Canada, the Spellbinder

by Lilian Whiting

Indians spearing Salmon in Bulkley Cañon

"Queen Charlotte Sound," writes Ella Higginson,[[1]] "is a splendid sweep of purple water.... The warm breath of the Kuro Siwo, penetrating all these inland seas and passages, is converted by the great white peaks of the horizon into pearl-like mist that drifts in clouds and fragments upon the blue waters. Nowhere are these mists more frequent, nor more elusive, than in Queen Charlotte Sound. At sunrise they take on the delicate tones of the primrose or the pinkish star-flower; at sunset, all the royal rose and purple blendings; all the warm flushes of amber, orange, and gold. Through a maze of pale yellow, whose fine, cool needles sting one's face and set one's hair with seed pearls, one passes into a little open water-world where a blue sky sparkles above a bluer sea, and the air is like clear, washed gold. But a mile ahead a solid wall of amethyst closes in this brilliant sea; shattering it into particles that set the hair with amethysts instead of pearls.... It is this daily mist-shower that bequeaths to British Columbia and Alaska their marvellous and luxuriant growth of vegetation, their spiced sweetness of atmosphere, their fairness and freshness."

[[1]] Alaska; the Great Country, by Ella Higginson. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Forty miles north of Prince Rupert is Dixon's Entrance, that marks the international boundary between the Canadian and Alaskan waters. Some haunting impress left upon the air by the great navigators who made their pioneer voyages in these intricate waterways—Perez and Valdez, Duncan, Vancouver, Meares, Caudra—their dauntless courage and their perils fling spectra on the passing winds and waves. The scenic effects grow more and more sublime as the steamer advances. At a distance of about seventy-five miles north of Prince Rupert the traveller comes in sight of a remarkable series of mountain terraces, rising more than six thousand feet into the air, with sheer walls and castellated summits.

The first call at port after Prince Rupert is at Ketchikan, seven hundred miles from Seattle, with a population of some two thousand people, the distributing point for the mines and fisheries of Southern Alaska. On its crescent-shaped harbour and with its eternal guard of mountains, with its lake and its falls and its wonderful gorge, three miles distant into the woodlands, it is a picturesque town, and with its electric lighting and steam heating it leaves little to be desired for comfortable residence. Between Ketchikan and Wrangell are the Wrangell Narrows, a channel where ethereal vapours, many-hued, like tropical flowers, are breeze-blown in the air; and the long, green moss, on the trees on either side, sways like drapery. Miss Scidmore, writing of Wrangell Narrows, thus pictured it with her fascinating pen:

"It was an enchanting trip up that narrow channel of deep water, rippling between bold island shores and parallel mountain walls. Beside clear emerald tide, reflecting tree and rock, there was the beauty of foaming cataracts leaping down the sides of snow-capped mountains and the grandeur of great glaciers pushing down through sharp ravines and dropping miniature icebergs into the sea. Touched by the last light of the sun, Patterson Glacier was a frozen lake of a wonderland, shining with silvery lights, and showing a pale ethereal green and deep, pure blue in all the rifts and crevices of its icy front."

From Wrangell on to Juneau the entrance to Taku Inlet is passed. The far-famed Taku Glacier is differentiated by the extreme brilliancy of its colouring from all other glaciers of the Alaskan regions. Taku Inlet, with its forty-five ice streams, is a fitting approach to this marvel of Nature. Every blast of the steamer's whistle is as the call of a giant monster which is answered by masses of ice that, detached by the vibration, plunge headlong into the sea with a noise like thunder. "That day on the Taku Glacier will live forever as one of the rarest and most perfect enjoyment," again writes Alaska's vivid interpreter, Miss Scidmore: "The grandest objects in Nature were before us, the primeval forces that mould the face of the earth were at work, and it was all so out of the every-day world that we might have been walking a new planet, fresh fallen from the Creator's hand." The Taku Glacier has a sheer, precipitous front three hundred feet high, the colour making it seem one gigantic sapphire, so intense is the blue. Yet again there are glints of green and rose and gold that flash out as if a casket of jewels had been flung over it, or an avalanche of star-dust, windswept, from the far spaces of the universe. John Muir, the great naturalist, whose vision was that of the artist and whose spirit was always open to the message of the eternal world, was deeply impressed by Taku and by Sundum fiords, and in one allusion he says of Taku:

"A hundred or more glaciers of the second and third class may be seen along these walls, and as many snowy cataracts, which, with the plunging bergs, keep all the fiord in a roar. The scenery is of the wildest description, especially in their upper reaches, where the granite walls, streaked with waterfalls, rise in sheer massive precipices, like those of Yosemite Valley, to a height of three and four thousand feet."

The poetic eye of John Burroughs keenly recognised the grandeur of all this voyage and the especial splendour that lies between Prince Rupert and Skagway; and of the gleaming brilliancy of the glacier regions he said that it was as if "the solid earth became spiritual and translucent."