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I ARRIVED early on the
morning of the eighth of August on the steamer California to continue my
explorations of the fiords to the northward which were closed by winter the
previous November. The noise of our cannon and whistle was barely sufficient
to awaken the sleepy town. The morning shout of one good rooster was the
only evidence of life and health in all the place. Everything seemed kindly
and familiar — the glassy water; evergreen islands; the Indians with their
canoes and baskets and blankets and berries; the jet ravens, prying and
flying about the streets and spruce trees; and the bland, hushed atmosphere
brooding tenderly over all.
How delightful it is, and how
it makes one's pulses bound to get back into this reviving northland
wilderness! How truly wild it is, and how joyously one's heart responds to
the welcome it gives, its waters and mountains shining and glowing like
enthusiastic human faces! Gliding along the shores of its network of
channels, we may travel thousands of miles without seeing any mark of man,
save at long intervals some little Indian village or the faint smoke of a
camp-fire. Even these are confined to the shore. Back a few yards from the
beach the forests are as trackless as the sky, while the mountains, wrapped
in their snow and ice and clouds, seem never before to have been even looked
at. For those who
really care to get into hearty contact with the coast region, travel by
canoe is by far the better way. The larger canoes carry from one to three
tons, rise lightly over any waves likely to be met on the inland channels,
go well under sail, and are easily paddled alongshore in calm weather or
against moderate winds, while snug harbors where they may ride at anchor or
be pulled up on a smooth beach are to be found almost everywhere. With
plenty of provisions packed in boxes, and blankets and warm clothing in
rubber or canvas bags, you may be truly independent, and enter into
partnership with Nature; to be carried with the winds and currents, accept
the noble invitations offered all along your way to enter the mountain
fiords, the homes of the waterfalls and glaciers, and encamp almost every
night beneath hospitable trees.
I left Fort Wrangell the 16th of August,
accompanied by Mr. Young, in a canoe about twenty-five feet long and five
wide, carrying two small square sails and manned by two Stickeen Indians --
Captain Tyeen and Hunter Joe — and a half-breed named Smart Billy. The day
was calm, and bright, fleecy clouds hung about the lowest of the
mountain-brows, while far above the clouds the peaks were seen stretching
grandly away to the northward with their ice and snow shining in as calm a
light as that which was falling on the glassy waters. Our Indians welcomed
the work that lay before them, dipping their oars in exact time with hearty
good will as we glided past island after island across the delta of the
Stickeen into Soutchoi Channel.
By noon we came in sight of a fleet of icebergs
from Hutli Bay. The Indian name of this icy fiord is Hutli, or Thunder Bay,
from the sound made by the bergs in falling and rising from the front of the
inflowing glacier. As
we floated happily on over the shining waters, the beautiful islands, in
ever-changing pictures, were an unfailing source of enjoyment; but chiefly
our attention was turned upon the mountains. Bold granite headlands with
their feet in the channel, or some broad-shouldered peak of surpassing
grandeur, would fix the eye, or some one of the larger glaciers, with
far-reaching tributaries clasping entire groups of peaks and its great
crystal river pouring down through the forest between gray ridges and domes.
In these grand picture lessons the day was spent, and we spread our blankets
beneath a Menzies spruce on moss two feet deep.
Next morning we sailed around an outcurving bank
of boulders and sand ten miles long, the terminal moraine of a grand old
glacier on which last November we met a perilous adventure. It is located
just opposite three large converging glaciers which formerly united to form
the vanished trunk of the glacier to which the submerged moraine belonged. A
few centuries ago it must have been the grandest feature of this part of the
coast, and, so well preserved are the monuments of its greatness, the noble
old ice-river may be seen again in imagination about as vividly as if
present in the flesh, with snow-clouds crawling about its fountains,
sunshine sparkling on its broad flood, and its ten-mile ice-wall planted in
the deep waters of the channel and sending off its bergs with loud
resounding thunder.
About noon we rounded Cape Fanshawe, scudding swiftly before a fine breeze,
to the delight of our Indians, who had now only to steer and chat. Here we
overtook two Hoona Indians and their families on their way home from Fort
Wrangell. They had exchanged five sea-otter furs, worth about a hundred
dollars apiece, and a considerable number of fur-seal, land-otter, marten,
beaver, and other furs and skins, some $800 worth, for a new canoe valued at
eighty dollars, some flour, tobacco, blankets, and a few barrels of molasses
for the manufacture of whiskey. The blankets were not to wear, but to keep
as money, for the almighty dollar of these tribes is a Hudson's Bay blanket.
The wind died away soon after we met, and as the two canoes glided slowly
side by side, the Hoonas made minute inquiries as to who we were and what we
were doing so far north. Mr. Young's object in meeting the Indians as a
missionary they could in part understand, but mine in searching for rocks
and glaciers seemed past comprehension, and they asked our Indians whether
gold-mines might not be the main object. They remembered, however, that I
had visited their Glacier Bay ice-mountains a year ago, and seemed to think
there might be, after all, some mysterious interest about them of which they
were ignorant. Toward the middle of the afternoon they engaged our crew in a
race. We pushed a little way ahead for a time, but, though possessing a
considerable advantage, as it would seem in our long oars, they at length
overtook us, and kept up until after dark, when we camped together in the
rain on the bank of a salmon-stream among dripping grass and bushes some
twenty-five miles beyond Cape Fanshawe.
These cold northern waters are at times about as
brilliantly phosphorescent as those of the warm South, and so they were this
evening in the rain and darkness, with the temperature of the water at
forty-nine degrees, the air fifty-one. Every stroke of the oar made a vivid
surge of white light, and the canoes left shining tracks.
As we neared the mouth of the well-known
salmon-stream where we intended making our camp, we noticed jets and flashes
of silvery light caused by the startled movement of the salmon that were on
their way to their spawning-grounds. These became more and more numerous and
exciting, and our Indians shouted joyfully, "Hi yu salmon! Hi yu
muck-amuck!" while the water about the canoe and beneath the canoe was
churned by thousands of fins into silver fire. After landing two of our men
to commence camp-work, Mr. Young and I went up the stream with Tyeen to the
foot of a rapid, to see him catch a few salmon for supper. The stream was so
filled with them there seemed to be more fish than water in it, and we
appeared to be sailing in boiling, seething silver light marvelously
relieved in the jet darkness. In the midst of the general auroral glow and
the specially vivid flashes made by the frightened fish darting ahead and to
right and left of the canoe, our attention was suddenly fixed by a long,
steady, comet-like blaze that seemed to be made by some frightful monster
that was pursuing us. But when the portentous object reached the canoe, it
proved to be only our little dog, Stickeen.
After getting the canoe into a side eddy at the
foot of the rapids, Tyeen caught half a dozen salmon in a few minutes by
means of a large hook fastened to the end of a pole. They were so abundant
that he simply groped for them in a random way, or aimed at them by the
light they themselves furnished. That food to last a month or two may thus
be procured in less than an hour is a striking illustration of the
fruitfulness of these Alaskan waters.
Our Hoona neighbors were asleep in the morning
at sunrise, lying in a row, wet and limp like dead salmon. A little boy
about six years old, with no other covering than a remnant of a shirt, was
lying peacefully on his back, like Tam o' Shanter, despising wind and rain
and fire. He is up now, looking happy and fresh, with no clothes to dry and
no need of washing while this weather lasts. The two babies are firmly
strapped on boards, leaving only their heads and hands free. Their mothers
are nursing them, holding the boards on end, while they sit on the ground
with their breasts level with the little prisoners' mouths.
This morning we found out how beautiful a nook
we had got into. Besides the charming picturesqueness of its lines, the
colors about it, brightened by the rain, made a fine study. Viewed from the
shore, there was first a margin of dark-brown algae, then a bar of
yellowish-brown, next a dark bar on the rugged rocks marking the highest
tides, then a bar of granite boulders with grasses in the seams, and above
this a thick, bossy, overleaning fringe of bushes colored red and yellow and
green. A wall of spruces and hemlocks draped and tufted with gray and yellow
lichens and mosses embowered the camp-ground and overarched the little
river, while the camp-fire smoke, like a stranded cloud, lay motionless in
their branches. Down on the beach ducks and sandpipers in flocks of hundreds
were getting their breakfasts, bald eagles were seen perched on dead spars
along the edge of the woods, heavy-looking and overfed, gazing stupidly like
gorged vultures, and porpoises were blowing and plunging outside.
As for the salmon, as seen this morning urging
their way up the swift current, — tens of thousands of them, side by side,
with their backs out of the water in shallow places now that the tide was
low, — nothing that I could write might possibly give anything like a fair
conception of the extravagance of their numbers. There was more salmon
apparently, bulk for bulk, than water in the. stream. The struggling
multitudes, crowding one against another, could not get out of our way when
we waded into the midst of them. One of our men amused himself by seizing
them above the tail and swinging them over his head. Thousands could thus be
taken by hand at low tide, while they were making their way over the
shallows among the stones.
Whatever may be said of other resources of the
Territory, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of the
fisheries. Not to mention cod, herring, halibut, etc., there are probably
not less than a thousand salmon-streams in southeastern Alaska as large or
larger than this one (about forty feet wide) crowded with salmon several
times a year. The first run commenced that year in July, while the king
salmon, one of the five species recognized by the Indians, was in the
Chilcat River about the middle of the November before.
From this wonderful salmon-camp we sailed
joyfully up the coast to explore icy Sum Dum Bay, beginning my studies where
I left off the previous November. We started about six o'clock, and pulled
merrily on through fog and rain, the beautiful wooded shore on our right,
passing bergs here and there, the largest of which, though not over two
hundred feet long, seemed many times larger as they loomed gray and
indistinct through the fog. For the first five hours the sailing was open
and easy, nor was there anything very exciting to be seen or heard, save now
and then the thunder of a falling berg rolling and echoing from cliff to
cliff, and the sustained roar of cataracts.
About eleven o'clock we reached a point where
the fiord was packed with ice all the way across, and we ran ashore to fit a
block of wood on the outwater of our canoe to prevent its being battered or
broken. While Captain Tyeen, who had had considerable experience among berg
ice, was at work on the canoe, Hunter Joe and Smart Billy prepared a warm
lunch. The sheltered
hollow where we landed seems to be a favorite camping-ground for the Sum Dum
seal-hunters. The pole-frames of tents, tied with cedar bark, stood on level
spots strewn with seal bones, bits of salmon, and spruce bark.
We found the work of pushing through the ice
rather tiresome. An opening of twenty or thirty yards would be found here
and there, then a close pack that had to be opened by pushing the smaller
bergs aside with poles. I enjoyed the labor, however, for the fine lessons I
got, and in an hour or two we found zigzag lanes of water, through which we
paddled with but little interruption, and had leisure to study the wonderful
variety of forms the bergs presented as we glided past them. The largest we
saw did not greatly exceed two hundred feet in length, or twenty-five or
thirty feet in height above the water. Such bergs would draw from one
hundred and fifty to two hundred feet of water. All those that have floated
long undisturbed have a projecting base at the waterline, caused by the more
rapid melting of the immersed portion. When a portion of the berg breaks
off, another base line is formed, and the old one, sharply cut, may be seen
rising at all angles, giving it a marked character. Many of the oldest bergs
are beautifully ridged by the melting out of narrow furrows strictly
parallel throughout the mass, revealing the bedded structure of the ice,
acquired perhaps centuries ago, on the mountain snow fountains. A berg
suddenly going to pieces is a grand sight, especially when the water is calm
and no motion is visible save perchance the slow drift of the tide-current.
The prolonged roar of its fall comes with startling effect, and heavy swells
are raised that haste away in every direction to tell what has taken place,
and tens of thousands of its neighbors rock and swash in sympathy, repeating
the news over and over again. We were too near several large ones that fell
apart as we passed them, and our canoe had narrow escapes. The seal-hunters,
Tyeen says, are frequently lost in these sudden berg accidents.
In the afternoon, while we were admiring the
scenery, which, as we approached the head of the fiord, became more and more
sublime, one of our Indians called attention to a flock of wild goats on a
mountain overhead, and soon afterwards we saw two other flocks, at a height
of about fifteen hundred feet, relieved against the mountains as white
spots. They are abundant here and throughout the Alaskan Alps in general,
feeding on the grassy slopes above the timber-line. Their long, yellowish
hair is shed at this time of year and they were snowy white. None of
nature's cattle are better fed or better protected from the cold. Tyeen told
us that before the introduction of guns they used to hunt them with spears,
chasing them with their wolf-dogs, and thus bringing them to bay among the
rocks, where they were easily approached and killed.
The upper half of the fiord is about from a mile
to a mile and a half wide, and shut in by sublime Yosemite cliffs, nobly
sculptured, and adorned with waterfalls and fringes of trees, bushes, and
patches of flowers; but amid so crowded a display of novel beauty it was not
easy to concentrate the attention long enough on any portion of it without
giving more days and years than our lives could afford. I was determined to
see at least the grand fountain of all this ice. As we passed headland after
headland, hoping as each was rounded we should obtain a view of it, it still
remained hidden.
"Ice-mountain hi yu kumtux hide," — glaciers know how to hide extremely
well, — said Tyeen, as he rested for a moment after rounding a huge granite
shoulder of the wall whence we expected to gain a view of the extreme head
of the fiord. The bergs, however, were less closely packed and we made good
progress, and at half-past eight o'clock, fourteen and a half hours after
setting out, the great glacier came in sight at the head of a branch of the
fiord that comes in from the northeast.
The discharging front of this fertile,
fast-flowing glacier is about three quarters of a mile wide, and probably
eight or nine hundred feet deep, about one hundred and fifty feet of its
depth rising above the water as a grand blue barrier wall. It is much wider
a few miles farther back, the front being jammed between sheer granite walls
from thirty-five hundred to four thousand feet high. It shows grandly from
where it broke on our sight, sweeping boldly forward and downward in its
majestic channel, swaying from side to side in graceful, fluent lines around
stern, unflinching rocks. While I stood in the canoe making a sketch of it,
several bergs came off with tremendous dashing and thunder, raising a cloud
of ice-dust and spray to a height of a hundred feet or more.
"The ice-mountain is well disposed toward you,"
said Tyeen. "He is firing his big guns to welcome you."
After completing my sketch and entering a few
notes, I directed the crew to pull around a lofty burnished rock on the west
side of the channel, where, as I knew from the trend of the canon, a large
glacier once came in; and what was my delight to discover that the glacier
was still there and still pouring its ice into a branch of the fiord. Even
the Indians shared my joy and shouted with me. I expected only one
first-class glacier here, and found two. They are only about two miles
apart. How glorious a mansion that precious pair dwell in! After sunset we
made haste to seek a camp-ground. I would fain have shared these upper
chambers with the two glaciers, but there was no landing place in sight, and
we had to make our way back a few miles in the twilight to the mouth of a
side canon where we had seen timber on the way up. There seemed to be a good
landing as we approached the shore, but, coming nearer, we found that the
granite fell directly into deep water without leaving any level margin,
though the slope a short distance back was not very steep.
After narrowly scanning the various seams and
steps that roughened the granite, we con-eluded to attempt a landing rather
than grope our way farther down the fiord through the ice. And what a time
we had climbing on hands and knees up the slippery glacier-polished rocks to
a shelf some two hundred feet above the water and dragging provisions and
blankets after us! But it proved to be a glorious place, the very best
camp-ground of all the trip, — a perfect garden, ripe berries nodding from a
fringe of bushes around its edges charmingly displayed in the light of our
big fire. Close alongside there was a lofty mountain capped with ice, and
from the blue edge of that icecap there were sixteen silvery cascades in a
row, falling about four thousand feet, each one of the sixteen large enough
to be heard at least two miles.
How beautiful was the firelight on the nearest
larkspurs and geraniums and daisies of our garden! How hearty the wave
greeting on the rocks below brought to us from the two glaciers! And how
glorious a song the sixteen cascades sang!
The cascade songs made us sleep all the sounder,
and we were so happy as to find in the morning that the berg waves had
spared our canoe. We set off in high spirits down the fiord and across to
the right side to explore a remarkably deep and narrow branch of the main
fiord that I had noted on the way up, and that, from the magnitude of the
glacial characters on the two colossal rocks that guard the entrance,
promised a rich reward for our pains.
After we had sailed about three miles up this
side fiord, we came to what seemed to be its head, for trees and rocks swept
in a curve around from one side to the other without showing any opening,
although the walls of the canon were seen extending back indefinitely, one
majestic brow beyond the other.
'When we were tracing this curve, however, in a
leisurely way, in search of a good landing, we were startled by Captain
Tyeen shouting. "Skookum chuck! Skookum chuck!" (strong water, strong
water), and found our canoe was being swept sideways by a powerful current,
the roar of which we had mistaken for a waterfall. We barely escaped being
carried over a rocky bar on the boiling flood, which, as we afterwards
learned, would have been only a happy shove on our way. After we had made a
landing a little distance back from the brow of the bar, we climbed the
highest rock near the shore to seek a view of the channel beyond the
inflowing tide rapids, to find out whether or no we could safely venture in.
Up over rolling, mossy, bushy, burnished rock waves we scrambled for an hour
or two, which resulted in a fair view of the deep-blue waters of the fiord
stretching on and on along the feet of the most majestic Yosemite rocks we
had yet seen. This determined our plan of shooting the rapids and exploring
it to its farthest recesses. This novel interruption of the channel is a bar
of exceedingly hard resisting granite, over which the great glacier that
once occupied it swept, without degrading it to the general level, and over
which tide-waters now rush in and out with the violence of a mountain
torrent. Returning to
the canoe, we pushed off, and in a few moments were racing over the bar with
lightning speed through hurrahing waves and eddies and sheets of foam, our
little shell of a boat tossing lightly as a bubble. Then, rowing across a
belt of back-flowing water, we found ourselves on a smooth mirror reach
between granite walls of the very wildest and most exciting description,
surpassing in some ways those of the far-famed Yosemite Valley.
As we drifted silent and awe-stricken beneath
the shadows of the mighty cliffs, which, in their tremendous height and
abruptness, seemed to overhang at the top, the Indians gazing intently, as
if they, too, were impressed with the strange, awe-inspiring grandeur that
shut them in, one of them at length broke the silence by saying, "This must
be a good place for woodchucks; I hear them calling."
When I asked them, further on, how they thought
this gorge was made, they gave up the question, but offered an opinion as to
the formation of rain and soil. The rain, they said, was produced by the
rapid whirling of the earth by a stout mythical being called Yek. The water
of the ocean was thus thrown up, to descend again in showers, just as it is
thrown off a wet grindstone. They did not, however, understand why the ocean
water should be salt, while the rain from it is fresh. The soil, they said,
for the plants to grow on is formed by the washing of the rain on the rocks
and gradually accumulating. The grinding action of ice in this connection
they had not recognized.
Gliding on and on, the scenery seemed at every
turn to become more lavishly fruitful in forms as well as more sublime in
dimensions - snowy falls booming in splendid dress; colossal domes and
battlements and sculptured arches of a fine neutral-gray tint, their bases
laved by the blue fiord water; green ferny dells; bits of flower-bloom on
ledges; fringes of willow and birch; and glaciers above all. But when we
approached the base of a majestic rock like the Yosemite Half Dome at the
head of the fiord, where two short branches put out, and came in sight of
another glacier of the first order sending off bergs, our joy was complete.
I had a most glorious view of it, sweeping in grand majesty from high
mountain fountains, swaying around one mighty bastion after another, until
it fell into the fiord in shattered over-leaning fragments. When we had
feasted awhile on this unhoped-for treasure, I directed the Indians to pull
to the head of the left fork of the fiord, where we found a large cascade
with a volume of water great enough to be called a river, doubtless the
outlet of a receding glacier not in sight from the fiord.
This is in form and origin a typical Yosemite
valley, though as yet its floor is covered with ice and water, — ice above
and beneath, a noble mansion in which to spend a winter and a summer! It is
about ten miles long, and from three quarters of a mile to one mile wide. It
contains ten large falls and cascades, the finest one on the left side near
the head. After coming in an admirable rush over a granite brow where it is
first seen at a height of nine hundred or a thousand feet, it leaps a sheer
precipice of about two hundred and fifty feet, then divides and reaches the
tide-water in broken rapids over boulders. Another about a thousand feet
high drops at once on to the margin of the glacier two miles back from the
front. Several of the others are upwards of three thousand feet high,
descending through narrow gorges as richly feathered with ferns as any
channel that water ever flowed in, though tremendously abrupt and deep. A
grander array of rocks and waterfalls I have never yet beheld in Alaska.
The amount of timber on the walls is about the
same as that on the Yosemite walls, but owing to greater moisture, there is
more small vegetation, — bushes, ferns, mosses, grasses, etc.; though by far
the greater portion of the area of the wall-surface is bare and shining with
the polish it received when occupied by the glacier that formed the fiord.
The deep-green patches seen on the mountains back of the walls at the limits
of vegetation are grass, where the wild goats, or chamois rather, roam and
feed. The still greener and more luxuriant patches farther down in gullies
and on slopes where the declivity is not excessive, are made up mostly of
willows, birch, and huckleberry bushes, with a varying amount of prickly
ribes and rubus and echinopanax. This growth, when approached, especially on
the lower slopes near the level of the sea at the jaws of the great side
canons, is found to be the most impenetrable and tedious and toilsome
combination of fighting bushes that the weary explorer ever fell into,
incomparably more punishing than the buckthorn and manzanita tangles of the
Sierra. The cliff
gardens of this hidden Yosemite are exceedingly rich in color. On almost
every rift and bench, however small, as well as on the wider table-rocks
where a little soil has lodged, we found gay multitudes of flowers, far more
brilliantly colored than would be looked for in so cool and beclouded a
region, — larkspurs, geraniums, painted-cups, blue-bells, gentians,
saxifrages, epilobiums, violets, parnassia, veratrum, spiranthes and other
orchids, fritillaria, smilax, asters, daisies, bryanthus, cassiope, linnoa,
and a great variety of flowering ribes and rubus and heathworts. Many of the
above, though with soft stems and leaves, are yet as brightly painted as
those of the warm sunlands of the south. The heathworts in particular are
very abundant and beautiful, both in flower and fruit, making delicate green
carpets for the rocks, flushed with pink bells, or dotted with red and blue
berries. The tallest of the grasses have ribbon leaves well tempered and
arched, and with no lack of bristly spikes and nodding purple panicles. The
alpine grasses of the Sierra, making close carpets on the glacier meadows, I
have not yet seen in Alaska.
The ferns are less numerous in species than in
California, but about equal in the number of fronds. I have seen three
aspidiums, two woodsias, a lomaria, polypodium, cheilanthes, and several
species of pteris. In
this eastern arm of Sum Dum Bay and its Yosemite branch, I counted from my
canoe, on my way up and down, thirty small glaciers back of the walls, and
we saw three of the first order; also thirty-seven cascades and falls,
counting only those large enough to make themselves heard several miles. The
whole bay, with its rocks and woods and ice, reverberates with their roar.
How many glaciers may be disclosed in the other great arm that I have not
seen as yet, I cannot say, but, judging from the bergs it sends down, I
guess not less than a hundred pour their turbid streams into the fiord,
making about as many joyful, bouncing cataracts.
About noon we began to retrace our way back into
the main fiord, and arrived at the gold-mine camp after dark, rich and
weary. On the morning
of August 21 I set out with my three Indians to explore the right arm of
this noble bay, Mr. Young having decided, on account of mission work, to
remain at the gold-mine. So here is another fine lot of Sum Dum ice, —
thirty-five or forty square miles of bergs, one great glacier of the first
class descending into the fiord at the head, the fountain whence all these
bergs were derived, and thirty-one smaller glaciers that do not reach
tide-water; also nine cascades and falls, large size, and two rows of
Yosemite rocks from three to four thousand feet high, each row about
eighteen or twenty miles long, burnished and sculptured in the most telling
glacier style, and well trimmed with spruce groves and flower gardens; a'
that and more of a kind that cannot here be catalogued.
For the first five or six miles there is nothing
excepting the icebergs that is very striking in the scenery as compared with
that of the smooth, unencumbered outside channels, where all is so evenly
beautiful. The mountain-wall on the right as you go up is more precipitous
than usual, and a series of small glaciers is seen along the top of it,
extending their blue-crevassed fronts over the rims of pure-white snow
fountains, and from the end of each front a hearty stream coming in a
succession of falls and rapids over the terminal moraines, through patches
of dwarf willows, and then through the spruce woods into the bay, singing
and dancing all the way down. On the opposite side of the bay from here
there is a small side bay about three miles deep, with a showy group of
glacier-bearing mountains back of it. Everywhere else the view is bounded by
comparatively low mountains densely forested t.o the very top.
After sailing about six miles from the mine, the
experienced mountaineer could see some evidence of an opening from this wide
lower portion, and on reaching it, it proved to be the continuation of the
main west arm, contracted between stupendous walls of gray granite, and
crowded with bergs from shore to shore, which seem to bar the way against
everything but wings. Headland after headland, in most imposing array, was
seen plunging sheer and bare from dizzy heights, and planting its feet in
the ice-encumbered water without leaving a spot on which one could land from
a boat, while no part of the great glacier that pours all these miles of ice
into the fiord was visible. Pushing our way slowly through the packed bergs,
and passing headland after headland, eagerly looking forward, the glacier
and its fountain mountains were still beyond sight, cut off by other
projecting headland capes, toward which I urged my way, enjoying the
extraordinary grandeur of the wild, unfinished Yosemite. Domes swell against
the sky in fine lines as lofty and as perfect in form as those of the
California valley, and rock-fronts stand forward, as sheer and as nobly
sculptured. No ice-work that I have ever seen surpasses this, either in the
magnitude of the features or effectiveness of composition.
On some of the narrow benches and tables of the
walls rows of spruce trees and two-leaved pines were growing, and patches of
considerable size were found on the spreading bases of those mountains that
stand back inside the canons, where the continuity of the walls is broken.
Some of these side canons are cut down to the level of the water and reach
far back, opening views into groups of glacier fountains that give rise to
many a noble stream; while all along the tops of the walls on both sides
small glaciers are seen, still busily engaged in the work of completing
their sculpture. I counted twenty-five from the canoe. Probably the drainage
of fifty or more pours into this fiord. The average elevation at which they
melt is about eighteen hundred feet above sea-level, and all of them are
residual branches of the grand trunk that filled the fiord and overflowed
its walls when there was only one Sum Dum glacier.
The afternoon was wearing away as we pushed on
and on through the drifting bergs without our having obtained a single
glimpse of the great glacier. A Sum Dum seal-hunter, whom we met groping his
way deftly through the ice in a very small, unsplitable cottonwood canoe,
told us that the ice-mountain was yet fifteen miles away. This was toward
the middle of the afternoon, and I gave up sketching and making notes and
worked hard with the Indians to reach it before dark. About seven o'clock we
approached what seemed to be the extreme head of the fiord, and still no
great glacier in sight — only a small one, three or four miles long, melting
a thousand feet above the sea. Presently, a narrow side opening appeared
between tremendous cliffs sheer to a height of four thousand feet or more,
trending nearly at right angles to the general trend of the fiord, and
apparently terminated by a cliff, scarcely less abrupt or high, at a
distance of a mile or two. Up this bend we toiled against wind and tide,
creeping closely along the wall on the right side, which, as we looked
upward, seemed to be leaning over, while the waves beating against the bergs
and rocks made a discouraging kind of music. At length, toward nine o'clock,
just before the gray darkness of evening fell, a long, triumphant shout told
that the glacier, so deeply and desperately hidden, was at last hunted back
to its benmost bore. A short distance around a second bend in the canon, I
reached a point where I obtained a good view of it as it pours its deep,
broad flood into the fiord in a majestic course from between the noble
mountains, its tributaries, each of which would be regarded elsewhere as a
grand glacier, converging from right and left from a fountain set far in the
silent fastnesses of the mountains.
"There is your lost friend," said the Indians
laughing; "he says, Sagh-a-ya" (how do you do)? And while berg after berg
was being born with thundering uproar, Tyeen said, " Your friend has klosh
tumtum (good heart). Hear! Like the other big-hearted one he is firing his
guns in your honor." I
stayed only long enough to make an outline sketch, and then urged the
Indians to hasten back some six miles to the mouth of a side canon I had
noted on the way up as a place where we might camp in case we should not
find a better. After dark we had to move with great caution through the ice.
One of the Indians was stationed-in the bow with a pole to push aside the
smaller fragments and look out for the most promising openings, through
which he guided us, shouting, "Friday! Tucktay !" (shoreward, seaward) about
ten times a minute. We reached this landing-place after ten o'clock, guided
in the darkness by the roar of a glacier torrent. The ground was all
boulders and it was hard to find a place among them, however small, to lie
on. The Indians anchored the canoe well out from the shore and passed the
night in it to guard against berg-waves and drifting waves, after assisting
me to set my tent in some sort of way among the stones well back beyond the
reach of the tide. I asked them as they were returning to the canoe if they
were not going to eat something. They answered promptly:
"We will sleep now, if your
ice friend will let us. We will eat to-morrow, but we can find some bread
for you if you want it."
"No," I said, "go to rest. I, too, will sleep
now and eat to-morrow." Nothing was attempted in the way of light or fire.
Camping that night was simply lying down. The boulders seemed to make a fair
bed after finding the best place to take their pressure.
During the night I was awakened by the beating
of the spent ends of berg-waves against the side of my tent, though I had
fancied myself well beyond their reach. These special waves are not raised
by wind or tide, but by the fall of large bergs from the snout of the
glacier, or sometimes by the overturning or breaking of large bergs that may
have long floated in perfect poise. The highest berg-waves oftentimes travel
half a dozen miles or farther before they are much spent, producing a
singularly impressive uproar in the far recesses of the mountains on calm,
dark nights when all beside is still. Far and near they tell the news that a
berg is born, repeating their story again and again, compelling attention
and reminding us of earthquake-waves that roll on for thousands of miles,
taking their story from continent to continent.
When the Indians came ashore in the morning and
saw the condition of my tent they laughed heartily and said, "Your friend
[meaning the big glacier] sent you a good word last night, and his servant
knocked at your tent and said, 'Sagh-a-ya, are you sleeping well? "
I had fasted too long to be in very good order
for hard work, but while the Indians were cooking, I made out to push my way
up the canon before breakfast to seek the glacier that once came into the
fiord, knowing from the size and muddiness of the stream that drains it that
it must be quite large and not far off. I came in sight of it after a hard
scramble of two hours through thorny chaparral and across steep avalanche
taluses of rocks and snow. The front reaches across the canon from wall to
wall, covered with rocky detritus, and looked dark and forbidding in the
shadow cast by the cliffs, while from a low, cavelike hollow its draining
stream breaks forth, a river in size, with a reverberating roar that stirs
all the canon. Beyond, in a cloudless blaze of sunshine, I saw many
tributaries, pure and white as new-fallen snow, drawing their sources from
clusters of peaks and sweeping down waving slopes to unite their crystal
currents with the trunk glacier in the central canon. This fine glacier
reaches to within two hundred and fifty feet of the level of the sea, and
would even yet reach the fiord and send off bergs but for the waste it
suffers in flowing slowly through the trunk canon, the declivity of which is
very slight. Returning,
I reached camp and breakfast at ten o'clock; then had everything packed into
the canoe, and set off leisurely across the fiord to the mouth of another
wide and low canon, whose lofty outer cliffs, facing the fiord, are telling
glacial advertisements. Gladly I should have explored it all, traced its
streams of water and streams of ice, and entered its highest chambers, the
homes and fountains of the snow. But I had to wait. I only stopped an hour
or two, and climbed to the top of a rock through the common underbrush,
whence I had a good general view. The front of the main glacier is not far
distant from the fiord, and sends off small bergs into a lake. The walls of
its tributary canons are remarkably jagged and high, cut in a red variegated
rock, probably slate. On the way back to the canoe I gathered ripe
salmon-berries an inch and a half in diameter, ripe huckleberries, too, in
great abundance, and several interesting plants I had not before met in the
territory. About noon,
when the tide was in our favor, we set out on the return trip to the
gold-mine camp. The sun shone free and warm. No wind stirred. The water
spaces between the bergs were as smooth as glass, reflecting the unclouded
sky, and doubling the ravishing beauty of the bergs as the sunlight streamed
through their innumerable angles in rainbow colors.
Soon a light breeze sprang up, and dancing lily
spangles on the water mingled their glory of light with that burning on the
angles of the ice. On
days like this, true sun-days, some of the bergs show a purplish tinge,
though most are white from the disintegrating of their weathered surfaces.
Now and then a new-born one is met that is pure blue crystal throughout,
freshly broken from the fountain or recently exposed to the air by turning
over. But in all of them, old and new, there are azure caves and rifts of
ineffable beauty, in which the purest tones of light pulse and shimmer,
lovely and untainted as anything on earth or in the sky.
As we were passing the Indian village I
presented a little tobacco to the headmen as an expression of regard, while
they gave us a few smoked salmon, after putting many questions concerning my
exploration of their bay and bluntly declaring their disbelief in the ice
business. About nine
o'clock we arrived at the gold camp, where we found Mr. Young ready to go on
with us the next morning, and thus ended two of the brightest and best of
all my Alaska days. |
