The serious vexations and real dangers of navigation in this great river, from source to mouth, are the sand and gravel bars. One may go down the Yukon from White Horse to St. Michael in fourteen days; and one may be a month on the way—pausing, by no will of his own, on various sand-bars.
The treacherous current changes hourly. It is seldom found twice the same. It washes the sand from side to side, or heaps it up in the middle—creating new channels and new dangers. The pilot can only be cautious, untiringly watchful—and lucky. The rest he must leave to heaven.
It is twenty-seven miles from White Horse to Lake Lebarge. Midway, the Tahkeena River flows into the Lewes, running through banks of clay.
Lake Lebarge is thirty-two miles long and three and a half wide. The day was suave. The water was silvery blue, and as smooth as satin; gray, deeply veined cliffs were reflected in the water, whose surface was not disturbed by a ripple or wave; the air was soft; farther down the river were forest fires, and just sufficient haze floated back to give the milky old-rose lights of the opal to the atmosphere. There is one small island in the lake. It was not named; and it received the name—as Vancouver would say—of Fireweed Isle, because it floated like a rosy cloud on the pale blue water.
The Indians called this lake Kluk-tas-si, and Schwatka favored retaining it; but the French name has endured, and it is not bad.
The Lake Lebarge grayling and whitefish are justly famed. Steamers stop at some lone fisherman's landing and take them down to Dawson, where they find ready sale. At Lower Lebarge there is a post-office and a telegraph station. Our steamer paused; two men came out in a boat, delivered a large supply of fish, received a few parcels of mail, and went swinging back across the water.
A dreary log-cabin stood on the bank, labelled "Clark's Place." A woman in a scarlet dress, walking through the reeds beside the beach, made a bit of vivid color. It seemed very, very lonely—with that kind of loneliness that is unendurable.
A quarter of a mile farther, around a bend in the shore, the boat landed at the telegraph station, where the Canadian flag was flying.
The different reaches of the Yukon are called locally by very confusing names. The river rising in Summit Lake on the White Pass railway is called both Lewes and Yukon; the stretch immediately below Lake Lebarge is called Lewes, Thirty-Mile, and Yukon. When we reach the old Hudson Bay post of Selkirk, however, our perplexities over this matter are at an end. The Pelly River here joins the Lewes, and all agree that the splendid river that now surges on to the sea is the Yukon.
It is daylight all the time, and no one should sleep between White Horse and Dawson. Not an hour of this beautiful voyage on the Upper Yukon should be wasted.