FIVE FINGERS RAPIDS ON THE YUKON.
We have passed several steamers coming up the river and stopped twice to take on firewood and a few times to put off mail at the stations of the Northwest Mounted Police. About four o’clock P. M. we safely passed through the dangerous rocky pass of the Five Fingers, where five basalt rocks of gigantic size tower 100 feet into the air and block the passage of the foaming waters. Just where we passed, the cliffs seemed almost to touch our gunwales, so near are they together. The banks are high slopes of sand and gravel, now and then striped by a white band of volcanic dust. The trees are small and stunted, but growing thickly together, so as scarcely to let a man pass between. We have seen two puny coal banks where is mined a dirty bituminous coal, but worth $30.00 to $40.00 per ton in Dawson. Better than a mine of gold!
We have just now run through the difficult passage known as Hell’s Gates, where on one side a mass of cliff and on the other a shifting sand bar confine the waters to a swift and treacherous chute. So close to the rocks have we passed that one might have clasped hands with a man upon them, yet for a mile we never touched their jagged sides. Clever steering by our Norwegian pilot!
Now we are past the mouth of the great Pelly River, itself navigable for steamboats for some three hundred miles, as far as up to White Horse by the main stream, and are hove to at Fort Selkirk, an old Hudson Bay Company post. Here the mounted police maintain a considerable force. They are standing on the bank, many of them in their red coats, together with a group of the Pelly Indians, a tribe of famous fur hunters.
Passing safely through the treacherous Lewes Rapids above the mouth of the Pelly, we have swung out into the true Yukon, an immense river, wide as the Mississippi at St. Louis, many islands and sand bars. At high water the river must here be two miles across. The moon hangs round and white in the south, not much above the horizon, and we shall slowly steam ahead all night.
September 7, 1903.
We are making a quick trip. We passed the mouth of the Stewart River in the early dawn. Another great stream navigable for 200 miles. By the Pelly Valley or by the Stewart, and their feeding lakes, will some day enter the railroads from the valley of the Mackenzie, coming up from Edmonton and the southeast. There is supposed to be yet much undiscovered gold on both of these streams, and fine grass land and black soil fit for root crops.
