America, Volume 6 (of 6)

Within Alaska, the route of exploration continues through Clarence Strait to the Alexander Archipelago, comprising several thousand islands, many of which are mountainous, and about eleven hundred of the larger ones have been charted. Here is Fort Wrangell, seven hundred miles from Victoria, on one of the islands, a little settlement named after Baron Wrangell, the Russian Governor of Alaska in 1834. Upon landing, the visitors see the Indians and their chief curiosity, the "totem poles," erected in front of their houses, and carved with rude figures emblematic of the owner and his ancestors. These poles are twenty to sixty feet in height, and two to five feet in diameter. The natives are divided into clans, of which the Whale, the Eagle, the Wolf and the Raven are the chief representatives and are said to have been the progenitors. These are also carved on the poles and show the intermarriages of ancestors, the leading families having the most elaborate poles. Beyond Fort Wrangell are Soukhoi Channel and Frederick Sound, leading into Chatham Strait, having on its western side Baranoff Island, on the outer edge of which is Sitka Sound. Here is Sitka, the capital of Alaska, in a well-protected bay dotted with pleasant islands in front and having snow-covered mountains for a high background. Alexander Baranoff founded the town in 1804, the first Russian Governor of Alaska, and there are now about twelve hundred inhabitants, mostly Indians. The old wooden Baranoff Castle, which was the residence of the Russian Governors, is on a hill near the landing-place. The main street leads past the Greek Church, surmounted with its bulbous spire, having six sweet-toned bells brought from Moscow, and adjoining it are various old-time log houses built by the early Russians. The church is still maintained by the Russian Government. The visitors buy curiosities and invest their small change in the Indians who get up monotonous dances or exciting canoe races for their amusement. It is a curious fact that, owing to the Kuro Siwo, or Japanese warm current coming across the Pacific, Sitka has a mild and most equable climate, the summer temperature averaging 54° and the winter 32°, the thermometer seldom falling to zero.

The Stephens Passage leads north from Frederick Sound, and into it opens Taku Inlet, a large fiord displaying fine glaciers. Here at Holkham Bay in 1876 began the first placer gold-mining in Alaska. Just beyond is Gastineaux Channel, between the mainland and Douglas Island. Upon its eastern bank, nine hundred miles from Victoria, is Juneau, the largest town in Alaska, having fifteen hundred population, about half of them whites; an American settlement, begun in 1880 under Yankee auspices, and named after the nephew of the founder of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The people are mostly gold-miners. The little white houses are on a narrow strip of comparatively level land along the shore, having a high and precipitous mountain behind. Juneau deals in furs and Chilkat blankets, the latter, when genuine, being made of the hair of mountain-goats and colored with native dyes. It is also a starting-point for the Klondyke and Yukon regions. Across the narrow strait, upon Douglas Island, is the famous Treadwell gold-mine, having three enormous ore-crushing mills, the largest in the world, aggregating nearly eight hundred stamps. This is a huge mountain of gold-ore which John Treadwell bought in 1882 from its owner for $430. It has paid since then $9,000,000 in dividends, and now with increased output crushes three thousand tons of ore daily, netting $4 gold per ton, and pours into the laps of the Rothschilds, its present owners, probably $2,000,000 annually from the enlarged product. The ore actually in sight in the mountain is estimated to be worth five times as much as was originally paid for the whole of Alaska. There is a native Indian cemetery adjoining Juneau, having curious little huts containing the cremated remains of the dead, with each one's personal effects.

THE GREAT MUIR GLACIER.

Passing west of Douglas Island and through Icy Strait to Glacier Bay, a magnificent view is presented. Snow-covered mountains rise six and seven thousand feet all around, and to the northwest is the imposing Mount Fairweather range, elevated over fifteen thousand feet. Glacier Bay extends forty-five miles up into the land, its width gradually contracting from twelve to three miles. Small icebergs and floes cover much of the surface, as they are constantly detached from the glaciers descending into it. At the head of the bay is the greatest curiosity of Alaska and the most stupendous glacier existing,—the Muir Glacier,—named in honor of Professor John Muir, the geologist of the Pacific coast, who first saw it in 1879 and thoroughly explored it in 1890. When Vancouver was here at the close of the eighteenth century he wrote that a wall of ice extended across the mouth of the bay. The belief is that the glacier once filled the entire bay and has gradually receded. Near the middle of the bay is Willoughby Island, a rock two miles long and fifteen hundred feet high, showing striated and polished surfaces and glacial grooves from bottom to top. This glacier far exceeds all the Swiss ice-fields put together, and it enters the sea with a front one mile and a half wide and two to three hundred feet high. Unlike the dirty terminal moraines of the Swiss glaciers, this is a splendid wall of clear blue and white ice, built up in columns, spires and huge crystal masses, displaying beautiful caves and grottoes. It goes many hundreds of feet below the surface of the water, and from its front, masses of ice constantly detach and fall into the bay with noises like thunder or the discharge of artillery. Huge bergs topple over, clouds of spray arise, and gigantic waves are sent across the water. Every few minutes this goes on as the glacier, moving forward with resistless motion, breaks to pieces at the end. The field of ice making this wonderful glacier is formed by nine main streams and seventeen smaller arms. It occupies a vast amphitheatre back among the mountains, thirty to forty miles across, and where it breaks out between the higher mountains to descend to the sea is about three miles wide. The superficial area of this mass of ice is three hundred and fifty square miles. It moves forward from seven to ten feet daily at the edges and more in the centre, and in August, when it loses the most ice, the estimate is that about two hundred millions of cubic feet fall into the bay every day. It loses more ice in the summer than it gains in the winter, and thus steadily retrogrades. The visitors go up to its face, although it cannot be ascended there, and then landing alongside approach it through a lateral moraine, and can there ascend to the top and walk upon the surface. The character and appearance of this famous glacier were much changed by an earthquake in 1899. Among the attractions are the mirages that are frequent here, which have been the origin of the "Phantom City," which early explorers fancifully described as upon Glacier Bay. Other huge glaciers also enter these waters, among them the Grand Pacific, Hugh Miller and Gelkie Glaciers.

THE KLONDYKE AND CAPE NOME.

Northward from the Gastineaux Channel stretches the grand fiord of the Lynn Canal for sixty miles. Snow-crowned mountains surround it, from whose sides many glaciers descend. At the upper end this Canal divides into two forks—the Chilkoot and Chilkat Inlets, at 59° north latitude. This begins the overland route to the Klondyke gold region, and upon the eastern inlet, Chilkoot, are on either bank the two bustling little towns that have grown out of the Klondyke immigration—Skaguay on the eastern and Dyea on the western shore. Each of them has three to four thousand people, with hotels, lodging-places and miners' outfitting shops. Dyea is the United States military post, with a garrison, and here begin the trails across the mountain passes to the upper waters of the Yukon. A railway is constructed over White's Pass to Bennett Lake, and is now the chief route of travel. Pyramid Harbor and Chilkat with salmon-canning establishments are on Chilkat Inlet. Beyond White's Pass, which crosses the international boundary, the land descends in British America to the headwaters of the Yukon River, which are navigated northwest to Dawson and Circle City and other mining camps of the Klondyke region, where the prolific gold-fields have had such rich yields, there having been $40,000,000 gold taken out in two years. The Yukon flows a winding course westward to Norton Sound on the Bering Sea, discharging through a wide-spreading delta. The port of St. Michaels is to the northward. There are two routes to the Klondyke from San Francisco—via Skaguay and overland a distance of about twenty-three hundred miles, and via St. Michaels and up the Yukon forty-seven hundred miles.

The Alaskan coast beyond the Muir Glacier is bordered by the great St. Elias mountain range, rising in Mount Logan to nineteen thousand five hundred and thirty-nine feet, the highest of the Rockies, and in Mount St. Elias nearer the coast to eighteen thousand and twenty-four feet. From the broad flanks of St. Elias the vast Malaspina Glacier flows down to Icy Bay on the Pacific Ocean. There are mountains all about this region, which the official geographers are naming after public men, among them being Mount Dewey. To the westward the vast Alaska peninsula projects far out, dividing the Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea, terminating in the Fox Islands, of which Ounalaska is the port, and having the Aleutian Islands spreading beyond still farther westward. It is a remarkable fact, indicating the vast extent of the United States, that the extremity of the Aleutian group is as far in latitude westward from San Francisco as the Penobscot River and coast of Maine are eastward. To the north is the Bering Strait, having the Russian East Cape of Siberia projecting opposite to the Alaskan Cape Prince of Wales to guard the passage into the Arctic Ocean. Here, upon the southern shore of the protruding end of Alaska, and fronting Norton Sound up almost under the Arctic Circle, is the noted Cape Nome, the latest discovered gold-field, about a hundred miles northwest of St. Michaels. Fabulous golden sands are spread out in gulches and on the beaches, and Nome City has become quite a settlement. This is the latest El Dorado to which such an enormous rush of prospectors and gold-hunters was made in the early spring of 1900, many thousands filling up every available steamer that could be got to sail northward. The prolific output of these gold-bearing sands is said to exceed the Klondyke in its yield, and this will be the golden Mecca until somebody crosses over into Siberia or goes up nearer the North Pole, and finds there a new deposit of treasure. Already it is said that Nome City spreads practically for twenty miles along the sea-beach, and that the industrious miners are getting much gold by dredging far out under the sea, and expect to secure fifty millions annually from this remote but extraordinary region.

Nome City, like everywhere else that the hardy American pioneer raises the flag for discovery and settlement, has its newspaper, the Gold Digger, and this enterprising publication thus poetically describes the new El Dorado of the Arctic seas, the "Golden Northland":

Wonderful is our latest American Continental possession—the rich territory of Alaska. Limitless are its resources, unmatchable its possibilities. One of its admirers thus sounds its praises: "In scenery, Alaska dwarfs the world. Think of six hundred and seventeen thousand square miles of landscape. Put Pike's Peak on Mount Washington or Mount Mitchell and it would hardly even up with Mount Logan. All the glaciers of Switzerland and the Tyrol dwindle to pitiful summer ice-wagon chunks beside the vast ice empires of Glacier Bay or mighty Malaspina. Think of a mass of blue-green ice forty miles long by twenty-five miles wide, nearly the size of the whole State of Rhode Island, and five thousand feet thick, glittering resplendently in the weird, dazzling light of a midnight sun. Imagine cataracts by scores from one thousand to three thousand feet high; ocean channels thousands of feet deep, walled in by snow-capped mountains; sixty-one volcanoes, ten of them still belching fire and smoke; boiling springs eighteen miles in circumference, used by hundreds of Indians for all their cooking; schools of whales spouting like huge marine fire-engines and tumbling somersaults over each other like big lubberly boys, weighing one hundred to two hundred thousands of pounds each; rivers so jammed with fish that tens of thousands of them are crowded out of the water high up on the shore; and woods alive with elk, moose, deer, bear, and all sorts and conditions of costly fur-clad aristocrats of the fox, wolf, lynx and beaver breeds. Growing country, this of ours."

PUGET SOUND TO SAN FRANCISCO.

Captain George Vancouver, already referred to, who named Vancouver Island, had among his officers a Lieutenant Puget. From him came the name of Puget Sound, stretching eighty miles southward from Vancouver Island and the Strait of Juan de Fuca into Washington State, ramifying into many bays and inlets, and having numerous islands. The Sound covers two thousand square miles and has eighteen hundred miles of coast line, being a splendid inland sea with admirable harbors. Its peculiar configuration makes very high tides, sometimes reaching twelve to eighteen feet. At the entrance near the head of the Strait of Juan de Fuca is the United States port of entry, Port Townsend, in a picturesque situation with the large graystone Custom House on the bluff, a conspicuous structure. Three formidable forts, Wilson, Casey and Flagler, guard the entrance from the sea. Opposite, on the eastern shore of the Sound, is Everett with a fine harbor, the terminal of the Great Northern Railway. To the northwest, a sentinel outpost of the Cascade Range, rises Mount Baker, nearly eleven thousand feet high. To the southward, on the circling shores of Elliott Bay, is Seattle, named after an Indian chief and founded in 1852, built on a series of terraces rising above the water, the chief commercial city of Puget Sound, and having sixty thousand population. On the southeastern arm of the Sound, called Commencement Bay, is Tacoma, the terminal of the Northern Pacific Railway, with fifty thousand people. Its Indian name comes from its great lion, Mount Tacoma (sometimes called Rainier), a giant of the Cascades, rising fourteen thousand five hundred and twenty feet, and in full view to the southeast of the city. Fourteen glaciers flow down its sides, the chief one, Nisqually Glacier, seven miles long, on the southern slope, being considered the finest on the coast south of Alaska. This mountain, like other peaks of the Cascades, is an extinct volcano, its crater still emitting sulphurous fumes and heat. Mount St. Helens, not far away, which was in eruption in 1898, is regarded as the most active volcano in the range, its massive rounded dome rising over nine thousand feet. Across on the southwestern shore of Puget Sound is the capital of Washington State, Olympia, with five thousand people.

Portland, the chief town of Oregon, is but a short distance south of Puget Sound, on the Willamette River, twelve miles from its confluence with the Columbia, and at the head of deep-sea navigation, one hundred and ten miles from the ocean. This is the leading business centre of the Pacific northwest, having seventy thousand people and extensive trade. It is finely situated, and from the heights on its western border is given a most superb view of the Cascades, the range grandly stretching over a hundred miles. The Mazama Club of earnest mountain explorers at Portland have done much to make known to the world the scenery and grandeur of these attractive mountains. Fifteen miles up the Willamette, at Oregon City, are the Falls, where that river descends forty feet in a splendid horseshoe cataract, displaying great beauty and furnishing valuable power. To the southward is Salem, on the Willamette, the capital of Oregon, having five thousand population. The "Oregon trail," as the route from San Francisco into this region was called, ascends the Rogue River, so named from the Indians of the region, crosses the Siskiyou Mountain, and descends on the southern side to the headwaters of the Sacramento. To the eastward, near the California boundary, high up in the Cascades, is the strangely constructed Crater Lake. It is at over sixty-two hundred feet elevation, and occupies an abyss produced by the subsidence of an enormous volcano, being six miles long and four wide. A perpendicular rocky wall one to two thousand feet high entirely surrounds it, and the water, without outlet or apparent inflow, is fully two thousand feet deep and densely blue in color. In the centre is Wizard Island, rising eight hundred and fifty feet, an extinct volcanic cone, thus presenting one crater within another. The district containing this wonderful lake has been made a reservation called the Oregon National Park. Some distance to the southward, the whole country being mountainous and the lower slopes covered with forests of splendid pines, is the grand snow-covered dome of Mount Shasta, one of the noblest of the Cascades (in California called the Coast Range), rising fourteen thousand four hundred and forty feet, a huge extinct volcano, having a crater in its western peak twenty-five hundred feet deep and three-quarters of a mile wide. Beyond, the Sacramento Valley stretches far away southward, passing Chico and Marysville, to Sacramento. It was to the eastward, near Coloma, that the first discovery of California gold was made in February, 1848, on the farm of Colonel Sutter, the county having been appropriately named El Dorado.

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AND CITY.

The San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers, having united, flow westward into Suisun Bay, thence by a strait to the circular and expansive San Pablo Bay, which in turn empties into San Francisco Bay. On the strait connecting Suisun and San Pablo Bays is Benicia, where lived the famous pugilist John C. Heenan, the "Benicia Boy," and the immense forge-hammer he wielded is on exhibition there. At the head of San Pablo Bay is Napa, or Mare Island, the location of the Navy Yard. Upon the mainland opposite is Vallejo, whence a railway runs up the fertile Napa Valley, through orchards and vineyards and among mineral springs, to Calistoga. Near here is the strange Petrified Forest, where there are scattered upon a tract of four square miles the remains of a hundred petrified trees. The Bay of San Francisco is a magnificent inland sea, fifty miles long and ten miles wide, connected with the Pacific Ocean by the strait of the Golden Gate, five miles long and a mile wide. The bay is separated from the ocean by a long peninsula, having the city of San Francisco on the inside of its northern extremity. Over opposite, on the eastern shore of the bay, is Oakland, the terminal of the Southern Pacific Railway routes from the East, a city of fifty thousand people, named from the numerous live-oaks growing in its gardens and along the streets. It has extensive manufactures and a magnificent view over the expansive bay and city of San Francisco and the distant Golden Gate, where the enclosing rocky shores can be seen rising boldly, the northern side to two thousand feet height. In the Oakland suburbs is Berkeley, where are some of the College buildings of the University of California, founded in 1868 and having twenty-three hundred students, many of them women. The attractive grounds cover two hundred and fifty acres, and the endowments exceed $8,000,000. South of Oakland is the pleasant suburban town of Alameda. On the western shore of the bay, south of San Francisco, is Menlo Park, a favorite place of rural residence for the wealthy San Francisco people, having many handsome villas and estates with noble trees. Here is Palo Alto or the "tall tree," taking its name from a fine redwood tree near the railway, an estate of over eight thousand acres, which is the location of the noted Leland Stanford, Jr., University. This is the greatest educational endowment in America, having a fund of over $30,000,000, the gift of Senator and Mrs. Leland Stanford in memory of their only son. The University has twelve hundred students, many being women. The buildings, which in a manner reproduce the architecture of the ancient Spanish Missions, are of buff sandstone, surmounted by red-tiled roofs, picturesquely contrasting with the oaks and eucalyptus trees which are so numerous and the many tropical plants that have been brought there. The Palo Alto estate is one of the great California stock-farms.

Two Franciscan monks in 1776 founded on this famous bay the Indian Mission of San Francisco de Assis, often called the Mission Dolores, and in course of time there started upon the shore, which had much wild mint growing about, the village of Yerba Buena, named from it the "good herb." Just about the time this lonely little village had got a small Spanish population and built a few houses, Richard Henry Dana came into the bay in 1835 on the voyage which he so pleasantly recounts in Two Years Before the Mast. He then prophetically wrote: "If ever California becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the centre of its prosperity. The abundance of wood and water; the extreme fertility of its shores; the excellence of its climate, which is as near to being perfect as any in the world; and its facilities for navigation affording the best anchoring-grounds in the whole Western coast of America, all fit it for a place of great importance." In the summer of 1846, during the Mexican War, the American navy made various important occupations on the California coasts, and a man-of-war came into San Francisco Bay and took possession for the United States. The next year the name of the village was changed to San Francisco. There were about six hundred inhabitants here when gold was discovered in 1848, and most of them at once left for the gold-fields; but the favorable location for trade soon attracted a large population and an extensive commerce. The young city had the usual mishaps from fires, suffering from a half-dozen serious conflagrations in its early career; while the peculiar character of the population made it then so lawless that twice the better element had to take summary control of the municipal government by "Vigilance Committees," who did not hesitate to promptly execute notorious criminals. There are now three hundred and fifty thousand people, the heterogeneous population including almost every nationality in the world.

San Francisco is in a fine situation on the shore of the bay and the steep hills to the westward, and is gradually spreading across the peninsula towards the ocean. It is, in fact, built on a succession of hills, of which a group extends westward from the bay, varying in height from less than two hundred to over nine hundred feet. Conspicuous among them are the Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, Park Peak, the Mission Peaks and others. For the purpose of readily climbing these hills, the cable street railway and its peculiar "grip" were invented and first put into successful operation, and a British visitor writes of San Francisco that "one of its most characteristic sights is the cable cars crawling up the steep inclines like flies on a window-pane." The country around is treeless, with little fertile land, owing to the copious rivers of sand which steadily flow over it, being blown from the seashore by the strong westerly trade-winds. Thus have naturally come the historical San Francisco "sand lots," the scene of public meetings and not infrequent disturbances in former times. An immense amount of grading, cutting down hills, filling gullies, and reclamations of overflowed lands was necessary in building the city; and over $50,000,000 has been expended in improving the site which, as nature fashioned it, was so illy fitted for a city. The great charm is the spacious bay environed by mountains, furnishing such an admirable harbor, and across it the ferry steamers ply in all directions. Upon it, guarding the Golden Gate entrance, are Alcatraz Island, Goat Island and Angel Island, strongly fortified, while Fort Mason is on the heights north of the city, overlooking the famous strait. The charming waters of the noble bay are thus rhythmically described by Ada Abbott Dunton:

The great "Ferry Depot," an ornamental structure with a high tower, is the centre of the San Francisco harbor front, whence the steamboats ply across the spacious bay. From this, the chief business highway, Market Street, stretches far southwest to the Mission Peaks, rising over nine hundred feet and nearly four miles away. Northward, Kearney Street with the leading stores extends past Telegraph Hill, rising almost three hundred feet and giving a magnificent outlook from the summit. Upon Market Street, in Yerba Buena Park, is the magnificent City Hall, completed in 1896 at a cost of over $4,000,000 and containing a library of one hundred thousand volumes. There is a Branch Mint of the United States which coins much of the gold mined on the Pacific Slope. The ancient church of the Mission Dolores, built of adobé is still preserved with the little churchyard. Upon Nob Hill are many of the finest residences, while to the northwestward is the Presidio, originally the Mexican and now the United States Military Reservation, adjoining the Golden Gate for some four miles, and a park of almost three square miles where troops are garrisoned. Here the military band plays in the afternoon and the walks and drives afford beautiful views. The Chinese Quarter of San Francisco, where there is a population of about fifteen thousand, is a characteristic feature, the inhabitants swarming in tall tenements divided by narrow alleys. Its attractions, however, are of a kind usually prepared with a view to induce contributions from visitors.

THE GOLDEN GATE.

The Golden Gate Park, a half-mile wide, stretches from the city three miles to the ocean shore, the western extremity being mainly the sand-dunes of the coast, while the eastern portions have been reclaimed, improved and planted with trees. Here are tasteful monuments. The author of the Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key, is commemorated by Story, and the Spanish discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, by Linden, unveiled in 1898. Here also rises Strawberry Hill, an eminence giving an unrivalled outlook. Adjoining the park are the great cemeteries of the city, Laurel Hill and the Lone Mountain, with others, the Presidio being to the northward. To the westward, on the ocean front, is the historic landmark of the coast—Point Lobos, or the "wolves"—having on its elevated surface the Sutro Heights, where the sandhills have been converted into a fine estate and garden, and out in the sea, a cable's length from shore, are the celebrated Seal Rocks, which are nearly always covered with seals basking in the sun. Some are very large, and their movements are quite interesting, their curious barking being distinctly heard above the roar of the surf. To the northward of Point Lobos is the ocean entrance to the Golden Gate. The portals are a mile apart, and seen from the sea its guardian heights rise two thousand feet on the left hand, stretching up to the peak of Tamalpais to the northward. On the right hand the heights are lower, but still lofty. The slopes are bare and sandy, and between them within the strait can be distinctly seen the island fortress of Alcatraz, guarded on the one hand by Goat Island and on the other by the high green slopes of Angel Island. Up on the Presidio proudly floats high above the shore the American flag standing out in the breeze. Behind it is the great city. This Golden Gate seen from within, looking westward, is a narrow pass, giving a vista view of the broad Pacific, its waves rolling towards us thousands of miles from the distant shores of China and Japan.

Here ends this pleasant recital. The desire has been to give an idea of the vast and wonderful land we live in, and to impress the noble and patriotic thought of Thoreau's so essential to all of us: "Nothing can be hoped of you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you than any other in the world." We have travelled over this broad land of ours from the tropics to the Arctic Sea, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and as our journey closes, with Whittier can sing:

THE END.

INDEX.