Passing west of Douglas Island and through Icy Strait to Glacier Bay, a magnificent view is presented. Snow-covered mountains rise six and seven thousand feet all around, and to the northwest is the imposing Mount Fairweather range, elevated over fifteen thousand feet. Glacier Bay extends forty-five miles up into the land, its width gradually contracting from twelve to three miles. Small icebergs and floes cover much of the surface, as they are constantly detached from the glaciers descending into it. At the head of the bay is the greatest curiosity of Alaska and the most stupendous glacier existing,—the Muir Glacier,—named in honor of Professor John Muir, the geologist of the Pacific coast, who first saw it in 1879 and thoroughly explored it in 1890. When Vancouver was here at the close of the eighteenth century he wrote that a wall of ice extended across the mouth of the bay. The belief is that the glacier once filled the entire bay and has gradually receded. Near the middle of the bay is Willoughby Island, a rock two miles long and fifteen hundred feet high, showing striated and polished surfaces and glacial grooves from bottom to top. This glacier far exceeds all the Swiss ice-fields put together, and it enters the sea with a front one mile and a half wide and two to three hundred feet high. Unlike the dirty terminal moraines of the Swiss glaciers, this is a splendid wall of clear blue and white ice, built up in columns, spires and huge crystal masses, displaying beautiful caves and grottoes. It goes many hundreds of feet below the surface of the water, and from its front, masses of ice constantly detach and fall into the bay with noises like thunder or the discharge of artillery. Huge bergs topple over, clouds of spray arise, and gigantic waves are sent across the water. Every few minutes this goes on as the glacier, moving forward with resistless motion, breaks to pieces at the end. The field of ice making this wonderful glacier is formed by nine main streams and seventeen smaller arms. It occupies a vast amphitheatre back among the mountains, thirty to forty miles across, and where it breaks out between the higher mountains to descend to the sea is about three miles wide. The superficial area of this mass of ice is three hundred and fifty square miles. It moves forward from seven to ten feet daily at the edges and more in the centre, and in August, when it loses the most ice, the estimate is that about two hundred millions of cubic feet fall into the bay every day. It loses more ice in the summer than it gains in the winter, and thus steadily retrogrades. The visitors go up to its face, although it cannot be ascended there, and then landing alongside approach it through a lateral moraine, and can there ascend to the top and walk upon the surface. The character and appearance of this famous glacier were much changed by an earthquake in 1899. Among the attractions are the mirages that are frequent here, which have been the origin of the "Phantom City," which early explorers fancifully described as upon Glacier Bay. Other huge glaciers also enter these waters, among them the Grand Pacific, Hugh Miller and Gelkie Glaciers.
THE KLONDYKE AND CAPE NOME.
Northward from the Gastineaux Channel stretches the grand fiord of the Lynn Canal for sixty miles. Snow-crowned mountains surround it, from whose sides many glaciers descend. At the upper end this Canal divides into two forks—the Chilkoot and Chilkat Inlets, at 59° north latitude. This begins the overland route to the Klondyke gold region, and upon the eastern inlet, Chilkoot, are on either bank the two bustling little towns that have grown out of the Klondyke immigration—Skaguay on the eastern and Dyea on the western shore. Each of them has three to four thousand people, with hotels, lodging-places and miners' outfitting shops. Dyea is the United States military post, with a garrison, and here begin the trails across the mountain passes to the upper waters of the Yukon. A railway is constructed over White's Pass to Bennett Lake, and is now the chief route of travel. Pyramid Harbor and Chilkat with salmon-canning establishments are on Chilkat Inlet. Beyond White's Pass, which crosses the international boundary, the land descends in British America to the headwaters of the Yukon River, which are navigated northwest to Dawson and Circle City and other mining camps of the Klondyke region, where the prolific gold-fields have had such rich yields, there having been $40,000,000 gold taken out in two years. The Yukon flows a winding course westward to Norton Sound on the Bering Sea, discharging through a wide-spreading delta. The port of St. Michaels is to the northward. There are two routes to the Klondyke from San Francisco—via Skaguay and overland a distance of about twenty-three hundred miles, and via St. Michaels and up the Yukon forty-seven hundred miles.
The Alaskan coast beyond the Muir Glacier is bordered by the great St. Elias mountain range, rising in Mount Logan to nineteen thousand five hundred and thirty-nine feet, the highest of the Rockies, and in Mount St. Elias nearer the coast to eighteen thousand and twenty-four feet. From the broad flanks of St. Elias the vast Malaspina Glacier flows down to Icy Bay on the Pacific Ocean. There are mountains all about this region, which the official geographers are naming after public men, among them being Mount Dewey. To the westward the vast Alaska peninsula projects far out, dividing the Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea, terminating in the Fox Islands, of which Ounalaska is the port, and having the Aleutian Islands spreading beyond still farther westward. It is a remarkable fact, indicating the vast extent of the United States, that the extremity of the Aleutian group is as far in latitude westward from San Francisco as the Penobscot River and coast of Maine are eastward. To the north is the Bering Strait, having the Russian East Cape of Siberia projecting opposite to the Alaskan Cape Prince of Wales to guard the passage into the Arctic Ocean. Here, upon the southern shore of the protruding end of Alaska, and fronting Norton Sound up almost under the Arctic Circle, is the noted Cape Nome, the latest discovered gold-field, about a hundred miles northwest of St. Michaels. Fabulous golden sands are spread out in gulches and on the beaches, and Nome City has become quite a settlement. This is the latest El Dorado to which such an enormous rush of prospectors and gold-hunters was made in the early spring of 1900, many thousands filling up every available steamer that could be got to sail northward. The prolific output of these gold-bearing sands is said to exceed the Klondyke in its yield, and this will be the golden Mecca until somebody crosses over into Siberia or goes up nearer the North Pole, and finds there a new deposit of treasure. Already it is said that Nome City spreads practically for twenty miles along the sea-beach, and that the industrious miners are getting much gold by dredging far out under the sea, and expect to secure fifty millions annually from this remote but extraordinary region.
Nome City, like everywhere else that the hardy American pioneer raises the flag for discovery and settlement, has its newspaper, the Gold Digger, and this enterprising publication thus poetically describes the new El Dorado of the Arctic seas, the "Golden Northland":
"High o'er the tundra's wide expanse,
Mount Anvil lifts its God-wrought crown,
Bold guardian of a shining shore,
That's ever garbed in golden gown.
"Here nature, lavish with her store