Here we were put off, and here we would, two days later, take the bi-weekly steamer for Atlin, on Atlin Lake, where we now are, and here the railway leaves the lakes and takes a short cut across a low divide to White Horse Rapids, where begins the steamboat navigation on the Yukon River.
Caribou is a collection of cabins and tents, and is the first settlement where, they say, will some day be a city.
It was on Lake Bennett that the weary pilgrims used to camp to build their boats and rafts and begin their long water journey of five hundred miles to Dawson and the golden Klondike.
Our hotel we found surprisingly neat and clean; owned and kept by a famous Indian, “Dawson Charlie,” who was one of the discoverers of the gold of Bonanza Creek in the Klondike, and who had the sense to himself stake out several claims, the gold from which has made him now a magnate worth several hundred thousand dollars, and who lives and entertains like a white man. He housed us in a neat, comfortable room, iron bedstead, wire mattress, carpeted floor. He fed us at fifty cents a meal as well, as abundantly as in West Virginia, and only his Indian daughter, who waited on us, dressed neatly and fashionably, with big diamonds in her ears, made us realize that we were not in our own land. Here we have spent two delightful days. The air is as wonderfully clear as on the table-lands of Mexico, full of ozone, but cold in the shadow even in midday, though the sun is warm.
On the ship we met a delightful naturalist, Mr. Baldwin, of New Haven, artist of the U. S. Fish Commission, and who came with us to try and catch some grayling, in order to make drawings for the Commission, and for two days we have been out in the woods, he with my rod, H—— with your butterfly net, and I with my gun. He caught his grayling, several of them. I shot several mallard ducks, but H—— caught no butterflies, nor saw one. It was too late in the season for that.
On the way up we fell in with a very intelligent Swede, whose partner in the Klondike is a Dane, and who, when he learned H——’s nationality, and she had talked Danish with him, was all courtesy and friendliness. He had come in with the “mushers” (corruption of the French marche), as the early foot-farers are called, and had succeeded. When we get to Dawson he will welcome us.
A VISTA ON LAKE MARSH.