Statistics giving the absolute mean minimum temperature in the capital cities of the United States prove that out of the forty-seven cities, thirty-one were as cold or colder than Sitka, and four were colder than Valdez.
On the southern coast of Alaska there are few points where zero is recorded, the average winter weather at Juneau, Sitka, Valdez, and Seward being milder than in Washington, D.C. In the interior, the weather is much colder, but it is the dry, light cold. At Fairbanks, it is true that the thermometer has registered sixty degrees below zero; but it has done the same in the Dakotas and other states, and is unusual. Severely cold weather occurs in Alaska as rarely as in other cold countries, and remains but a few days.
Alaska has unfortunately had the reputation of having an unendurable climate thrust upon her, first by such chill-blooded navigators as Whidbey and Vancouver; and later, by the gold seekers who rushed, frenziedly, into the unsettled wastes, with no preparation for the intense cold which at times prevails.
Almost every winter in Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, and the Dakotas, children of the prairies and their teachers freeze to death going to or from school, and it is accepted as a matter of course. In Alaska, where hundreds of men traverse hundreds of miles by dog sleds and snow-shoes, with none of the comforts of more civilized countries and with road houses few and far, if two or three in a winter freeze to death, the tragedy is wired to all parts of the world as another mute testimony to the "tremendously horrible" climate of Alaska.
The intense heat, of which dozens of people perish every summer in New York and other eastern states is unknown in Alaska. Cyclones and cloud-bursts are unchronicled. Fatal epidemics of disease among white people have never yet occurred.
As for the summer climate of Alaska, both along the coast and in the interior, it is possessed of a charm and fascination which cannot be described in words.
"You can just taste the Alaska climate," said an old Klondiker, on a White Pass and Yukon train. We were standing between cars, clinging to the brakes—sooty-eyed, worn-out with joy as we neared White Horse, but standing and looking still, unwilling to lose one moment of that beautiful trip.
"It tastes different every hundred miles," he went on, with that beam in his eye which means love of Alaska in the heart. "You begun to taste it in Grenville Channel. It tasted different in Skagway, and there's a big change when you get to White Horse. I golly! at White Horse, you'll think you never tasted anything like it; but it don't hold a candle there to the way it tastes going down the Yukon. If you happen to get into the Ar'tic Circle, say, about two in the morning, you dress yourself and hike out on deck, an' I darn! you can taste more'n climate. You can taste the Ar'tic Circle itself! Say, can you guess what it tastes like?"
I could not guess what the Arctic Circle tasted like, and frankly confessed it.