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ON the trail to the
steamboat-landing at the foot of Dease Lake, I met a Douglas squirrel,
nearly as red and rusty in color as his Eastern relative the chickaree.
Except in color he differs but little from the California Douglas squirrel.
In voice, language, gestures, temperament, he is the same fiery, indomitable
little king of the woods. Another darker and probably younger specimen met
near the Caribou House, barked, chirruped, and showed off in fine style on a
tree within a few feet of us.
"What does the little rascal
mean?" said my companion, a man I had fallen in with on the trail. "What is
he making such a fuss about? I cannot frighten him."
"Never mind," I replied;
"just wait until I whistle `Old Hundred' and you will see him fly in
disgust." And so he did, just as his California brethren do. Strange that no
squirrel or spermophile I yet have found ever seemed to have anything like
enough of Scotch religion to enjoy this grand old tune.
The taverns along the Cassiar
gold trail were the worst I had ever seen, rough shacks with dirt floors,
dirt roofs, and rough meals. The meals are all alike — a potato, a slice of
something like bacon, some gray stuff called bread, and a cup of muddy,
semi-liquid coffee like that which the California miners call "slick-ens" or
"slumgullion." The bread was terrible and sinful. How the Lord's good wheat
could be made into stuff so mysteriously bad is past finding out. The very
de'il, it would seem, in wicked anger and ingenuity, had been the baker.
On our walk from Dease Lake
to Telegraph Creek we had one of these rough luncheons at three o'clock in
the afternoon of the first day, then walked on five miles to Ward's, where
we were solemnly assured that we could not have a single bite of either
supper or breakfast, but as a great favor we might sleep on his best gray
bunk. We replied that, as we had lunched at the lake, supper would not be
greatly missed, and as for breakfast we would start early and walk eight
miles to the next road-house. We set out at half-past four, glad to escape
into the fresh air, and reached the breakfast place at eight o'clock. The
landlord was still abed, and when at length he came to the door, he scowled
savagely at us as if our request for breakfast was preposterous and criminal
beyond anything ever heard of in all goldful Alaska. A good many in those
days were returning from the mines dead broke, and he probably regarded us
as belonging to that disreputable class. Anyhow, we got nothing and had to
tramp on.
As we approached the next
house, three miles ahead, we saw the tavern-keeper keenly surveying us, and,
as we afterwards learned, taking me for a certain judge whom for some cause
he wished to avoid, he hurriedly locked his door and fled. Half a mile
farther on we discovered him in a thicket a little way off the trail,
explained our wants, marched him back to his house, and at length obtained a
little sour bread, sour milk, and old salmon, our only lonely meal between
the Lake and Telegraph Creek.
We arrived at Telegraph
Creek, the end of my two-hundred-mile walk, about noon. After luncheon I
went on down the river to Glenora in a fine canoe owned and manned by Kitty,
a stout, intelligent-looking Indian woman, who charged her passengers a
dollar for the fifteen-mile trip. Her crew was four Indian paddlers. In the
rapids she also plied the paddle, with stout, telling strokes, and a
keen-eyed old man, probably her husband, sat high in the stern and steered.
All seemed exhilarated as we shot down through the narrow gorge on the
rushing, roaring, throttled river, paddling all the more vigorously the
faster the speed of the stream, to hold good steering way. The canoe danced
lightly amid gray surges and spray as if alive and enthusiastically enjoying
the adventure. Some of the passengers were pretty thoroughly drenched. In
unskillful hands the frail dugout would surely have been wrecked or upset.
Most of the season, goods for the Cassiar gold camps were carried from
Glenora to Telegraph Creek in canoes, the steamers not being able to
overcome the rapids except during high water. Even then they had usually to
line two of the rapids — that is, take a line ashore, make it fast to a tree
on the bank, and pull up on the capstan. The freight canoes carried about
three or four tons, for which fifteen dollars per ton was charged. Slow
progress was made by poling along the bank out of the swiftest part of the
current. In the rapids a tow line was taken ashore, only one of the crew
remaining aboard to steer. The trip took a day unless a favoring wind was
blowing, which often happened.
Next morning I set out from
Glenora to climb Glenora Peak for the general view of the great Coast Range
that I failed to obtain on my first ascent on account of the accident that
befell Mr. Young when we were within a minute or two of the top. It is hard
to fail in reaching a mountain-top that one starts for, let the cause be
what it may. This time I had no companion to care for, but the sky was
threatening. I was assured by the local weather-prophets that the day would
be rainy or snowy because the peaks in sight were muffled in clouds that
seemed to be getting ready for work. I determined to go ahead, however, for
storms of any kind are well worth while, and if driven back I could wait and
try again.
With crackers in my pocket
and a light rubber coat that a kind Hebrew passenger on the steamer Gertrude
loaned me, I was ready for anything that might offer, my hopes for the grand
view rising and falling as the clouds rose and fell. Anxiously I watched
them as they trailed their draggled skirts across the glaciers and fountain
peaks, as if thoughtfully looking for the places where they could do the
most good. From Glenora there is first a terrace two hundred feet above the
river covered mostly with bushes, yellow apocynum on the open spaces,
together with carpets of dwarf manzanita, bunch-grass, and a few of the
compositae, galiums, etc. Then comes a flat stretch a mile wide, extending
to the foothills, covered with birch, spruce, fir, and poplar, now mostly
killed by fire and the ground strewn with charred trunks. From this black
forest the mountain rises in rather steep slopes covered with a luxuriant
growth of bushes, grass, flowers, and a few trees, chiefly spruce and fir,
the firs gradually dwarfing into a beautiful chaparral, the most beautiful,
I think, I have ever seen, the flat fan-shaped plumes thickly foliaged and
imbricated by snow pressure, forming a smooth, handsome thatch which bears
cones and thrives as if this repressed condition were its very best. It
extends up to an elevation of about fifty-five hundred feet. Only a few
trees more than a foot in diameter and more than fifty feet high are found
higher than four thousand feet above the sea. A few poplars and willows
occur on moist places, gradually dwarfing like the conifers. Alder is the
most generally distributed of the chaparral bushes, growing nearly
everywhere; its crinkled stems an inch or two thick form a troublesome
tangle to the mountaineer. The blue geranium, with leaves red and showy at
this time of the year, is perhaps the most telling of the flowering plants.
It grows up to five thousand feet or more. Larkspurs are common, with
epilobium, senecio, erigeron, and a few solidagos. The harebell appears at
about four thousand feet and extends to the summit, dwarfing in stature but
maintaining the size of its handsome bells until they seem to be lying loose
and detached on the ground as if like snow flowers they had fallen from the
sky; and, though frail and delicate-looking, none of its companions is more
enduring or rings out the praise of beauty-loving Nature in tones more
appreciable to mortals, not forgetting even Cassiope, who also is here and
her companion, Bryanthus, the loveliest and most widely distributed of the
alpine shrubs. Then come crowberry, and two species of huckleberry, one of
them from about six inches to a foot high with delicious berries, the other
a most lavishly prolific and contented looking dwarf, few of the bushes
being more than two inches high, counting to the topmost leaf, yet each
bearing from ten to twenty or more large berries. Perhaps more than half the
bulk of the whole plant is fruit, the largest and finest-flavored of all the
huckleberries or blueberries I ever tasted, spreading fine feasts for the
grouse and ptarmigan and many others of Nature's mountain people. I noticed
three species of dwarf willows, one with narrow leaves, growing at the very
summit of the mountain in cracks of the rocks, as well as on patches of
soil, another with large, smooth leaves now turning yellow. The third
species grows between the others as to elevation; its leaves, then orange-colored,
are strikingly pitted and reticulated. Another alpine shrub, a species of
sericocarpus, covered with handsome heads of feathery achenia, beautiful
dwarf echiverias with flocks of purple flowers pricked into their bright
grass-green, cushion-like bosses of moss-like foliage, and a fine
forget-me-not reach to the summit. I may also mention a large mertensia, a
fine anemone, a veratrum, six feet high, a large blue daisy, growing up to
three to four thousand feet, and at the summit a dwarf species, with dusky,
hairy involucres, and a few ferns, aspidium, gymnogramma, and small rock
cheilanthes, leaving scarce a foot of ground bare, though the mountain looks
bald and brown in the distance like those of the desert ranges of the Great
Basin in Utah and Nevada.
Charmed with these plant
people, I had almost forgotten to watch the sky until I reached the top of
the highest peak, when one of the greatest and most impressively sublime of
all the mountain views I have ever enjoyed came full in sight — more than
three hundred miles of closely packed peaks of the great Coast Range,
sculptured in the boldest manner imaginable, their naked tops and dividing
ridges dark in color, their sides and the canons, gorges, and valleys
between them loaded with glaciers and snow. From this standpoint I counted
upwards of two hundred glaciers, while dark-centered, luminous clouds with
fringed edges hovered and crawled over them, now slowly descending, casting
transparent shadows on the ice and snow, now rising high above them,
lingering like loving angels guarding the crystal gifts they had bestowed.
Although the range as seen from this Glenora mountain-top seems regular in
its trend, as if the main axis were simple and continuous, it is, on the
contrary, far from simple. In front of the highest ranks of peaks are others
of the same form with their own glaciers, and lower peaks before these, and
yet lower ones with their ridges and canons, valleys and foothills. Alps
rise beyond alps as far as the eye can reach, and clusters of higher peaks
here and there closely crowded together; clusters, too, of needles and
pinnacles innumerable like trees in groves. Everywhere the peaks seem
comparatively slender and closely packed, as if Nature had here been trying
to see how many noble well-dressed mountains could be crowded into one grand
range.
The black rocks, too steep
for snow to lie upon, were brought into sharp relief by white clouds and
snow and glaciers, and these again were outlined and made tellingly plain by
the rocks. The glaciers so grandly displayed are of every form, some
crawling through gorge and valley like monster glittering serpents; others
like broad cataracts pouring over cliffs into shadowy gulfs; others, with
their main trunks winding through narrow canons, display long, white
finger-like tributaries descending from the summits of pinnacled ridges.
Others lie back in fountain cirques walled in all around save at the lower
edge, over which they pour in blue cascades. Snow, too, lay in folds and
patches of every form on blunt, rounded ridges in curves, arrowy lines,
dashes, and narrow ornamental flutings among the summit peaks and in broad,
radiating wings on smooth slopes. And on many a bulging headland and lower
ridge there lay heavy, over-curling copings and smooth, white domes where
wind-driven snow was pressed and wreathed and packed into every form and in
every possible place and condition. I never before had seen so richly
sculptured a range or so many awe-inspiring inaccessible mountains crowded
together. If a line were drawn east and west from the peak on which I stood,
and extended both ways to the horizon, cutting the whole round landscape in
two equal parts, then all of the south half would be bounded by these icy
peaks, which would seem to curve around half the horizon and about twenty
degrees more, though extending in a general straight, or but moderately
curved, line. The deepest and thickest and highest of all this wilderness of
peaks lie to the southwest. They are probably from about nine to twelve
thousand feet high, springing to this elevation from near the sea-level. The
peak on which these observations were made is somewhere about seven thousand
feet high, and from here I estimated the height of the range. The highest
peak of all, or that seemed so to me, lies to the westward at an estimated
distance of about one hundred and fifty or two hundred miles. Only its solid
white summit was visible. Possibly it may be the topmost peak of St. Elias.
Now look northward around the other half of the horizon, and instead of
countless peaks crowding into the sky, you see a low, brown region, heaving
and swelling in gentle curves, apparently scarcely more waved than a rolling
prairie. The so-called canons of several forks of the upper Stickeen are
visible, but even where best seen in the foreground and middle ground of the
picture, they are like mere sunken gorges, making scarce perceptible marks
on the landscape, while the tops of the highest mountain-swells show only
small patches of snow and no glaciers.
Glenora Peak, on which I
stood, is the highest point of a spur that puts out from the main range in a
northerly direction. It seems to have been a rounded, broad-backed ridge
which has been sculptured into its present irregular form by short residual
glaciers, some of which, a mile or two long, are still at work.
As I lingered, gazing on the
vast show, luminous, shadowy clouds seemed to increase in glory of color and
motion, now fondling the highest peaks with infinite tenderness of touch,
now hovering above them like eagles over their nests.
When night was drawing near,
I ran down the flowery slopes exhilarated, thanking God for the gift of this
great day. The setting sun fired the clouds. All the world seemed newborn.
Every thing, even the commonest, was seen in new light and was looked at
with new interest as if never seen before. The plant people seemed glad, as
if rejoicing with me, the little ones as well as the trees, while every
feature of the peak and its traveled boulders seemed to know what I had been
about and the depth of my joy, as if they could read faces. |
