. The waters of the Missouri are as swift as those of the Yukon, but the river flows for a thousand miles through the soft muds of the Western prairies, instead of through the banks of firm gravel, and it eats its way here and there when and where it chooses, and no man can prevent. Hence the railways, while they traverse the general course of the great valley of the Missouri, do not dare follow too closely the river banks, but they rather keep far away and have just as little to do with the treacherous stream as they may. So it was we did not see much more of the Missouri, but sped into wide, flat, rich stretches of alluvial country until darkness fell upon us and night shut out all suggestions of the river.

When morning dawned we were among immense fields of tall corn, corn so high as to quite hide a horseman riding through it. The farm-houses were large and substantial. The farmstead buildings were big and trim. The cattle we saw were big, the hogs were big, the fowls were big. And over all there brooded a certain atmosphere of big contentedness. We were in the State of Missouri, and passing through some of its richest, most fruitful, fertile farming lands. A rich land of rich masters, once tilled by slave labor, a land still rich, still possessed by owners well-to-do and yielding yet greater crops under the stimulus of labor that is free.

When we had retired for the night our car was but partially filled. When we awoke in the morning, and I entered the men’s toilet-room, I found it full of big, jovial, Roman priests. Our car was packed with them. They had got in at every station; they continued to get in until we reached St. Louis. The eminent Roman prelate, the Right Reverend Archbishop of St. Louis, Kain, once Bishop of Wheeling, had surrendered his great office to the Pope, and the churchly fathers of all the middle West were gathering to St. Louis, to participate in the funeral pageant. A couple of young priests were talking about the “old man,” while a white-haired father spoke of “His Eminence,” and I learned that Cardinal Gibbons, of Baltimore, was expected to also attend the funeral ceremonies.

We breakfasted on the train, and in the dining-car sat at table with two brother Masons wearing badges, and from them I learned that they were also traveling to St. Louis, there to attend the great meeting of the Grand Lodge of the State of Missouri. The city would be full of Masons, and the ceremonies of the Masonic Order and of the Roman Church would absorb the attention of St. Louis for the next few days. And so we found it, when we at last came to a stop within the great Central Railway Station—next to that of Boston, the largest in the world—where we observed that the crowd within it was made up chiefly of men wearing the Masonic badges, their friends and families, and the round-collared priests. A strange commingling and only possible in America. In Mexico, a land where the Roman Church dominates, though it no longer rules, the Masons do not wear their badges or show outward token of their fraternal bonds. In England, where the king is head of the Masonic Order, there, until the last half century, the Roman Catholic subject might not vote nor hold office. Here in St. Louis, in free America, I saw the two mixing and mingling in friendly and neighborly comradeship.

I do not know whether you have ever been in St. Louis, but if you have, I am sure you have felt the subtle, attractive charm of it. It is an old city. It was founded by the French. The old French-descended families of to-day talk among themselves the language of La Belle France. For a century it has been the Mecca of the Southern pioneer, who found in it and about it the highest northern limit of his emigration. Missouri was a slave state. St. Louis was a Southern slave-served city. The Virginians, who crossed through Greenbrier and flat-boated down the Kanawha and Ohio, settled in it or went out further west from it. Alvah, Charles and Morris Hansford, the Lewises, the Ruffners, made their flatboats along the Kanawha and floated all the way to it. St. Louis early acquired the courtly manners of the South. She is a city to-day which has preserved among her people much of that Southern savor which marks a Southern gentleman wherever he may be. St. Louis is conservative; her French blood makes her so. She is gracious and well-mannered; her southern founders taught her to be so. And when the struggle of the Civil War was over, and the Union armies had kept her from the burning and pillaging and havoc and wreck that befell her more southern sisters, St. Louis naturally responded to the good fortune that had so safely guarded her, and took on the renewed energy and wealth-acquiring powers of the unfolding West. The marvelous developments of the Southwest, and now of Mexico, by American railroad extension, has built up and is building up St. Louis, just as the great Northwest has poured its vitalizing energies, its boundless wheat crops, into Chicago. Corn and cattle and cotton have made St. Louis, and Spanish is taught in her public schools. Chicago may be the chief of the cities upon the great lakes; St. Louis must forever remain the mistress of the commerce and trade and wealth of the great Mississippi basin, with New Orleans as her seaport upon the south, Baltimore, Newport News, Norfolk on the Chesapeake Bay, her ports upon the east. St. Louis is self-contained. She owns herself. Most of the real estate in and out of St. Louis is owned by her citizens. Her mortgages are held by her own banks and trust companies. Chicago is said to be chiefly owned by the financiers of Boston and New York. The St. Louisian, when he makes his pile and stacks his fortune, builds a home there and invests his hoard. The Chicagoan when he wins a million in the wheat pit or, like Yerkes, makes it out of street railway deals, hies himself to New York and forgets that he ever lived west of Buffalo.

Hence, you find a quite different spirit prevailing among the people of St. Louis from Chicago. This difference in mental attitude toward the city the stranger first entering St. Louis apprehends at once, and each time he returns to visit the great city, that impression deepens. I felt it when first I visited St. Louis just eleven years ago, when attending the first Nicaragua Canal Convention as a delegate from West Virginia. I have felt it more keenly on every occasion when I have returned.

The Great Union Depot of St. Louis is the pride of the city. It was designed after the model of the superb Central Bahnhof of Frankfort on the Main, in Germany, the largest in Europe, but is bigger and more conveniently arranged. In the German station, I noted a certain disorderliness. Travelers did not know just what trains to enter, and often had to climb down out of one car to climb up into another, and then try it again. Here, although a much greater number of trains come in and go out in the day, American method directs the traveler to the proper train almost as a matter of course.

From the station we took our way to the Southern Hotel, for so many years, and yet to-day, the chief hostelry in the city. A building of white marble, covering one entire block, with four entrances converging upon the office in the center. Here the Southern planters and Mississippi steamboat captains always tarry, here the corn and cattle kings of Kansas and the great Southwest congregate. The politicians of Missouri, too, have always made the Southern a sort of political exchange. Other and newer hotels, like the Planters, have been built in St. Louis, but none has ever outclassed the Southern. We were not expecting to tarry long at the hotel, nor did we, for after waiting only a short interval in the wide reception-room, a carriage drove up, a gracious-mannered woman in black descended, and we were soon in the keeping of one of the most delightful hostesses of old St. Louis. Her carriage was at our command, her time was ours, her home our own so long as we should remain. And we had never met her until the bowing hotel clerk brought her smiling to us. So much for acquaintance with mutual friends.

The morning was spent visiting the more notable of the great retail stores, viewing the miles of massive business blocks, watching the volume of heavy traffic upon the crowded streets. At noon we lunched with our hostess in a home filled with rare books and objects of art, collected during many years of foreign residence and travel, and I was taken to the famous St. Louis Club, shown over its imposing granite club-house, and put up there for a fortnight, should I stay so long.

In the afternoon we were driven through the sumptuous residence section of the city out toward the extensive park on whose western borders are now erected the aggregation of stupendous buildings of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. This residence section of St. Louis has always been impressive to me. There is so much of it. The mansions are so diverse in architecture, so splendid in design. “Palaces,” they would be called in England, in Germany, in France. Here the plain St. Louisian says “Come up to my house,” and walks you into the palace with no ado. Evidences of the material wealth of this great city they are. Not one, not two, but tens and hundreds of palatial homes. Men and women live in them whom you and I have never read about, have never heard about, will never know about, yet there they are, successful, intelligent, influential in the affairs of this Republic quite as much so as you and I. And the larger part of these splendid mansions are lived in by men and women who represent in themselves that distinctively American quality of “getting on.” One granite palace pointed out to me, is inhabited by a man and his wife, neither of whom can more than read and write. Yet both are gifted with great good sense, and he lives there because he saved his wages when a chore hand in a brewery until at last he owned the brewery. Another beautiful home is possessed by a man who began as a day laborer and then struck it rich digging gold in the Black Hills. Calves and cattle built one French chateau; corn, plain corn, built several more, and cotton and mules a number of others. Steamboats and railways, and trade and commerce and manufactures have built miles of others, while the great Shaw’s Botanical Garden, established and endowed and donated to the city, came from a miserly bachelor banker’s penchant to stint and save. The incomes of the hustling citizens of St. Louis remain her own; the incomes of the rent-payers of Chicago, like the interest on her mortgages, go into the pockets of stranger owners who dwell in distant cities in the East.

The extensive Fair grounds and Exposition Buildings were driven upon and among. A gigantic enterprise, an ambitious enterprise. St. Louis means to outdo Chicago, and this time Chicago will surely be outdone. The buildings are bigger and there are more of them than at Chicago. They are painted according to a comprehensive color scheme, not left a blinding white, less gaudy than the French effort of 1900, more harmonious than the Pan-American effects at Buffalo two years ago. The prevailing tints are cream white for the perpendicular walls and statuary, soft blues, greens, reds, for the roofs and pinnacles, and much gilding. More than twenty millions of dollars are now being expended upon this great Exposition show. For one brief summer it is to dazzle the world, forever it is to glorify St. Louis. The complacent St. Louisian now draws a long breath and mutters contentedly, “Thank God, for one time Chicago isn’t in it.” The Art buildings alone are to be permanent. They are not yet complete. I wonder whether it will be possible to have them as splendidly sumptuous as were the marble Art Palaces I beheld in Paris three years ago—the only works of French genius I saw in that Exposition that seemed to me worthy of the greatness of France. The Exposition grounds and buildings are yet in an inchoate condition, and but for the fact that Americans are doing and pushing the work, one would deem it impossible for the undertaking to be completed within the limited time. As it is, many a West Virginian and Kanawhan will next summer enjoy to the full these evidences of American power.

In the late afternoon we were entertained at the Country Club, a delightful bit of field and meadow and woodland, a few miles beyond the city. Here the tired business man may come from the desk and shop and warehouse and office, and play like a boy in the sunshine and among green, living things. Here the young folk of the big city, some of them, gather for evening dance and quiet suppers when the summer heat makes city life too hard. Here golf and polo are played all through the milder seasons of the year. We were asked to remain over for the following day, when a polo match would be played. We should have liked to see the ponies chase the ball, but our time of holiday was coming to an end. We might not stay.

In the evening we were entertained at a most delightful banquet. A large table of interesting and cultivated people were gathered to meet ourselves. We had never met them before, we might never meet them again, but for the brief hour we were as though intimates of many years.

All the night we came speeding across the rolling prairie lands of Illinois and Indiana into Ohio. A country I have seen before, a landscape wide and undulating, filled with immense wheat and corn fields. The home of a well-established and affluent population. The sons and grandsons of the pioneers who, in the early days of the last century, poured in from all quarters of the East, many Virginians and Kanawhans among the number. A country from which the present younger generations have gone and are now going forth into the land yet further west, and even up into the as yet untenanted prairies and plains of the Canadian north.

In the morning we were in Cincinnati and felt almost at home. The city, smoky as usual, marred by the blast of the great fire of the early summer. The throngs upon the streets were just about as numerous, just about as hustling as those elsewhere we have seen, yet there was a variation. The men not so tall, more chunky in build, bigger round the girth, stolid, solid. The large infusion of German blood shows itself in Cincinnati, even more than in St. Louis, where the lank Westerner is more in evidence.

It was dusk when the glimmering lights of Charleston showed across the placid Kanawha. We were once more at home. We had been absent some seventy days; we had journeyed some eight thousand miles upon sea and lake and land. We had enjoyed perfect health. We had met no mishap. We had traveled from almost the Arctic Circle to the sight of Mexico. We had traversed the entire Pacific coast of the continent from Skagway to Los Angeles. We had twice crossed the continent. We had beheld the greatness of our country, the vigor and wealth and energy of many cities, the splendor and power of the Republic.

ON THE GREAT KANAWHA.

OUR KANAWHA GARDEN.

MAP OF ROUTE IN U. S.

MAP OF UPPER YUKON BASIN.

INDEX.

Abbots, Secular, 242

Agricultural and grazing wealth of Colorado, 305.

Animal life, 121.

An outlaw at White Horse Rapids, 178.

A prospector’s story, 203.

Atlin, 75, 88.

A wild night, 201.

Banff, 30.

Bathing in Salt Lake, 280.

Bird notes, 28, 65, 131, 201.

Bishop Bompas, 115.

Bishop Bompas on the Coast Indians, 214.

Blanket concessions from Ottawa, 145.

Boyle, 146.

British Columbia River, 40.

Broncho-busting match, 283–299.

Canadian Pacific Railway, 27.

Canadian Rockies, 47.

Caribou Station, 81.

Cascades, 220.

Chinatown, 234.

Cincinnati, 324.

Clarence Straight, 60.

Climate of Oregon, 228.

Cold of the north land, 186.

Colorado and Denver, 300.

Crossing the Rockies, 38.

Dangerous navigation, 200.

Dawson Charlie, 81, 115.

Dawson City, 112, 132, 136.

Dawson Horticultural Society, 150.

Del Monte hotel at Monterey, 241.

Detroit River, 13.

Dixon Channel and Port Simpson, 59.

Dogs—Malamutes and Huskies, 136, 180.

Dog ranch, 149.

Dr. Grant, of St. Andrews Hospital, 171.

Edmonton to Dawson, 174.

Fifty Mile River, 121.

First glimpse of the Great Salt Lake, 266.

Fort Selkirk, 128.

Fort Wrangel, 65.

Fraser River, 43.

Frederick Sound, 66.

Freezing of the Yukon, 193.

French Canadian trapper, 173.

Glacier Hotel, 43.

Glenwood Springs, 283.

Government of Yukon Territory, 87.

Grand River, 282.

Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, 35.

Grayling, 82, 117.

Green River, 282.

Gulf of Georgia, 56.

Hells Gates, 127.

How the Government searches for gold, 195.

Icebergs and whales, 66.

Immigrants from the U. S., 30.

Indian laborers in Washington and Oregon, 213.

International boundary line, 76.

Japanese on the coast, 234.

Japanese rice planter, 258.

Juneau, 69.

Ketchikan, 59.

Kicking Horse River, 39.

Klondike, 154.

Lake Atlin, 88.

Lake Bennett, 76.

Lake Lebarge, 121.

Lake Marsh, 88.

Lake St. Clair, 14.

Lake Superior, 18.

Lake Taggish, 93.

Los Angeles, 249.

Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, 260.

Lynn Canal, 70.

Luxurious living in Dawson, 165.

Mackinac, 14.

Miles Cañon, 116.

Millbank Sound, 203.

Mineral wealth of Colorado, 304.

Mining on Bonanza Creek, 140, 154.

Mining on El Dorado Fork, 157.

Mining on Pine Creek, 94.

Mining on Hunker Creek, 158.

Minneapolis, 24.

Mode of living at the diggings, 108.

Mojave Desert, 257.

Monterey, 241.

Mormon literature, 273.

Mormon Temple, 270.

Mt. Shasta, 226.

Narrow-gauge railway from Skagway, 75.

Nebraska, 307.

Northwest Mounted Police, 172.

Ogden to Salt Lake City, 269.

Omaha, 310.

Otter Creek, 101.

Our landlady at Dawson, 163.

Peace River, 33.

Pelly River, 128.

Placer mining, 94.

Portland, 219.

Preparations for winter, 180.

Presidio, 234.

Ptarmigan, 101.

Public school in Dawson, 172.

Puget Sound cities, 219.

Puget Sound crabs, 209.

Queen Charlotte Sound, 56.

Returning travellers from the Klondike, 207.

Ride along the coast, 242.

Ride to Portland, 216.

Ride to Yakima, 215.

Salmon, 60.

Salmon at Ketchikan, 59.

Salmon in the Columbia River, 220.

Salt Lake City, 270.

Salt Lake City to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, 282.

San Francisco, 230.

Santa Barbara, 242.

Santa Cruz, 238.

San Joaquin Valley, 257.

Sausalito and Mt. Tamalpais, 233.

Sault St. Marie, 17.

Sawmill at Tacoma, 212.

Seattle, 206.

Secret of the success of Mormonism in Utah, 275.

Silver Bow River, 30.

Skagway, 70, 75.

Spruce Creek, 102.

Steamer “City of Seattle,” 52.

Steamer White Horse, 116.

Stewart River, 128.

St.Louis, 317.

St. Paul, 20, 22.

Sutton, geologist, 93.

Tacoma, 210.

The Five Fingers, 127.

Thirty Mile River, 122.

Treadgold, 146.

Treadwell mines, 69.

Trip to the Taku Glacier, 109.

Upper Yukon, 122.

Up the Yukon from Dawson, 180.

U. S. Fish Commission, 82.

Valley of the Willamette, 224.

Vancouver, 48, 51.

Victoria, 48, 51, 52.

Washington State Fair at Yakima, 214.

Wheat land, 26, 29, 34, 35.

White Pass, 87.

Wild sheep and goats, 101.

Winnipeg, 26.

Work in the diggings in winter, 192.

Yukon above Dawson, 131.

Zodiacal lights in winter, 192.

Notes

[A]Caribou Crossing now called Carcross.

Transcriber’s Note

Small inconsistencies in punctuation in the Index and captions of photographs have been resolved. Two ‘N’ entries in the Index (“Narrow-gauge railway” and “Northwest Mounted Police”), were misplaced, and have been moved to their correct positions.

There were several other indexing errors:

“Portland was corrected to refer to p. 219.
“Cincinati” was corrected to refer to p. 324.

The following obvious printer’s errors are noted, and where unambiguous, have been corrected.

70 | we are sor[r]ry | Removed extra ‘r’.
97 | and blow it in [in] leisurely | Removed repeated ‘in’.
110 | the great [Llewellen] or Taku glacier | sic
166 | N. W. [N/M]. P. | North West Mounted Police
196 | so I [persume/presume] | Corrected.
238 | the very best of them all.[”] | Added.
279 | they have also never fled from, but the[y] rather... | Added.

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Table of Contents

- In To The Yukon

- PREFACE.
- CONTENTS
- ILLUSTRATIONS

- In To The Yukon

- FIRST LETTER. THE GREAT LAKES, CLEVELAND TO DETROIT.

- SECOND LETTER. ST. PAUL, WINNIPEG AND BANFF; THE WHEAT LANDS OF THE FAR NORTHWEST.

- THIRD LETTER. BANFF TO VANCOUVER ACROSS THE ROCKIES AND SELKIRKS.

- VICTORIA A SLEEPY ENGLISH TOWN.

- FOURTH LETTER. VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY; FJORDS AND FORESTS.

- FIFTH LETTER. SKAGWAY, CARIBOU CROSSING[A] AND ATLIN.

- SIXTH LETTER. THE GREAT LLEWELLYN OR TAKU GLACIER.

- SEVENTH LETTER. VOYAGING DOWN THE MIGHTY YUKON.

- EIGHTH LETTER. DAWSON AND THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE.

- NINTH LETTER. MEN OF THE KLONDIKE.

- TENTH LETTER. DOG LORE OF THE NORTH.

- ELEVENTH LETTER. HOW THE GOVERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD.

- WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS.

- TWELFTH LETTER. SEATTLE, THE FUTURE MISTRESS OF THE TRADE AND COMMERCE OF THE NORTH.

- THIRTEENTH LETTER. THE VALLEY OF THE WILLAMETTE.

- FOURTEENTH LETTER. SAN FRANCISCO.

- FIFTEENTH LETTER. LOS ANGELES.

- SIXTEENTH LETTER. SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY.

- SEVENTEENTH LETTER. A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH.

- EIGHTEENTH LETTER. COLORADO AND DENVER.

- NINETEENTH LETTER. ACROSS NEBRASKA.

- TWENTIETH LETTER. ALONG IOWA AND INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS.

- INDEX.
- Notes
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE