The horses apparently make no effort to reach the opposite shore, but use their strength desperately to hold their own in the swift current, fighting against it, with their heads turned pitifully up-stream. Their bodies being turned at a slight angle, the current, pushing violently against them, forces them slowly, but surely, from sand bar to sand bar, and, finally, to the shore.
It frequently requires two hours to get men, horses, and outfit from shore to shore, where they usually arrive dripping wet. Women who make this trip, it is needless to say, suffer still more from the hardship of the crossing than do men.
In riding horses across such streams, they should be started diagonally up-stream toward the first sand bar above. They lean far forward, bracing themselves at every step against the current and choosing their footing carefully. The horses of the trail know all the dangers, and scent them afar—holes, boulders, irresistible currents, and quicksand; they detect them before the most experienced "trailer" even suspects them.
I will not venture even to guess what the other two women in my party did when they crossed dangerous streams; but for myself, I wasted no strength in trying to turn my horse's head up-stream, or down-stream, or in any other direction. When we went down into the foaming water, I gave him his head, clung to his mane, leaned forward in the saddle,—and prayed like anything. I do not believe in childishly asking the Lord to help one so long as one can help one's self; but when one is on the back of a half-swimming, half-floundering horse in the middle of a swollen, treacherous flood, with holes and quicksand on all sides, one is as helpless as he was the day he was born; and it is a good time to pray.
According to the report of Major Abercrombie, who probably knows this part of Alaska more thoroughly than any one else, there are hundreds of thousands of acres in the Copper River Valley alone where almost all kinds of vegetables, as well as barley and rye, will grow in abundance and mature. Considering the travel to the many and fabulously rich mines already discovered in this valley and adjacent ones, and the cost of bringing in grain and supplies, it may be easily seen what splendid opportunities await the small farmer who will select his homestead judiciously, with a view to the accommodation of man and beast, and the cultivation of food for both. The opportunities awaiting such a man are so much more enticing than the inducements of the bleak Dakota prairies or the wind-swept valleys of the Yellowstone as to be beyond comparison.
Major Abercrombie believes that the valleys of the sub-drainage of the Copper River Valley will in future years supply the demands for cereals and vegetables, if not for meats, of the thousands of miners that will be required to extract the vast deposits of metals from the Tonsina, Chitina, Kotsina, Nizina, Chesna, Tanana, and other famous districts.
The vast importance to the whole territory of Alaska, and to the United States, as well, of the building of the Guggenheim railroad from Cordova into this splendid inland empire may be realized after reading Major Abercrombie's report.
We have been accustomed to mineralized zones of from ten to twelve miles in length; in the Wrangell group alone we have a circle eighty miles in diameter, the mineralization of which is simply marvellous; yet, valuable though these concentrates are, they are as valueless commercially as so much sandstone, without the aid of a railroad and reduction works.
If the group of mines at Butte could deflect a great transcontinental trunk-line like the Great Northern, what will this mighty zone, which contains a dozen properties already discovered,—to say nothing of the unfound, undreamed-of ones,—of far greater value as copper propositions than the richest of Montana, do to advance the commercial interests of the Pacific Coast?
The first discovery of gold in the Nizina district was made by Daniel Kain and Clarence Warner. These two prospectors were urged by a crippled Indian to accompany him to inspect a vein of copper on the head waters of a creek that is now known as Dan Creek.