INDIAN CHIEF’S HOUSE, JUNEAU.
Patrick O’Flynn, a prisoner serving a six months’ sentence, escaped Thursday and has gone, nobody knows where. He, with other prisoners, was carrying water from the Yukon when he bolted among the tents along the river bank, mingled with the crowd and was lost sight of. One hundred dollars reward was promptly offered for information leading to his capture.
The Yukon has been steadily rising for the past week, and the high water mark is not yet reached. Water is backed up in the Klondike, overflowing the island.
This little city came near having a Johnstown flood last winter. An eye witness thus describes how the ice went out at Dawson. The river had been frozen all winter. When a few warm spring days came, the melting ice and snow in the mountains sent down immense volumes of water the strain of which the ice could not long withstand. All day the people stood helplessly about discussing the situation. A flood seemed inevitable; the greater part of the city was in danger of being swept away; until three o’clock in the afternoon the situation was unchanged, the ice gave no evidence of going.
Suddenly and almost simultaneously all along the city front the ice was seen to commence moving. A steamboat whistled and the cry went up, “The ice is moving,” and thousands of spectators rushed to the river bank just in time to see it go. The dancing masses of huge pieces of ice weighing tons upon tons, reared high in the air and tumbling over each other as they fell, presented a most beautiful spectacle. At ten o’clock it jammed and raised the water about three feet, doing no damage except smashing the wheel of the steamer Nellie Irving. In ten minutes the jam broke and the next morning the river, which the day before was frozen solid across, was entirely free except for blocks of floating ice from above.
Last year ice jammed and, backing the water up, flooded the town, doing much damage.
SUMMIT OF THE SELKIRK RANGE, AT HEAD OF YUKON RIVER. OLD GLORY WAVES BESIDE THE BRITISH FLAG.