We went to the Hotel Vancouver, where we had been staying, and there breakfasted.
Our boat, “City of Seattle,” is roomy and comfortable. We have a large upper state-room on the starboard side, plenty of fresh air and sunlight. It is loaded down with an immense cargo of miscellaneous freight, from piles of boxes of Iowa butter and fresh eggs, to sheep and live stock, chickens and pigs, vegetables and canned goods, most of it billed to Dawson and even to points below. The Yukon has been so low this year—less snow than usual falling last winter—that the bulk of the freight “going in” has had to be shipped via these Skagway boats and the White Pass Railway, despite the exorbitant freight rates they are charging for everything.
LEAVING VANCOUVER.
The travellers are of two sorts. A good many making the round trip from Seattle to Skagway, and the Yukoner “going in” for the winter. The former are not of much concern to us, but among the latter I have found a number of interesting acquaintances. One, a man who hunts for a business, and is full of forest lore and hunting tales. He is also something of a naturalist and taxidermist, and I have been showing him our volumes of the report of the Harriman Expedition, to his delight. He has also explored along the Kamtschatka coasts of Siberia, and describes it as a land stocked with salmon and fur animals. He says, too, that I have done right to bring along my gun, for there are lots of ptarmigan as well as mountain sheep and goats in the Yukon Valley, and caribou and moose are also plentiful.
Another man has spent a year or more on the Yukon—our chief engineer—and thinks we will have no difficulty in getting a boat down from Dawson, and the scenery he says is grand. Another is a lumber-man of Wrangel—from Pennsylvania—and tells me they have some fine timber there, though most of that of these far northern latitudes is too small to now profitably compete with the big logs of Washington.
Our vis-a-vis at table is going up to the Porcupine Placer district to try his luck with finding gold, and several men are going into Atlin—whither we are bound—to find work at big pay.
The atmosphere of the company is buoyant and hopeful, even the women have a dash of prosperity about them—gold chains and diamonds—of which there are not a few.