Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/14

4 important gold location on Bonanza Creek in August of the year previous.

On the 24th of July of the past year I found myself on the principal thoroughfare of Skaguay, the ubiquitous Broadway, contemplating a journey to the new north. The route of travel had been determined for me in part by the non-arrival at Seattle of the expected steamers from the mouth of the Yukon River, and by that woeful lack of knowledge regarding "conditions" which so frequently distinguishes steamship companies. It was to be, therefore, the overland route, and from Skaguay it was merely the alternative between the White Pass and the Chilkoot Pass or Dyea trails. The two start from points barely four miles apart, cross their summits at very nearly the same distance from one another, and virtually terminate at the same body of inland water, Lake Lindeman, the navigable head of the great Yukon River. A more than generous supply of summer heat gave little warning of that bleak and severe interior with which the world had been made so well familiar during the last twelvemonth, and from which we were barely six hundred miles distant; nor did the character of the surroundings betray much of an approach to the Arctic Circle. Mountains of aspiring elevations, six thousand to seven thousand feet, most symmetrically separated off into pinnacles and knobs, and supporting here and there enough of snow to form goodly glaciers, look down upon the narrow trough which today is the valley of the Skaguay River. At the foot of this ancient fiord lies the boom town of Skaguay. Charming forests, except where the hand of man has leveled the work of Nature to suit the requirements of a constructing railway, yet clothe the mountain slopes and fill in the gap that lies between them, shadowing the dense herbage and moss which almost everywhere form an exquisite carpeting to the underlying rock. The ear may catch the strains of a few mosquitoes, or the mellow notes of the robin or thrush, but rising far above these in the majesty of tone and accent is the swish of the tumbling cataracts which bring the landscape of Norway to America. Man, it is claimed, is much the same the world over; but there is a limitation. The second habitation of white man in Skaguay was established less than a year before my visit; yet at that time, presumably to meet the demands of a resident population of nearly five thousand, and of the wandering hordes pressing to the interior, the destructive hand of the advertiser had already inscribed on the walls of rock, in characters twenty feet or more in height, and sufficiently elevated to make them nearly the most conspicuous elements of the landscape, the glories of cigars, the value of mental and physical specifics, and of other abominations which were contrived to fatten the Yankee pocket.