Within the last fifteen days I have travelled by foot, by rail, and by steamer from the headwaters of the Yukon to Dawson, a distance of five hundred miles. The river has one of its sources in the coast range of mountains only fifteen miles from the Pacific Ocean. It starts as a trickling stream of icy cold water and winds its way down the hills to Lake Bennett. On the White Pass Railway I rode twenty-five miles along the east shore of that lake to Caribou, and thence for an hour or so farther to White Horse. That town is at the head of steam navigation on the Yukon, from where one can go for more than two thousand miles to the mouth of the river on Bering Sea, not far from the Arctic Ocean.

The Yukon makes one think of Mark Twain’s description of the Mississippi, which he knew so well as a pilot. He said: “If you will peel an apple in one long paring and throw it over your head, the shape it will have when it falls on the floor will represent the ordinary curves of the river.”

Let me take you with me on my trip down this looping river. In its upper reaches, it winds about like a snake. It narrows and widens, now measuring only a few hundred feet from shore to shore, and now almost as broad as a lake. It is full of sand banks, and there are rocky cañons through which our boat shoots, its sides almost grazing the cliffs.

Our ship down the Yukon from White Horse is the little steamer Selkirk, drawing between four and five feet of water. Nevertheless, it is so skilfully handled that it twists and turns with the current and at times swings about as though on a pivot. Now the pilot throws the boat across the stream and lets the current carry it along, and now he drives it through the rapids, putting on steam to make the paddles go faster.

In addition to the boat itself we have a great barge to care for. Most of the freight that goes down the Yukon is carried on barges pushed along in front of the steamers. The load of to-day consists largely of cattle. The barge is enclosed in a high board fence, within which are eight cow pens, with a double-deck sheep-fold at the back. There are one hundred and fifty beef cattle in the pens and two hundred live sheep in the fold. The animals were brought by rail from Calgary to Vancouver. There they were loaded on a Canadian Pacific steamer and carried through the thousand miles of inland waterways that border the west coast of the continent to Skagway. They were then taken over the mountains on the White Pass Railway, and are now on their way to Dawson, where they will be transferred to another steamer that will push them a thousand or fifteen hundred miles more down the Yukon.

The freight charges are so heavy that the animals selected must be of a high grade. The steers average three fourths of a ton and several of them weigh close to two thousand pounds each. They were raised on grass and are now fed on the bales of alfalfa piled around the edge of the barge.

We have other live stock on board. Down in the hold are eight hundred chickens bound for the hen fanciers of interior Alaska. They crow night and morning, and with the baaing of the sheep and the mooing of the cattle we seem to be in a floating barnyard. The barge is swung this way and that, and whenever it touches the bank, the sheep pile up one over the other, some of the cattle are thrown from their feet, and the chickens cackle in protest.

The Selkirk burns wood, and we stop several times a day to take on fuel, which is wheeled to the steamer in barrows over a gangplank from the piles of cord wood stacked up on the banks. At many of the stops the only dwelling we see is the cabin of the wood chopper, who supplies fuel for a few dollars a cord. The purser measures with a ten-foot pole the amount in each pile loaded on board. Going down stream the Selkirk burns about one cord an hour, and in coming back against the current the consumption is often four times as much. The wood is largely from spruce trees from three to six inches in diameter. Many of the little islands we pass are covered with the stumps of trees cut for the steamers, but most of the wood stations are on the mainland, the cutting having been done along the banks or in the valleys back from the river.

Except where we take on fuel there are no settlements on the Yukon between White Horse and Dawson. The country is much the same as it was when the cave dwellers, the ancestors of the Eskimos, wrought with their tools of stone. For a distance of four hundred and sixty miles we do not see a half dozen people at any stop of the steamer, although here and there are deserted camps with the abandoned cabins of prospectors and wood choppers. One such is at Chisana, near the mouth of the White River. The town was built during the rush to the Chisana gold mines, and it was for a time a thriving village, with a government telegraph office, a two-story hotel, and a log stable that could accommodate a dozen horses and numerous sled dogs. The White Pass and Yukon Company built the hotel and the stable, expecting to bring the miners in by its steamers and to send them into the interior with horses and dogs. It did a good business until the gold bubble burst and the camp “busted.” To-day the Chisana Hotel is deserted, all the cabins except that of the wood chopper are empty, and under the wires leading into one of them is a notice: “Government telegraph, closed August 3, 1914.”

The woodman’s cabin is open. A horseshoe is nailed over the door and a rifle stands on the porch at the side. On the wall at the back of the hut a dog harness hangs on a peg. The skin of a freshly killed bear is tacked up on one side, and bits of rabbit skins lie here and there on the ground. The cabin itself is not more than eight feet in height. It is made of logs, well chinked with mud and with earth banked up about the foundation. There is a weather-strip of bagging nailed to the door posts. The door is a framework filled in with pieces of wooden packing boxes for panels.

Entering, we find that there are two rooms. One is a kitchen, and the other a living room and bedroom combined. Three cots, made of poles and covered with blankets, form the beds. There are some benches for seats and a rude table stands under the window. Various articles of clothing hang from the walls or lie upon the floor. In the kitchen a table is covered with unwashed dishes. There is a guitar on the shelf near the stove and a pack of cards on a ledge in the logs. The whole is by no means inviting, but I doubt not it is a fair type of the home of the prospectors and woodsmen throughout this whole region.

I have seen most of the great rivers of the world—the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Nile, the Zambesi, the Yangtse, and the Hoang Ho. I know the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Indus, and the Irrawaddy, as well as the Amazon and the Parana, and many other streams of more or less fame. But nowhere else have I seen scenery like that along the Yukon. We seem to have joined the army of early explorers and to be steaming through a new world. We pass places

Much of the country is semi-desert, but some of it is as green as the valley of the Nile. In places the hills, sloping almost precipitously back from the river, are wrinkled with dry waterways filled with scrubby forests. In others there are series of ledges rising one over the other, making great terraces from the edge of the stream to the tops of the mountains.

The Yukon changes its course like the Yellow River of China. Now we pass through gorges of silt where the sand walls rise above us to the height of a twenty-story office building; and now swing around beds where we seem to be walled in by the cuttings made by the water. The hills are composed of earth washings, and from year to year the snaggy teeth of old Father Time have been gouging long furrows out of their sides. These furrows have caught the moisture, forests of small evergreens have grown up in them, and the landscape for miles looks as though it had been ploughed by the gods and drilled in with these crops of green trees. This makes the country, when seen from a distance, seem to be cultivated. There is a scanty grass between the patches of forests, and the whole is like a mighty farm planted by the genii of the Far North.

As we go down the river the scenery changes. Here the banks are almost flat and are covered with bushes. There on the opposite side they are of a sandy glacial alluvial formation, perfectly bare. At times the soil is so friable that it rolls down in avalanches, and a blast from our steam whistle starts the sand flowing. It makes one think of the loess cliffs on the plains of North China. Those cliffs contain some of the richest fertilizing matter on earth, and their dust, carried by the wind, enriches the country upon which it drops as the silt from the Abyssinian highlands enriches the Nile Valley.

The soil from the upper Yukon, on the other hand, is poorer than that which surrounds the Dead Sea at the lower end of the Jordan. It lacks fertilizing qualities, and some of it rests on a bed of prehistoric ice, which carries off the rainfall, leaving no moisture for plant life. A geological expert in our party says it is as though the land were laid down on plates of smooth copper tilted toward the valleys to carry the rain straight to the rivers. He tells me that the region has only ten or twelve inches of water a year, or a rainfall similar to that of California in the neighbourhood of Los Angeles. He says also that sixty-five per cent. of the water that falls finds its way to the streams.

Much of our way down the Yukon is in and out among islands. The stream is continually building up and tearing down the land through which it flows, and the islands are in every stage of formation. Here they are sand bars as bare as the desert of Sahara; there they are dusted with the green of their first vegetation. A little farther on are patches of land with bushes as high as your waist, and farther still are islands covered with forest. Each island has its own shade of green, from the fresh hue of the sprouts of a wheatfield to the dark green mixed with silver that is common in the woods of Norway and Sweden. Not a few of the islands are spotted with flowers. Some from which the trees have been cut are covered with fireweed, and a huge quilt of delicate pink rises out of the water, the black stumps upon it standing out like knots on the surface. Such islands are more gorgeous than the flower beds of Holland.

In places the Yukon is bordered by low hills, behind which are mountains covered with grass, and, still farther on, peaks clad in their silvery garments of perpetual snow. At one place far back from the river, rising out of a park of the greenest of green, are rocky formations that look like castles, as clean cut and symmetrical as any to be seen on the banks of the Rhine. Down in the river itself are other great rocks, more dangerous than that on which the Lorelei sat and with her singing lured the sailors on to their destruction.

One such formation is known as the “Five Fingers.” It consists of five mighty masses of reddish-brown rock that rise to the height of a six-story building directly in the channel through which the steamers must go. The current is swift and the ship needs careful piloting to keep it from being dashed to pieces against the great rocks. The captain guides the barge of cattle to the centre of the channel. He puts the barge and the steamer in the very heart of the current and we shoot with a rush between two of these mighty fingers of rock down into the rapids below. As we pass, it seems as though the rocks are not more than three feet away on each side of our steamer.

A little farther on we ride under precipices of sand that extend straight up from the water as though they were cut by a knife, with strata as regular as those of a layer cake. They seem to be made of volcanic ash or glacial clay. They rise to the height of the Washington Monument and are absolutely bare of vegetation, save for the lean spruce and pine on the tops.

We pass the “Five Fingers” between one and two o’clock in the morning, when the sun is just rising. This is the land of the midnight sun, and there are places not far from here where on one or two days of the year the sun does not sink below the horizon. Even here, at midnight it is hard to tell sunrise from sunset. There is a long twilight, and the glories of the rising and the setting sun seem almost commingled. At times it has been light until one o’clock in the morning, and I have been able to make notes at midnight at my cabin windows.

There is a vast difference between this region and the rainy districts near the Pacific coast. We have left the wet lands, and we are now in the dry belt of the great Yukon Valley. The air here is as clear as that of Colorado. The sky is deep blue, the clouds hug the horizon, and we seem to be on the very roof of the world, with the “deep deathlike valleys below.” We are in the country of Robert Service, the poet of the Yukon, and some of his verses come to our minds: