All day we have sailed up this great land-locked sheet of blue water, the icebergs and floes increasing in number as we approached Taku Inlet, from whose great live glaciers they are incessantly shed off.
4 P. M.—We have landed at the Treadwell Mines on Douglas Island, where the largest stamp mill in the world crushes a low grade quartz night and day the year around, and where is gathered a mining population of several thousand. Then we crossed the fjord to the bustling port of Juneau, the would-be capital of Alaska, the rival of Sitka. A curious little town of wooden buildings, wooden streets, wooden sidewalks, nestling under a mighty snow-capped mountain, and, like those other towns, largely built on piles, on account of the tides.
Now we are off for Skagway, a twelve hours’ run with our thirteen-knot speed.
To-day we have fallen in with two more fellow-travelers. One a young fellow named Baldwin, attached to the U. S. Fish Commission, who tells me much about the fishing on these coasts, and the efforts now being made to stay the indiscriminate slaughter. Another, a grave-faced, sturdy man from Maine who is panning free gold near Circle City, and has endured much of hardship and suffering. He hopes to win enough this winter and coming summer from his claim to go back to California and make a home for his old mother who waits for him there.
Skagway, Alaska, Wednesday, August 25.
Here we are, safe and sound after a voyage due north four days and four nights, more than 1,500 miles—I do not know just how far. We came out from Juneau last night in a nasty rain, mist (snow-rain almost) and wind driving against the rushing tides. Coming around Douglas Island in the teeth of the gale, we passed over the very spot where a year or two ago the ill-fated S. S. “Islander” struck a sunken iceberg, and went down into the profound depths with all on board. As I heard the moan of the winds, the rain splash on our cabin window, and hearkened to the roar of the whirling tides against whose currents we were entering the great Lynn Canal—fjord we should say—ninety miles or more long—ten to fifteen miles wide—I could not help thinking of the innumerable frail and lesser boats that dared these dangerous waters in the first mad rush to the Klondike but a few short years ago. In the darkness we have passed many fine glaciers, and along the bases of immense snow and ice crested mountains, which we are sorry not to have seen, but so much is now before us that our minds are already bent toward the great Yukon.
We are tied to an immense pier, and mechanical lifters seem to be dragging out the very entrails of the ship. Across the line of the warehouses I see the trucks of the railway, the hackmen are crying out their hotels. “This way, free ’bus to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
