The banks are high and bold, for the most part springing sheer out of the water in columns and pinnacles of solid stone. There are also forestated slopes rising to peaks of snow; and the same kind of clay cliffs that we saw at White Horse, white and shining in the bluish light of morning, but more beautiful still in the mysterious rosy shadows of midnight.
There are some striking columns of red rock along Lake Lebarge, and their reflections in the water at sunset of a still evening are said to be entrancing: "two warm pictures of rosy red in the sinking sun, joined base to base by a thread of silver, at the edge of the other shore."
There are many high hills of soft gray limestone, veined and shaded with the green of spruce; vast slopes, timbered heavily; low valleys and picturesque mouths of rivers.
Five-Finger, or Rink, Rapids is caused by a contraction of the river from its usual width to one of a hundred and fifty yards. Five bulks of stone, rising to a perpendicular height of forty or fifty feet, are stretched across the channel. The steamer seems to touch the stone walls as it rushes through on the boiling rapids.
The Upper Ramparts of the Yukon begin at Fort Selkirk. Here the waters cut through the lower spurs of the mountains, and for a distance of a hundred and fifty miles, reaching to Dawson, the scenery is sublime.
"Quiet Sentinel" is a rocky promontory which, seen in profile, resembles the face and entire figure of a woman. She stands with her head slightly bowed, as if in prayer, with loose draperies flowing in classic lines to her feet, and with a rose held to her lips. One of the greatest singers of the present time might have posed for the "Quiet Sentinel."
Rivers and their valleys are more famed in the northern interior than towns. Teslin, Tahkeena, Teslintoo, Big and Little Salmon, Pelly, Stewart, White, Forty-Mile, Indian, Sixty-Mile, Macmillan, Klotassin, Porcupine, Chandlar, Koyukuk, Unalaklik, Tanana, Mynook,—these be names to conjure with in the North; while those south of the Yukon and tributary to other waters have equal fame.
As for the Klondike, it is the only stream of its size, being but the merest creek and averaging a hundred feet in width, which has given its name to one whole country and to a portion of another country. During the past decade it has not been unusual to hear the name Klondike Country applied to all Alaska and that part of Canada adjacent to the Klondike district. The tiny, gold-bearing creeks, from ten to twenty feet wide, tributary to the Klondike, are known by name and fame in all parts of the world to-day. They are Bonanza, Hunker, Too-Much-Gold, Eldorado, Rock, North Fork, All-Gold, Gold-Bottom, and others of less importance. The Bonanza flows into the Klondike at Dawson, and it is but a half-hour's walk to the dredge at work in this stream.
In 1833 Baron Wrangell directed Michael Tebenkoff to establish Fort St. Michael's on the small island in Norton Sound to which the name of the fort was given. Three years later it was attacked by natives, but was successfully defended by Kurupanoff, who was in charge.