During the warmer days of summer the heat feels almost tropical; the winter cold is, on the other hand, of almost the extreme Siberian rigor. Yet a beautiful vegetation smiles not only over the valleys, but on the hilltops, the birds gambol in the thickets, and the tiny mosquito, either here or near by, pipes out its daily sustenance to the wrath of man. The hungry forest stretches out its gnarled and ragged arms for still another hundred or even three hundred miles farther to the north.
Up to within a few years the white man was a stranger in the land, and the Indian roamed the woods and pastures as still do the moose and caribou. To-day this has largely changed. The banks of the once silent river now give out the hum of the sawmill, the click of the hammer, and the blast of the time-whistle, commanding either to rest or to work. A busy front of humanity has settled where formerly the grizzly bear lapped the stranded salmon from the shore, and where at a still earlier period—although perhaps not easily associated with the history of man—the mammoth, the musk ox, and the bison were masters of the land. The red man is still there in lingering numbers, but his spirit is no longer that which dominates, and his courage not that of the untutored savage.
The modern history of Dawson begins with about the middle of 1896, shortly after the "public" discovery of gold in the Klondike tract. Three or four months previous there was hardly a habitation, whether tent or of logs, to deface the landscape, and the voice of animate Nature was hushed only in the sound of many waters. At the close of the past year, as nearly as estimate can make it, there were probably not less than from fourteen thousand to fifteen thousand men, women, and children, settled on the strip of land that borders the Yukon, both as lowland and highland, for about two miles of its course near the confluence of the Klondike. Many of these have located for a permanence, others only to give way to successors more fortunate than themselves. Some of the richest claims of the Bonanza, now a famed gold creek of the world, are located hardly twelve miles distant, and the wealth of the Eldorado is discharged within a radius of less than twenty miles. Over the mountains that closely limit the head springs of Bonanza and Eldorado, Hunker, Dominion, and Sulphur Creeks thread their own valleys of gold in deep hollows of beautiful woodland—fascinating even to-day, but already badly scarred by the work that man has so assiduously pressed in the region. This is the Klondike, a land full of promise and of equal disappointment, brought to public notice in the early part of 1897, when intelligence was received by the outside world regarding the first important gold location on Bonanza Creek in August of the year previous.
Looking down the Lynn Canal—Skaguay River, with Skaguay on the Left.
On the 24th of July of the past year I found myself on the principal thoroughfare of Skaguay, the ubiquitous Broadway, contemplating a journey to the new north. The route of travel had been determined for me in part by the non-arrival at Seattle of the expected steamers from the mouth of the Yukon River, and by that woeful lack of knowledge regarding "conditions" which so frequently distinguishes steamship companies. It was to be, therefore, the overland route, and from Skaguay it was merely the alternative between the White Pass and the Chilkoot Pass or Dyea trails. The two start from points barely four miles apart, cross their summits at very nearly the same distance from one another, and virtually terminate at the same body of inland water, Lake Lindeman, the navigable head of the great Yukon River. A more than generous supply of summer heat gave little warning of that bleak and severe interior with which the world had been made so well familiar during the last twelvemonth, and from which we were barely six hundred miles distant; nor did the character of the surroundings betray much of an approach to the Arctic Circle. Mountains of aspiring elevations, six thousand to seven thousand feet, most symmetrically separated off into pinnacles and knobs, and supporting here and there enough of snow to form goodly glaciers, look down upon the narrow trough which to-day is the valley of the Skaguay River. At the foot of this ancient fiord lies the boom town of Skaguay. Charming forests, except where the hand of man has leveled the work of Nature to suit the requirements of a constructing railway, yet clothe the mountain slopes and fill in the gap that lies between them, shadowing the dense herbage and moss which almost everywhere form an exquisite carpeting to the underlying rock. The ear may catch the strains of a few mosquitoes, or the mellow notes of the robin or thrush, but rising far above these in the majesty of tone and accent is the swish of the tumbling cataracts which bring the landscape of Norway to America. Man, it is claimed, is much the same the world over; but there is a limitation. The second habitation of white man in Skaguay was established less than a year before my visit; yet at that time, presumably to meet the demands of a resident population of nearly five thousand, and of the wandering hordes pressing to the interior, the destructive hand of the advertiser had already inscribed on the walls of rock, in characters twenty feet or more in height, and sufficiently elevated to make them nearly the most conspicuous elements of the landscape, the glories of cigars, the value of mental and physical specifics, and of other abominations which were contrived to fatten the Yankee pocket.
A Summer Day on the Skaguay.
Had it not been for the kindly advice of one who had just returned from the Klondike, and who claimed to have crossed both passes fifty times, I should almost unhesitatingly have taken the White Pass trail; but the representation that beyond the summit the mud would be neck-deep and virtually impenetrable for a distance of twenty miles or more, cast the decision in favor of the Chilkoot. The fortunate or unfortunate circumstance that a billowy sea made a landing of passengers at Dyea impossible on that day threw me back upon my first resource, and about two hours before midday of the 30th I was mounted on a horse following out the Skaguay trail. By seven o'clock in the evening of the following day I had reached Lake Lindeman, and about a half hour later Lake Bennett, the starting point of the lines of Upper Yukon steamers which had just recently been established. We had made the forty miles of the dreaded White Pass trail without serious hindrance or delay, up over the summit of 2,860 feet elevation, and down over a course which was depicted in colors of hardship that would have done more truthful service in describing a pass in the Himalayas. There was no mud, not a trace of snow or ice except on the mountain declivities, and had it not been for a horse that was both stiff and lame, and required my attention as pedestrian to an extent that had not been bargained for, the journey would have been an exceptionally delightful one.