In places the river does not reach a width of half a mile and is deep and swift. The shadows between the high rock-bluffs and pinnacled cliffs take on the mysterious purple tones of twilight; many of the hills are covered with spruce, whose dark green blends agreeably with the gray and rose color. The bends here are sharp and many; at the Rapids the current is exceedingly rapid, and Dall reported a fall of twelve feet to the half mile, with the water running in sheets of foam over a granite island in the middle of the stream. This was on June 1, 1866. In August, 1883, Schwatka, after many hours of anxiety and dread of the reputed rapids, inquired of Indians and learned that he had already passed them. They were not formidable at the time of our voyage,—August,—and it is only during high stages of water that they present a bar to navigation.
We reached Rampart at six o'clock in the morning. After Tanana, this is the loveliest place on the Yukon. Its sparkling, emerald beauty shone under a silvery blue sky. There was a long street of artistic log houses and stores on a commanding bluff, up which paths wound from the water. Roofs covered with earth and flowers, carried out in brilliant bloom over the porches, added the characteristic Yukon touch. Every door-yard and window blazed with color. Narrow paths ran through tall fireweed and grasses over and around the hill—each path terminating, like a winding lane, in a pretty log-cabin home. There was an atmosphere of cleanliness, tidiness, and thrift not found in other settlements along the Yukon.
Captain Mayo, who, with McQuesten, founded Rampart in 1873, still lives here. The two commercial companies have large stores and warehouses; and residences were comfortably, and even luxuriously, furnished.
Rampart is two hundred and thirty miles below Fort Yukon, and is about halfway between Dawson and the sea. It has a population of four or five hundred people—when they are in from the mines!—and almost as many fighting, hungry dogs. Its street winds, and the buildings follow its windings; sometimes it stops altogether, and the buildings stop with it—then both go on again; and in front of all the public buildings are clean rustic benches, where one may sit and "look to the rose about him." The river here is half a mile wide, and on its opposite shore the green fields of the government experimental station slope up from the water.
Gold was discovered on Minook Creek, half a mile from town, in 1895, and the camp is regarded as one of the most even producers in Alaska. In 1906, despite an unusually dry season, the output of the district was three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
In the afternoon of the same day we reached Tanana, which is, as I have said, the most beautiful place on the Yukon. It has a splendid site on a level plateau; and all the springlike greenness, the cleanliness and order, the luxuriant vegetation, of Dawson, are outdone here. One walks in a maze of delight along streets of tropic, instead of arctic, bloom. The log houses are set far back from the streets, and the deep dooryards are seas of tremulous color, through which neat paths lead to flower-roofed homes. Cleanliness, color, and perfume are everywhere delights, but on the lonely Yukon their unexpectedness is enchanting.
In 1900 Fort Gibbon was established here, and this post has the most attractive surroundings of any in Alaska. Tanana is situated at the mouth of the Tanana River, seventy-five miles below Rampart, and passengers for Fairbanks connect here with luxurious steamers for a voyage of three hundred miles up the Tanana. It is a beautiful voyage and it ends at the most progressive and metropolitan town of the North.