There will be some good placer mines in Cook’s Inlet when the country is properly opened, but it has hardly been prospected as yet, owing to the difficulty in sinking shafts to bed rock on account of the water coming in so rapidly. It is necessary to go through bed rock to the glacier channels below for the main deposits of gold.
By timbering the shafts the water may be kept out. The soil and gravel taken out of a shaft which has just been sunk averages only twenty-five cents per cubic yard, but the owners intend to go through the rock to the channels below, where they expect to strike a rich vein, make their fortunes and return to civilization.
There is usually a light freeze about the middle of September, after which the weather is fine until the last of November.
The king of volcanoes in this region is Iliamna. Steam and smoke issue from two craters at the summit of the snow-clad mountain. During an eruption this giant shakes the earth to its very center.
This wonderful estuary was discovered by Captain Cook, on the natal day of Princess Elizabeth, May 21, 1778. He took possession in the name of her majesty, and buried his records in a bottle at Possession Point. Vancouver searched for these records in vain.
Tramways, stone piers and decaying buildings speak in unmistakable language of busy scenes during Russian occupation.
Five hundred miles west of Sitka, on the shore of Kadiak, one of the emerald isles of the Alaskan coast, is St. Paul, the first capital of Alaska, and the center of the fur trade established by Shelikoff and Baranhoff.
The natives say that many summers ago the Kadiak Islands were separated from the mainland by a very narrow channel. One day a big otter attempting to swim through was caught fast. He struggled until he widened the Shelikoff Strait, when he swam triumphantly through. A bad Indian and his dog sent adrift on a big stone turned into the largest Kadiak, on the shore of which St. Paul is located. The Kadiakers are descended from the daughter of a great chief of the north, who, with her husband and dogs, was banished from her father’s lodge.
The forest on these islands consists of a few scattered groves. The grass, shrubs and mosses bathed in a perpetual fog are so brilliantly green as to dazzle the eye.
The dug-out canoe disappears here and boats of sea lion and walrus skins stretched over frames of drift wood lightly skim the blue waters of the cold sea.