FIFTH LETTER.
SKAGWAY, CARIBOU CROSSING[A] AND ATLIN.
Atlin, British Columbia, August 29, 1903.
Here we are at the mining camp of Atlin, on Atlin Lake. We left Skagway the same morning we arrived. Our boat, the “City of Seattle,” came in early Wednesday morning, and long before we got up we heard them discharging cargo, all hands at work. The day was cloudy, cold, and icy winds swept down from the glaciers. It seemed November. The little town is built on a low sand tongue of detritus carried down from the glaciers by the snow rivers, the river Skagway here pouring out a flood of muddy white water like the Swiss streams.
The railway is a narrow, three-foot gauge, and the cars are low but roomy. Our train consisted of nine freight cars, a baggage, two passenger cars and three locomotives, one in front and two in the middle. The famous ride was all that has been said of it. First, a gradual ascent up the deep valley of the Skagway, then steep climbing and many doubles and winds up through the cañon to the summit, twenty miles away, and 3,200 feet above the sea. In many places the road-bed is blasted out of the granite rock, sheer precipices above and below, a most costly piece of work, and ever down below winds the difficult, dangerous trail, over which fifty to one hundred thousand men and women footed it in the winters of 1897–1898, in the strange, mad world-rush to the fabulous gold fields of the interior. How they got up and through at all is the wonder; yet men tell me that men, pack-laden, footsore, determined, were so closely massed along the trail that it was one continuous line from Skagway to summit and beyond, for months at a time. The various views from our car were magnificent and even appalling; sometimes we seemed to hang in mid-air as we crawled upward. As we approached the summit we came among snow fields and near many glaciers, and then passed through long snow-sheds over which the avalanches often slip and thunder into the abysses below.
Near the divide is the international boundary line, and the customs station for Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada, and where the red-coated Canadian mounted police come first in evidence. Here our bags were examined by the customs. Then we began a gradual descent into wide, open, flat valleys, over bare granite rock masses and through a stunted fir wilderness into the basin of the Yukon, 2,600 miles from the Behring Sea at St. Michaels. Flocks of ptarmigan flew up as the train rolled down, and a few eagles soared high above the snow summits.
Our first stop was at a railway eating-house near the head of Lake Bennett, a sheet of light green water, two to ten miles wide and over thirty miles long, all shut in by gigantic granite mountains whose summits were covered with glittering snow. The railway skirts the water for the entire distance until it crosses at a bridge over a swift current where Lake Bennett flows into Lake Marsh, and where is the station of Caribou.
