As a specimen of this author’s prose writing and style, we present the following extract from a syndicate letter clipped from the “Philadelphia Inquirer.”
Head of Lake Bennett, Alaska, August 2, 1897.
WRITE by the bank of what is already a big river, and at the fountain head of the mighty Yukon, the second if not the first of American rivers. We have crossed the summit, passed the terrible Chilkoot Pass and Crater Lake and Long Lake and Lideman Lake, and now I sit down to tell the story of the past, while the man who is to take me up the river six hundred miles to the Klondike rows his big scow, full of cattle, brought from Seattle.
THE BEAUTY AND GRANDEUR OF CHILKOOT PASS.
All the pictures that had been painted by word, all on easel, or even in imagination of Napoleon and his men climbing up the Alps, are but childish playthings in comparison with the grandeur of Chilkoot Pass. Starting up the steep ascent, we raised a shout and it ran the long, steep and tortuous line that reached from a bluff above us, and over and up till it lost itself in the clouds. And down to us from the clouds, the shout and cry of exultation of those brave conquerers came back, and only died away when the distance made it possible to be heard no longer. And now we began to ascend.
It was not so hard as it seemed. The stupendous granite mountain, the home of the avalanche and the father of glaciers, melted away before us as we ascended, and in a single hour of brisk climbing we stood against the summit or rather between the big granite blocks that marked the summit. As I said before, the path is not so formidable as it looked, and it is not half so formidable as represented, but mark you, it is no boy’s play, no man’s play. It is a man’s and a big strong man’s honest work, and takes strength of body and nerve of soul.
Right in the path and within ten feet of a snow bank that has not perished for a thousand years, I picked and ate a little strawberry, and as I rested and roamed about a bit, looking down into the brightly blue lake that made the head waters of the Yukon, I gathered a little sun flower, a wild hyacinth and a wild tea blossom for my buttonhole.