Six-horse stages are run from White Horse to Dawson after the river closes. The distance is four hundred and thirty-five miles; the fare in the early autumn and late spring is a hundred and twenty-five dollars; in winter, when sleighing is good, sixty dollars.
White Horse was first named Closeleigh by the railway company; but the name was not popular. At one place in the rapids the waves curving over rocks somewhat resemble a white horse, with wildly floating mane and tail of foam. This is said to be the origin of the name.
White Horse is only eight years old. The hotel accommodations, if one does not mind a little thing like not being able to eat, are good. The rooms are clean and comfortable and filled with sweet mountain and river air.
At eight o'clock that evening the steamer Dawson struggled up the river and landed within fifty yards of the hotel. We immediately went aboard; but it was nine o'clock the next morning before we started, so we had another night in White Horse.
The Yukon steamers are four stories high, with a place for a roof garden. I could do nothing for some time but regard the Dawson in silent wonder. It seemed to glide along on the surface of the water, like a smooth, flat stone when it is "skipped."
The lower deck is within a few inches of the water; and high above is the pilot-house, with its lonely-looking captain and pilot; and high, oh, very high, above them—like a charred monarch of a Puget Sound forest—rises the black smoke-stack, from which issue such vast funnels of smoke and such slow and tremendous breathing.
This breathing is a sound that haunts every memory of the Yukon. It is not easy to describe, it is so slow and so powerful. It is not quite like a cough—unless one could cough in instead of out; it is more like a sobbing, shivering in-drawing of the breath of some mighty animal. It echoes from point to point, and may be heard for several miles on a still day. Day and night it moves through the upper air, and floats on ahead, often echoing so insistently around some point which the steamer has not turned, that the "cheechaco" is deluded into the belief that another steamer is approaching.
The captains and pilots of the Yukon are the loneliest-looking men! First of all, they are so far away from everybody else; and second, passengers, particularly women, are not permitted to be in the pilot-house, nor on the texas, nor even on the hurricane-deck, of steamers passing through Yukon Territory.
Between White Horse and Lake Lebarge the river is about two hundred yards wide. The water is smooth and deep. It loiters along the shore, but the current is strong and bears the steamer down with a rush, compelling it to zigzag ceaselessly from shore to shore.
Going down the Yukon for the first time, one's heart stands still nearly half the time. The steamer heads straight for one shore, approaches it so closely that its bow is within six inches of it, and then swings powerfully and starts for the opposite shore—its great stern wheel barely clearing the rocky wall.