Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska Part 3

CHAPTER VIII.

Juneau.

Sitka, the capital of Alaska, sleeps, save when she is awakened for a day or two by the arrival of a steamer-load of tourists. Fort Wrangell, the premature offspring of a gold rumor, died, but rose again from the dead when the l.u.s.t of gold turned the human tide toward the Klondike.

Juneau, the metropolis, was the only settlement that showed any signs of vigor before the Klondike day; and she lived a not over-lively village life on the strength of the mines on Douglas Island, across the narrow straits. There were sea-birds skimming the water as we threaded the labyrinthine channels that surround Juneau. We were evidently not very far from the coast-line; for the gulls were only occasional visitors on the Alaskan cruise, though the eagles we had always with us. They soared aloft among the pines that crowned the mountain heights; they glossed their wings in the spray of the sky-tipped waterfalls, and looked down upon us from serene summits with the unwinking eye of scorn. It is awfully fine sailing all about Juneau. Superb heights, snow-capped in many cases, forest-clad in all, and with cloud belts and sunshine mingling in the crystalline atmosphere, form a glorious picture, which, oddly enough, one does not view with amazement and delight, but in the very midst of which, and a very part of which, he is; and the proud consciousness of this marks one of the happiest moments of his life.

Steaming into a lagoon where its mountain walls are so high it seemed like a watery way in some prodigious Venice; steaming in, stealing in like a wraith, we were shortly saluted by the miners on Douglas Island, who are, perhaps, the most persistent and least harmful of the dynamiters. It was not long before we began to get used to the batteries that are touched off every few minutes, night and day; but how strange to find in that wild solitude a 120-stamp mill, electric lights, and all the modern nuisances! Never was there a greater contrast than the one presented at Douglas Island. The lagoon, with its deep, dark waters, still as a dead river, yet mirroring the sea-bird's wing; a strip of beach; just above it rows of cabins and tents that at once suggest the mining camps of early California days; then the rather handsome quarters of the directors; and then the huge mill, admirably constructed and set so snugly among the quarries that it seems almost a part of the ore mountain itself; beyond that the great forest, with its eagles and big game; and the everlasting snow peaks overtopping all, as they lose themselves in the fairest of summer skies. Small boats ply to and fro between Douglas Island and Juneau, a mile or more up the inlet on the opposite sh.o.r.e. These ferries are paddled leisurely, and only the explosive element at Douglas Island gives token of the activity that prevails at Gastineaux Channel.

Soon, weary of the racket on Douglas Island, and expecting to inspect the mine later on, we returned across the water and made fast to the dock in the lower end of Juneau. This settlement has seen a good deal of experience for a young one. It was first known as Pilsbury; then some humorist dubbed it Fliptown. Later it was called Rockwell and Harrisburg; and finally Juneau, the name it still bears with more or less dignity. The customary Indian village hangs upon the borders of the town; in fact, the two wings of the settlement are aboriginal; but the copper-skin seems not particularly interested in the progress of civilization, further than the occasional chance it affords him of turning an honest penny in the disposal of his wares.

No sooner was the gang-plank out than we all made a rush for the trading stores in search of curios. The faculty of acquisitiveness grows with what it feeds on; and before the Alaskan tour is over, it almost amounts to a mania among the excursionists. You should have seen us--men, women and children--hurrying along the beach toward the heart of Juneau, where we saw flags flying from the staves that stood by the trading-stores. It was no easy task to distance a compet.i.tor in those great thoroughfares.

Juneau has an annual rainfall of nine feet; the streets are guttered: indeed the streets are gutters in some cases. I know of at least one little bridge that carries the pedestrian from one sidewalk to another, over the muddy road below. I was headed off on my way to the N. W. T.

Co.'s warehouse, and sat me down on a stump to write till the rush on bric-a-brac was over. Meanwhile I noticed the shake shanties and the pioneers who hung about them, with their long legs crooked under rush chairs in the diminutive verandas.

Indian belles were out in full feather. Some had their faces covered with a thick coating of soot and oil; the rims of the eyelids, the tip of the nose and the inner portions of the lips showing in striking contrast to the hideous mask, which they are said to wear in order to preserve their complexion. They look for the most part like black-faced monkeys, and appear in this guise a great portion of the time in order to dazzle the town, after a scrubbing, with skins as fair and sleek as soft-soap. Even some of the sterner s.e.x are constrained to resort to art in the hope of heightening their manly beauty; but these are, of course, Alaskan dudes, and as such are doubtless pardonable.

There is a bath-house in Juneau and a barber-shop. They did a big business on our arrival. There are many billiard halls, where prohibited drinks are more or less surrept.i.tiously obtained. A dance-hall stands uninvitingly open to the street. At the doorway, as we pa.s.sed it, was posted a hand-lettered placard announcing that the ladies of Juneau would on the evening in question give a grand ball in honor of the pa.s.sengers of the _Ancon_. Tickets, 50 cents.

It began to drizzle. We dodged under the narrow awnings of the shops, and bargained blindly in the most unmusical lingos. Within were to be had stores of toy canoes--graceful little things hewn after the Haida model, with prows and sides painted in strange hieroglyphics; paddles were there--life-size, so to speak,--gorgeously dyed, and just the things for hall decorations; also dishes of carved wood of quaint pattern, and some of them quite ancient, were to be had at very moderate prices; pipes and pipe-bowls of the weirdest description; halibut fish-hooks, looking like anything at all but fish-hooks; Shaman rattles, grotesque in design; Thlinket baskets, beautifully plaited and stained with subdued dyes--the most popular of souvenirs; spoons with bone bowls and handles carved from the horns of the mountain goat or musk-ox; even the big horn-spoon itself was no doubt made by these ingenious people; Indian masks of wood, inlaid with abalone sh.e.l.ls, bears' teeth, or lucky stones from the head of the catfish; Indian wampum; deer-skin sacks filled with the smooth, pencil-shaped sticks with which the native sport pa.s.ses the merry hours away in games of chance; bangles without end, and rings of the clumsiest description hammered out of silver coin; bows and arrows; doll papooses, totem poles in miniature. There were garments made of fish-skins and bird-skins, smelling of oil and semi-transparent, as if saturated with it; and half-musical instruments, or implements, made of twigs strung full of the beaks of birds that clattered with a weird, unearthly Alaskan clatter.

There were little graven images, a few of them looking somewhat idolatrous; and heaps upon heaps of nameless and shapeless odds and ends that boasted more or less bead-work in the line of ornamentation; but all chiefly noticeable for the lack of taste displayed, both in design and the combination of color. The Chilkat blanket is an exception to the Alaskan Indian rule. It is a handsome bit of embroidery, of significant though mysterious design; rich in color, and with a deep, knotted fringe on the lower edge--just the thing for a lambrequin, and to be had in Juneau for $40, which is only $15 more than is asked for the same article in Portland, Oregon, as some of us discovered to our cost. There were quant.i.ties of skins miserably cured, impregnating the air with vilest odors; and these were waved at you and wafted after you at every step. In the forest which suddenly terminates at the edge of the town there is game worth hunting. The whistler, reindeer, mountain sheep and goat, ermine, musk-rat, marmet, wolf and bear, are tracked and trapped by the red-man; but I doubt if the foot of the white-man is likely to venture far into the almost impenetrable confusion of logs and brush that is the distinguishing feature of the Alaskan wilderness. Beautiful antlers are to be had in Juneau and elsewhere; and perhaps a cinnamon or a black cub as playful as a puppy, and full of a kind of half-savage fun.

In the upper part of the town, where the stumps and brush are thickest, there are cosy little log-cabins, and garden patches that seem to be making the most of the summer sunshine. In the window of one of these cabins we saw a face--dusky, beautiful, sensitive. Dreamy eyes slumbered under fringes that might have won a song from a Persian poet; admirably proportioned features, delicious lips, almost persuaded us that a squaw-man might in some cases be excusable for his infatuation. Later we discovered that the one beauty of Alaska was of Hawaiian parentage; that she was married, and was as shy of intruders as a caged bird. Very dissimilar are the ladies of Juneau.

In the evening the town-crier went to and fro announcing the opening of the ball. It was still drizzling; the cliffs that tower above the metropolis were capped with cloud; slender, rain-born rivulets plunged from these airy heights into s.p.a.ce and were blown away like smoke.

Sometimes we caught glimpses of white, moving objects, far aloft against the black wall of rock: these were mountain sheep.

The cannonading at Douglas Island continued--m.u.f.fled thunder that ceases neither night nor day. n.o.body seemed to think of sleeping. The dock was swarming with Indians; you would have known it with your eyes shut, from the musky odor that permeated every quarter of the ship. The deck was filled with pa.s.sengers, chatting, reading, smoking, looking off upon the queer little town and wondering what its future was likely to be. And so, we might have lingered on indefinitely, with the light of a dull day above us--a light that was to grow no less till dawn, for there is no night there,--were it not that some one looked at his watch, and lo!

it was the midnight hour.

Then we went to the ball given by the ladies of Juneau in our honor.

Half a dozen young Indian maidens sat on a bench against the wall and munched peanuts while they smiled; a few straggling settlers gathered at the bar while they smiled; two fiddlers and a guitar made as merry as they could under the circ.u.mstances in an alcove at the top of the hall.

Round dances were in vogue,--round dances interspersed with flirtations and fire-water; round dances that grew oblong and irregular before sunrise--and yet it was sunrise at the unearthly hour of 3.30 a. m., or thereabout. We all felt as if we had been cheated out of something when we saw his coming; but perhaps it was only the summer siesta that had been cut short,--the summer siesta that here pa.s.ses for the more wholesome and old-fashioned sleep of the world lower down on the map.

During the night, having discharged freight and exhausted the resources of Juneau, including a post-office, and a post-mistress who sorts the mail twice a month, we steamed back to Douglas Island, and dropped many fathoms of noisy chain into the deep abreast of the camp. The eve of the Fourth in the United States of America is nothing in comparison with the everlasting racket at this wonderful mine. The iron jaws of the 120-stamp mill grind incessantly, spitting pulverized rock and ore into the vats that quake under the mastication of the mighty molars; cars slip down into the bowels of the earth, and emerge laden with precious freight; mult.i.tudinous miners relieve one another, watch and watch.

Electric light banishes even a thought of dusk; and were it now winter--the long, dark, dreary winter of the North, with but half a dozen hours of legitimate daylight out of the four and twenty--the work at Douglas Island would go on triumphantly; and it will go forever--or, rather, until the bottom drops out of the mine, just as it drops out of everything in this life. All night long the terrible rattle and rumble and roar of the explosive agent robbed us of our rest. I could think of nothing but the gnomes of the German fairy tale; the dwarfs of the black mountain, with their glowworm lamps, darting in and out of the tunnels in the earth like moles, and heaping together the riches that are the cause of so much pleasure and pain, and envy and despair, and sorrow and sin, and too often death.

CHAPTER IX.

By Solitary Sh.o.r.es.

Probably no one leaves Juneau with regret. Far more enjoyable was the day we spent in Ward's Cove, land-locked, wooded to the water's edge, and with forty-five fathoms of water of the richest sea-green hue. Here lay the _Pinta_ and the _Paterson_, two characteristic representatives of the United States Navy--as it was before the war--the former a promoted tug-boat, equipped at an expense of $100,000, and now looking top-heavy and unseaworthy, but just the thing for a _matinee_ performance of Pinafore, if that were not out of date.

This _Pinta_, terrible as a ca.n.a.l-boat, armed to the teeth, drew up under our quarter to take in coal. You see the _Ancon_ combined business with pleasure, and distributed coal in quant.i.ties to suit throughout the Alaskan lagoon. Now, there is not much fun in coaling, even when a craft as funny as the _Pinta_ is snuggling up under your quarter, looking more like the Pinafore than ever, with her skylarking sailors, midshipmite and all; so Captain Carroll secured a jaunty little steam-launch, and away we went on a picnic in the forest primeval. The launch was laden to the brim; three of our biggest boats were in tow; an abundant collation, in charge of a corps of cabin-boys, gave a.s.surance of success in one line at least.

We explored. Old Vancouver did the same thing long ago, and no doubt found these sh.o.r.es exactly as we find them to-day. We entered a shallow creek at the top of the cove; landed on a dreary point redolent of stale fish, and the beach literally alive and creeping with small worms above half an inch in length. A solitary squaw was splitting salmon for drying. She remained absorbed in her work while we gathered about and regarded her with impudent curiosity. Overcome by the fetid air of the place, we re-embarked and steamed gaily miles away over the sparkling sea.

In an undiscovered country--so it seemed to us--we came to a smooth and sandy strip of sh.o.r.e and landed there. But a few paces from the lightly-breaking ripples was the forest--and such a forest! There were huge trees, looking centuries old, swathed in blankets of moss, and the moss gray with age. Impenetrable depths of shadow overhead, impenetrable depths of litter under foot. Log had fallen upon log crosswise and at every conceivable angle.

Out of the fruitful dust of these deposed monarchs of the forest sprang a numerous progeny--l.u.s.ty claimants, every one of them,--their foliage feathery and of the most delicate green, being fed only by the thin sunshine that sifts through the dense canopy, supported far aloft by the majestic columns that cl.u.s.tered about us. Under foot the russet moss was of astonishing depth and softness. One walks with care upon it, for the foot breaks through the thick matting that has in many cases spread from log to log, hiding treacherous traps beneath. The ferns luxuriate in this sylvan paradise; and many a beautiful shrub, new to us, bore flowers that blushed unseen until we made our unexpected and perhaps unwelcome appearance.

Here we camped. The cloth was spread in a temple not made with hands; how hard it is to avoid ringing in these little old-time tags about flowers and forests! The viands were deftly served; the merry jest went round, and sometimes came back the same way, "returned with thanks." And thus we revelled in the midst of a solitude that may never before have been broken by the sound of human voice. When we held our peace--which we did at long intervals, and for a brief moment only--we realized this solemn fact; but it didn't seem to impress us much on the spot. Why, even the birds were silent. Only the sea-gulls flashed their white wings under the boughs in the edge of the wood, and wheeled away in dizzy circles, piping sharp, peevish cries.

It was a delightful day we pa.s.sed together. The memory of it is one of the most precious souvenirs of the Alaskan tour; and it was with reluctance that we returned to the ship, after consulting our watches with astonishment; for the late hours gave no warning, and we might have pa.s.sed the night there in the loveliest of twilights.

The _Pinta_ was about to withdraw to her anchorage as we boarded the _Ancon_; and then, too late, I discovered among the officers of that terror of the sea an old friend with whom I had revelled in the halcyon days at Stag Racket Bungalow, Honolulu. He was then on the U. S.

man-of-war, _Alaska_ of jolly memory; and he, with his companions, const.i.tuted the crack mess of the navy. But the _Alaska_ is a sheer hulk, and her once jovial crew scattered hither and yon; he alone, in the solitude of these unfreighted waters, remains to tell the tale. I thought it a happy coincidence that, having met him first under _Old Glory_, then floating in the trade wind that blew over southern seas, I should find him last in the lone land that gave name to the ship that brought him over. Can the theosophists unravel this mystery, or see aught in it that verges upon the mystic philosophy? As we steamed out of Wood's Cove that night, with the echoes of a parting salute filling the heavens to overflowing, we saw a cl.u.s.ter of small, dark islets in the foreground; shining waters beyond flowed to the foot of far-away mountains; a silvery sky melted into gold as it neared the horizon: this picture, as delicate in tint as the most exquisite water-color, was framed in a setting of gigantic pines; and it was by this fairy portal we entered the sea of ice.

From solitude to solitude is the order in Alaska. The solitude of the forest and the sea, of the mountain and ravine,--with these we had become more or less familiar when our good ship headed for the solitude of ice and snow. I began to feel as if we were being dragged out on the roof of the world--as if we were swimming in the flooded eaves of a continent. Sometimes there came over me a sense of loneliness--of the distance that lay between us and everybody else, and of the helplessness of our case should any serious accident befall us. It is this very state, perhaps, that ages the hearts of the hardiest of the explorers who seek vainly to unravel the polar mystery.

From time to time as we sailed, the sea, now a brighter blue than ever, was strewn with fragments of ice. Very lovely they looked as they hugged the distant sh.o.r.e; a ghostly and fantastical procession, borne ever southward by the slow current; and growing more ghostly and fantastical hour by hour, as they dwindled in the clear sunshine of the long summer days. Anon the ice fragments increased in number and dimensions. The whole watery expanse was covered with brash, and we were obliged to pick our way with considerable caution. At times we narrowly escaped grazing small icebergs, that might have disabled us had we come in collision with them. As it was, many an ice-cake that looked harmless enough, being very low in the water, struck us with a thud that was startling; or pa.s.sed under our old-fashioned side-wheels, splintering the paddles and causing our hearts to leap within us. A disabled wheel meant a tedious delay in a lat.i.tude where the resources are decidedly limited.

Often we thought of the miserable millions away down East simmering in the sultry summer heat, while the thermometer with us stood at 45 degrees in the sun, and the bracing salt air was impregnated with balsamic odors.

In this delectable state we sighted a bouncing baby iceberg, and at once made for it with the enthusiasm of veritable discoverers. It was pretty to see with what discretion we approached and circled round it, searching for the most favorable point of attack. So much of an iceberg is beneath the surface of the water, ballasting the whole, that it is rather ticklish business cruising in its vicinity. We lay off and on, coquetting with the little beauty, while one of our boats pulled up to it, and threw a lariat over a glittering peak that flamed in the sun like a torch. Then we drew in the slack and made fast, while a half dozen of our men mounted the slippery ma.s.s, armed with ropes and axes, and began to hack off big chunks, which were in due season transferred to our iceboxes.

Our iceberg was about fifty feet in length and twenty or thirty feet out of the water. It was a glittering island, with savage peaks, deep valleys, bluffs, and promontories. The edges were delicately frilled and resembled silver filigree. Some of these, which were transparent and as daintily turned as old Venetian gla.s.s, dripped continually like rain-beaten eaves. The portion nearest the water's edge was honeycombed by the wavelets that dashed upon it without ceasing, rushing in and out of the small, luminous caverns in swift, sparkling rivulets. Much of the surface was crusted with a fine frosting; it was full of wells deep enough to sink a man in. These wells were filled with water, and with a blue light, celestial in its loveliness,--a light ethereal and pellucid.

It was as if the whole iceberg were saturated with transfused moonbeams, that gave forth a mellow radiance, which flashed at times like brilliants, and burst into flame and played like lightning along the almost invisible rims and ridges. The unspeakable, the incomprehensible light throbbed through and through; and was sometimes bluish green and sometimes greenish blue; but oftenest with the one was the other, both at once, and with a perfectly bewildering tint added,--in a word, it was frozen moonlight and no mistake. O my friend, I a.s.sure you there are many famous sports with not half the fun in them that there is in la.s.soing an iceberg!

Once more I turn to my note-books. I find that the morning had been foggy; that we could see scarcely a ship's length ahead of us; that the water was like oil beneath and the mists like snow above and about, while we groped blindly. Of course we could not press forward under the circ.u.mstances; for we were surrounded by islands great and small, and any one of these might silently materialize at a moment's notice; but we were not idle. Now and again our paddles beat the water impetuously, and they hung dripping, while the sea stretched around us as we leisurely drifted on like a larger bubble in danger of bursting upon an unexpected rock. We sounded frequently. There was an abundance of water--there nearly always is throughout the Alaskan archipelago; enough and to spare; but the abrupt sh.o.r.e might be but a stone's-throw from us on the one hand or the other.

What was to be done? In the vast stillness we blew a blast on our shrill whistle, and listened for the echo. Sometimes it returned to us almost on the instant and we cried, "Halt!" When we halted or veered off, creeping as it were on the surface of the oily sea, sometimes a faint or far-off whisper--"the horns of elf-land"--gave us a.s.surance of plenty of s.p.a.ce and the sea-room we were sorely in need of just then. Once we saw looming right under our prow a little islet with a tuft of fir-trees crowning it--the whole worthy to be made the head-piece or tail-piece to some poem on solitude. It was very picturesque; but it seemed to be crouching there, lying in wait for us, ready to arch its back the moment we came within reach. The rapidity with which we backed out of that predicament left us no time for apologies.

Again we got some distance up the wrong channel. When the fog lifted for a moment, we discovered the error, put about without more ado, and went around the block in a hurry. Meanwhile we had schooled our ears to detect the most delicate shades of sound; to measure or weigh each individual echo with an accuracy that gave us the utmost self-satisfaction. Perhaps Captain Carroll or Captain George, who was spying out the land with his ears, would not have trusted the ship in our keeping for five minutes--but no matter.

Presently the opaque atmosphere began to dissolve away; and as the sun brushed the webs from his face, and darted sharp beams upon the water all at once in a shower, the fog-banks went to pieces and rolled away in sections out of sight, like the transformation scene in a Christmas pantomime. And there we were in the very centre of the smiling island world, with splendid snow peaks towering all about us; and such a flood of blue sky and bluer water, golden sunshine and gilded fields of snow, of jutting sh.o.r.es clad in perennial verdure, and eagles and sea-birds wheeling round about us, as can be seen nowhere else in the wide world to the same advantage.

We were entering a region of desolation. The ice was increasing, and the water took that ghastly hue, even a glimpse of which is enough to chill the marrow in one's bones. Vegetation was dying out. A canoe-full of shivering Indians were stemming the icy flood in search of some chosen fishery,--all of them blanketed, and all--squaw as well as papooses--taking a turn at the paddle. These were the children of Nature, whose song-birds are the screaming eagle, the croaking raven, and the crying sea-doves blown inland by the wild westerly gales.

We were now nearly within sound of the booming glaciers; and as we drew nearer and nearer I could but brood over the oft imagined picture of that vast territory--our Alaska,--where, beyond that mountain range, the almost interminable winter is scarcely habitable, and the summers so brief it takes about six of them to make a swallow.

CHAPTER X.

In Search of the Totem-Pole.

Hour after hour and day after day we are coasting along sh.o.r.es that become monotonous in their beauty. For leagues the sea-washed roots of the forest present a fairly impa.s.sable barrier to the foot of man. It is only at infrequent intervals that a human habitation is visible, and still more seldom does the eye discover a solitary canoe making its way among the inextricable confusion of inlets. Sometimes a small cl.u.s.ter of Indian lodges enlivens the scene; and this can scarcely be said to enliven it, for most Indian lodges are as forlorn as a last year's bird's-nest. Sometimes a bright little village gives hope of a break in the serenity of the season--a few hours on sh.o.r.e and an extra page or two in our log-books. Yet again, sometimes it is a green jungle, above the sea, out of which rise diminutive box-houses, like exaggerated dove-cotes, with a goodly number of towering cedar columns, curiously carved, perhaps stained black or red in patches, scattered through them.

These are Indian cemeteries. They are hedged about with staves, from the top of which flutter ragged streamers. They are rich in rude carvings of men and birds and beasts. Now and again a shield as big as a target, and looking not unlike an archery-target, marks the tomb of some warrior.

The unerring shafts of death search out the obscurest handfuls of people scattered through these wide domains; and every village has its solemn suburb, where the houses of the dead are decorated with barbaric bric-a-brac.

Many of the tombs are above ground--airy sarcophagi on high poles rocking in the wind and the rain. Some are nearer the earth, like old-fashioned four-poster bed-steads; and there the dead sleep well.