The Indians wear citizens’ clothes and carry watches. Many of them sport canes when walking about the streets. The women and girls do the family washing on the rocks in the mountain streams. One little black-eyed, brown-faced witch who said her name was Troke Lewis, was washing handkerchiefs on a big rock over which the water poured. She paused to talk to us, a cake of soap held high in one hand, while with the other she held her handkerchiefs down in the cold water on the rock.
Just around the cliff, back of Juneau, lies the beautiful Silver Bow cañon.
SILVER BOW CAÑON, JUNEAU.
By permission of F. Laroche, Photographer, Seattle, Washington.
There are plenty of fine fish in the bay. Salmon, trout and eels abound. The writer caught a trout weighing ten pounds and an eel weighing one pound.
Skagway is located on the Lynn canal at the foot of Mt. Dewey, which rises sheer fifty-five hundred feet above the sea. The climate is very mild, the thermometer never being known to register over six below zero. A veritable Ganymede sends down a vast supply of the most delicious water. Skagway is the coming city of Alaska. It will be to Alaska what Chicago is to the Middle Western States, what St. Paul and Minneapolis are to the Northwest and what Seattle is to the North Pacific coast. Streets are being laid out and other improvements are going on. Log cabins covered with tar paper are being replaced by more substantial buildings. People are coming here to stay and the representative inhabitants of this youthful town are men and women of refinement and culture from the Eastern and Middle States.
At Skagway all sorts of vegetables are growing in the gardens, lettuce, radishes, onions, potatoes, cabbage and tomatoes.
We spent the Fourth of July in this place. Congressman Warner invited us to join him and the senatorial party for the day. We went to the summit of the Selkirk mountains, to the head of the Yukon River on the White Pass and Yukon railway, after which the party was entertained in Skagway.
OLD RUSSIAN COURT HOUSE, JUNEAU.