 Chapter 9 of Carpenter's World Travels. Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland, by Frank Carpenter. This labor box recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Chapter 9 at Juneau. Leaving Alaska's old capital, I have come on to Juneau, the capital of today and the biggest city of the territory. It is a great mining and fishing center and a live up-to-date place. Here are the residences of the governor and the chief officials, whose offices are in an old frame structure not far from the governor's mansion. And here the territorial legislature meets every two years. Juneau has also a pretentious frame courthouse of two stories with a little dome on the top and a city hall with a cupola that reminds one of the head of a pearl diver in his diving suit, ready to drop into the deep. Most of the houses of Juneau are a frame. The country about is covered with timber and there are great sawmills at the wars that supply the building materials. Of late, however, concrete structures have been going up. The Juneau of today has only 3,000 inhabitants, but every man in the town is a hustler and the place hums with politicians, lawyers, tourists, and miners. The crowd is of all classes and costumes. Some of the men wear clothes of the latest cut of Broadway or Fifth Avenue, while others wear slouch hats, macanoss, and khaki trousers. Some have on boots that reach to the knees and now and then you meet one in white rubber pantaloons. Draze, automobiles, and carriages move about through the city and a motor stage runs to the mining town of Thing three miles down the channel. At that place are the mills and reduction plant of the Alaska Gastinot gold properties. Nearby are the Juneau gold mills and on the other side of the channel in plain view are the Treadwell mines with the towns of Treadwell and Douglas around them. Juneau is beautifully situated on the mainland at the head of the Gastinot channel, a narrow strait which separates it from Douglas Island. The channel connects Stevens Passage with the Ling Canal at the northern end of which is Skagway. The harbor is so good that all of the ships that pass through Alaskan waters, accepting those plying between Seattle and Gnome, call here. During the summer there are boats north or south every day and tens of thousands of tourists pass through. The town is right on the water with wooded mountains rising almost perpendicularly behind it to a height of perhaps 2,000 feet. I have seen cliffs of this height in other parts of the world, but they were mostly straight walls of gray, red, and black rock as bleak and bare as the desert of Sahara. The walls behind Juneau are covered with the vegetation as green as that of the Valley of the Nile. The city is cut out of the rocks or rather it is propped up by them. Most of the houses and streets stand upon stilts. The irregularities of the Rocky Foundation have been overcome by a trestlework of piles. The wharves are on piles and from the channel as the tide falls they look like an army of centipedes trampling out to the ocean. It is now planned to fill in the space between the piles with the waste rock dust from the gold mills, thus giving Juneau a substantial foundation. In the town of Douglas, over the way, a beach of such tailings was made along the edge of the channel and the baseball grounds are laid out upon them. Millions of dollars have come from the sand lying inside that diamond. The streets of Juneau consist of more than ten miles of planked roadways running uphill and down. They give no spring to the feet and your hips keep bobbing up to your waist and tire your anatomy. Both the central wooden roadways and sidewalks are so tipped that the water runs off into gutters of wood. As such streets are costly and need constant repair, the plan is gradually to replace them with a macadam of the gold mine tailings. The business section runs parallel with the channel. Close to the docks are sawmills, lumber yards, sheet metal works, and machine shops. And farther back are long streets devoted to stores, banks, and shops of all kinds. The town with its department stores, cigar factories, daily newspapers, and thriving banks does a much larger volume of business than would be handled in a place several times its size in the United States. Chicken Ridge, the knob hill of Juneau, is at the upper end of the city, well back from the water. The residents are not in love with the name and talk of changing it to Bellevue or Bonaire or some other less plebeian title. The houses are pretty two-story frame structures built on patches cut out of the rocks. The richest man in the town has a lawn about as big as a parlor rug, which tourists are taken to see as one of the sights of the city. Other fine homes are still higher up, and some of them cling to the green wall of the mountains. When I made a call last evening upon the editor of one of the Juneau papers, I had to climb a pathway several times as high as that which leads to the tea house of the 100 steps above Yokohama, Japan. These houses of Juneau have no double windows or other special arrangements for winter protection. Nevertheless, the people tell me they have no trouble in keeping warm. The thermometer seldom falls below zero, and the heavier water pipes are laid on the top of the ground. The chief complaint is of the long nights and the short days. In mid-winter, the electric lights have to be turned on two or three hours after noon, and it is not daylight until nine o'clock in the morning. In mid-summer, there are but few hours of real darkness. Up to ten o'clock at night, one can go anywhere without lights, and the dawn comes between two and three o'clock in the morning. The winter climate here suits even the Negroes, those children of the tropical sun. I had my shoes shine this morning by a colored boot black whose stand is on the main street. He charged me 15 cents for the shine, and told me that in the interior I shall have to pay not less than a quarter. As he worked, I asked him if the winter did not chill his African blood. He replied, no, adding that the winters here are quite as warm as those of Baltimore where he was born, and that most of the time he does not even need an overcoat. He has lived four years in Alaska and has worked as far north as Anchorage, the railroad town on Cook Inlet. He complains that Juno is a poor place for boot blacks except in the summer. The winters have so much rain that the people go about in oil skins and rubbers, and no one wants to shine. I am living at the Hotel Zinda, a concrete five-story building not far from the courthouse and the governor's residence. It has some rooms with baths and an elevator that runs now and then, usually then. Like most of the Alaska hotels, it has no dining room, and I have to walk two or three blocks to the restaurants. The food is excellent and comparatively cheap. As these Alaskans have big appetites, the caterers make their portions generous. One order of chops or steak is sufficient for two people, and a single order of cracked crab is more than one man can eat. The crabs here are as big around as a dinner plate and delicious. The menu is a la carte, and as many of the dishes are given French names as the vocabulary of the restaurant keeper will permit. Among those on the bill today, for instance, were consomme on cup and beefsteak on platter. The waiters were good-natured girls from Sweden. Many summer visitors, less informed than I was, bring to Alaska a great supply of unnecessary clothing. They load up with furs and overcoats only to find that the interior of the country is roasting and that the children are going about with bare feet. A party which went down the Yukon this season had nothing but heavy woolens along. Their steamer ran aground on one of the islands where they were stranded for five days with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade. The same ignorance prevails as to the food of the country. The multimillionaire president of a gold dredging company of the Klondike brought a load of fresh meats and vegetables with him to Dawson. For fear he would suffer. When he got there he found at the hotel everything he had on his ship. They tell a story here of one of the merchants of Cordova, the ocean terminus of the Copper River Railroad, who ordered some woolen goods from a Minnesota mill through an agent in Seattle. The goods should have arrived within 30 days. Upon their failure to come, the agent wrote the Minnesota firm and received the reply that the order had not been filled as navigation was already closed and there was no use in making any shipment to Alaska at that time of the year. The truth is that Cordova is right on the Pacific Ocean and ships call there every week the year round. A Chicago man recently said to an Alaskan who was telling stories about his country, I can believe everything but what you say about the mosquitoes. There can be no mosquitoes in the land where there is so much ice and snow. Anyone who has traveled in Alaska in summer knows that the country abounds in mosquitoes and that at times it is impossible to go anywhere in the woods unless every bit of one's skin is protected. Many of our people evidently think that the Klondike belongs to Alaska and that Dawson is one of its cities. This ignorance extends even to some of the government officials at Washington. Not long ago, one of the big executives of our post office department sent a letter of censure to the postmaster at Dawson because he had not been submitting his reports to the department at Washington. He told the postmaster that the Dawson office would be closed unless a report was submitted at once. The postmaster replied that Dawson was the capital and chief city of Yukon Territory and that its reports went only to the Canadian government at Ottawa. The incident occasioned great laughter in this part of the world and the Dawson agent thought so much of it that he had the letter framed and hung up in the post office. To give another instance, one of the clerks of our treasury department once wrote to an official at Sitka when that town was the capital that the treasury had very few blanks of the kind Sitka had asked for but that the Alaska official might easily run across to Gnom and get some as Gnom had a double supply. Now Gnom is as far from Sitka as New York is distant from Omaha. The only way is by sea, the voyage is as long as from New York to Liverpool and the steamers go once a month. Few people appreciate the distances in Alaska. By the ordinary summer routes, it is from 1800 to 2000 miles from Juneau to Fairbanks. Nevertheless, a merchant of the latter town told me that he had received a letter from a Boston firm saying that they had drawn upon him through a banking establishment at Juneau. Another citizen of Fairbanks ordered a well-known dictionary consisting of 10 or 11 volumes which had been extensively advertised in the magazines. The man sent the money and asked that the books be delivered at Fairbanks. A month or more afterward he received a letter saying that the books had been shipped him from the publisher's Canadian branch the company evidently thinking that Fairbanks was in Canada. The result was that the books were held at the international boundary for duty and have not yet been delivered. Another amusing story belongs to the time of the boundary dispute between the United States and Canada. When the subject came up in Congress, a senator wanted to know when the Lynn Canal was dug and who dug it. When it is remembered that the Lynn Canal is one of the great fjords of the North American continent and that it was plowed out by nature in the prehistoric past, the fund of information of the questioner can be appreciated. A letter received at Juneau from a Philadelphia firm in response to an order for certain goods to be sent COD stated that the Philadelphia firm could not send goods COD to foreign countries. Whatever the degree of ignorance about it outside Alaska is far from lacking in culture. I am surprised at the number of college men I run across in southeastern Alaska. More than half of the professional men are graduates of colleges and Juneau has a thriving university club. The majority are from Western institutions but Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Cornell all have their representatives. The graduates of the University of Washington at Seattle came to dinner together on one occasion and 35 sat down to the table. The public schools of Juneau are good. The high school has its business branches with courses in public speaking, mechanical drawing, sewing and cooking. It gives its graduates certificates admitting them to the University of California and other Western colleges. I came here expecting to find a population of men only. The sexes are almost equally divided. Many of the women have come as school teachers or as clerks or stenographers and have married. Some of the young men have gone back home for their wives and the girls who are born here usually stay. The population is not transient as is often supposed. I meet daily men who have been in Alaska from 15 to 30 years and find young men and women who expect to spend their lives here. There is much civic spirit in the town which believes in municipal ownership. It owns and operates the principal wharf and it has a fuel depot where it supplies coal to the city. This municipal establishment has at times had a marked effect in keeping down the price of both coal and gasoline as sold by local dealers. The city has also aided in the building of a cold storage plant with a freezing capacity of 18,000 pounds a day and storage rooms for 50,000 pounds of fish. End of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 of Carpenter's World Travels. Alaska Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter. This LibriVox courting is in the public domain. Chapter 10. Treasures Under the Sea. My typewriter is clicking away on the roof of the modern cave of Aladdin. The rock underneath me has been cut up into tunnels which wind about in a maze more complicated than the labyrinth of Rosamond's Bower. Some of the passageways go far out under the ocean and others have been cut for miles through the mountain. Out of them have come treasures far more valuable than those brought by the slaves of the lamb, and from them today a long procession of geni is continually marching, bringing out fresh gold from the caverns under the hills and the sea. I am speaking of the Treadwell and Alaska Gastino mines situated on Douglas Island in the Gastino Channel and on the mainland opposite. It is these properties which have given to Juno the name of the Golden Belt City and made for her a place among the gold centers of the world. The rocks in these hills have yielded something like 80 millions of dollars or more than 11 times what we paid for the entire territory. There are in Alaska two kinds of gold mining, placer mining and quartz mining. In placer mining, loose bits of gold ranging in size from tiny grains to big nuggets are washed out of gravel or sand, usually in or near the bed of a stream. The gold mining around Fairbanks and Nome is of this character. In a quartz mine there are loads or veins of hard rock sprinkled with specks of gold, which must be ground to powder before the gold can be extracted by chemical process. Such ores are known as high or low grade, according to the amount of gold recovered from a ton of rock. The mines in the Juno district, the most important quartz loads yet found and worked in all Alaska, consist of low grade ores. Nevertheless, they have produced more than four-fifths of all the quartz gold mined in the territory. These Juno mines are among the most famous gold properties, being the first where paying quantities of gold were separated from such low grade ore. Much of the ore in the Treadwell Group contains less than $2 worth of gold to the ton. And of the millions of tons which have been mined, the average is produced only $2.42 per ton. The Gastonome mines are an even lower grade proposition, the average there being only $1.50 per ton. Have you any idea of what gold ore carrying only $1.50 a ton means? Gold is worth $20 an ounce and at that rate a dollar and fifty cents worth of gold would equal only about one-thirteenth of an ounce. Divide a $20 gold piece into thirteen parts and no part will be as big as a pea. Nevertheless, that pea of gold is all that is to be found in one whole ton of this ore. A ton of ore is a cartload for two horses. Grind your pea into the finest powder and put one of the grains of that powder into every bit of rock in the cartload. And you have some idea of how the gold is scattered through the rock and how difficult it is to get it all out. Or suppose the gold to be salt and the ore to be water. I went to a drugstore today and weighed out enough salt to just equal the weight of the gold in a ton of this ore. The salt did not fill a teaspoon, but a ton of water would fill a 250 gallon hog's head. Now, if you should drop your spoonful of salt into the hog's head and churn up the water until the salt is thoroughly mixed through it all, you would have just the proportion of gold and rock in some of the mines of which I am riding. Think of getting the pea made of gold powder out of the cartload of rock in such a way that half of it will more than pay all the costs. And you have the problem which the operators of the Gastonome Mine successfully solved. Obviously, in times of high prices for chemicals, supplies, and labor, these mines, like other low-grade properties, cannot be operated at a profit and are forced to close down until prices drop, and the buying power of gold goes up, or until cheaper ways of treating the ore are found. But before I go further, let me tell you something of the romance of these properties. Immediately back of me on the side of the mountain is the great Glory Hole, on the site where the first goal was discovered. It is several hundred feet above the Gastonome Channel and far down the slope of the mountain, the upper portions of which are now covered with snow. The Glory Hole is a mighty ellipse, eight hundred feet long, six hundred feet broad, and more than six hundred feet deep. The Washington Monument could be dropped down inside and its aluminum tip would still be fifty feet from the top. It could be laid lengthwise within it and the ends would not touch the sides. The walls of the Glory Hole are a black rock, streaked with drab and gray, while here and there is a string of white quartz from which comes the gold. As I look down on it, a great rock slid off the top and went crashing down to the bottom. It was from such rocks that the mine got the name of Glory Hole. Miners were often killed by them and thus transported to Glory. Strange to say, many of the deaths were due to crows, which made the neighborhood of the Glory Hole their favorite roosting and feeding place. They were so numerous that trumpeters were stationed about the hole to warn the miners of danger in case a flock should light on the edges. The first blast of the trumpet meant the crows are now lighting and the second warned the miners that the rocks were loosening and would soon be down upon them. A slight pecking of the gravel overhead was liable to start an avalanche that would carry tons of rock down the sides. Even now the Glory Hole is by no means safe. The earth and the rock about it have not yet reached their equilibrium and slides like those in the Panama Canal sometimes occur. The richest ore of the Treadwell mines was found at the top. Like cream it seemed to have risen from the low-grade gold-bearing rock underneath. This ore was discovered by a Canadian whose nickname was French Pete and whose real name was Pierre Erosard. When Junot and Harris were making their gold finds on the opposite side of the Gastonot Channel and beginning to prospect Douglas Island, French Pete came along with some Indians. He washed the sands on the beach and found color. A little later he climbed up the hills to where the Glory Hole is and there discovered an outcrop of gold-bearing quartz upon which he located two claims. He named one claim Paris where he expected to spend the great treasures he had discovered and called the other, Bear's Nest, because it was in a little cave occupied by a bear and two cubs. French Pete then started mining but had nothing more than rockers and sluice pots and could crush and wash only the softer parts of the load. He did not get enough to pay well and a little later on sold the mine to John Treadwell for the sum of $505 to pay a pressing debt. John Treadwell, who had come to Alaska at the instance of some California capitalists, had been prospecting in the Silver Bow Basin, back of Junot, and had found quartz gold in the belt where the ebner mine now is. But the gold was poor and he was about to give up in despair and go back to San Francisco when he met Pete and learned of his discovery on Douglas Island. He went to see the claims but did not think much of them as the ore seemed to be of too low a grade to pay for the mining. He suggested, however, that Pete should give him a quit-claim deed for the two properties for $500 and he would try to sell them to the capitalists of San Francisco. Pete had a store and the understanding was that if the mines were opened the miners would trade at his store. This was an additional consideration and so for $500 was sold this property from which have already come more than 60 millions of dollars. The stock was floated in San Francisco and Treadwell got one-third of it. The other owners were large capitalists, among them D.O. Mills, much of whose fortune came from this source. Later on the Rothschilds of London bought into the property and today the mine is owned by the Mills estate, the Rothschilds and other rich men. From the start the mines were operated with large capital. The first excavations were in the glory-hole, out of which 5 million tons of gold-bearing rock have been taken. About 15 years ago the first underground stoping was done and then began the tunneling of the earth and the work altogether underground. I cannot tell you just how many miles of underground works there now are, but the mining goes on for a long distance up and down the Gastino Channel and far out under the ocean. The ore is lifted into great shaft houses from which it descends by gravity to the Mills. The ore bodies dip toward the channel and some of the tunnels have hundreds of feet of salt water overhead. There are four mines in the Treadwell group, the Treadwell, the Mexican, the 700 and the Reddy Bullion. The first three suspended operations in 1917 when a cave-in flooded the workings. One month after French peat made its discovery a handful of prospectors landed on Douglas Island. One of them scooped up a pan of gravel from the foot of what seemed to be an outcropping of a quartz load and washed it out. When he saw what a find he had made he exclaimed, We have it boys, almost the Reddy Bullion. And so was Chrison the mine which I went through yesterday with Mr. Russell G. Weyland, Assistant Manager of the Treadwell Properties. We climbed into a 5-ton steel bucket as big as a hog's head and held on to the rim. Then an electric signal was given and we shot down into the darkness. The great bucket wobbled this way and that as we fell. Our descent was at an angle of about 50 degrees. We continued at that angle for something like 2,000 feet after which the fall was even more precipitous. At last we stepped out far under the sea. With a set of lean lamps we picked our way through the tunnels and stoves. The tunnels were lighted by electricity and each of them had its railroad. We walked between the tracks stepping now and then to the side and squeezing ourselves to the wall to let the ore trains pass. These trains were of cars drawn by mules. At one place we passed a mule stable and I was told the mules were kept down in the mines for several years at a time. Those I saw were fat and not at all vicious. The darkness does not affect their eyesight as is generally supposed. I stopped now and then in the stoves or great caverns where the miners were blasting the ore. They used drills operated by compressed air to sink the holes for the dynamite and thus blast out great rooms away down under the water. These stoves are several hundred feet high and of almost an acre in area. Some of them are filled with gold ore nearly to the roof. Nevertheless only a slab of rock lies between them and the ocean. Leaving the mines I went through the mills where they were crushing the mighty masses of rock to powder and saving the small quantities of gold. The red buildings may be seen from the ship's deck as one rides up the channel. They wall the sides of the hills and as one comes near them a noise like so many blasts of artillery fills the air. Inside the din is furious. You may shout into the air of the man at your side but you cannot make yourself heard. You cannot even hear your own words. Niagara is a soft hum beside treadmill, said John Burroughs. The noise is from the hundreds of stamps which are always falling upon the ore to pulverize it. As the ore comes in it is of all sizes from that of the broken stone of a mechanized road to masses as big as a flower barrel. The larger chunks are broken until fit for the stamps. These reduce everything to a powder as fine as the finest flower dust. As one of the mills was not working I was able to examine the stamps. Each consists of a long steel beam as big around as the arm of a man fitted into a mighty steel shoe 8 inches in diameter and perhaps a foot long. This shoe is fastened to the end of the stamp and the stem and shoe together weigh about half a ton. In crushing the ore the stem is raised and dropped on the ore 100 times every minute. Think of dropping a half ton upon rock every time your watch ticks and you have a slight idea of the power that grinds this ore. There are hundreds of these stamps working at once and as you look at them you do not wonder at the racket. This smashing goes on day and night, Sundays and weekdays all the year through. The wear and tear on the machinery is enormous. The shoes are of solid steel. Each of them is twice as big as a loaf of bread but it is worn to the thickness of a knife blade after it has crushed three tons of ore. The iron block upon which the ore lies is soon ground away and has to be replaced for every five tons. The process of getting the ore out of the gold dust after the crushing is simple. In front of the stamps is an apron of netting made of wires put together in a mesh finer than that of any kitchen sieve. As the ore is crushed a stream of water carries the flour dust through the mesh and it falls on to inclined tables of copper coated with quicksilver. Now quicksilver has an affinity for gold and as the powdered ore flows over it it swallows the free gold and the rock sand passes on. After a time the quicksilver becomes loaded with gold. It is then scraped off and put into a furnace where the heat vaporizes the mercury and the pure gold only is left. In addition to this free gold there are some in the baser minerals found in the rock. These minerals are taken out on shaking tables and then treated to a cyanide bath which sucks up the gold just as water takes up any salt dropped into it. The cyanide water is then put through a process which makes it give up the gold. End of Chapter 10. Chapter 11 of Carpenter's World Travels. Alaska Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Chapter 11 The World's Greatest Glaciers Between Lynn Canal and Seward there are more than 5,000 glaciers. Hundreds of them come down to the sea and 25 are now dropping icebergs into the tide waters. With the exception of Greenland and Antarctica, Alaska is the greatest glacier region of the world. It has many glaciers in the southeastern part of the territory, some of the biggest of which can be seen in a ride of four or five days from Seattle on a comfortable steamer. I am now in the Lynn Canal on my way from Juneau to Skagway. My ship has been moving in and out among icebergs of crystal sapphire right up to the precipitous ends of these ice rivers that are slowly flowing down the sides of the mountains. Now and then the tide leaves icebergs on the shores and the tall pines bend over and sweep them with their branches. Looking through my state room window, I can see a wall of snow-capped mountains green almost to their tops. Just opposite me is a great field of ice appell between two lofty peaks. That field is miles in width and slopes upward into the clouds. It is a glacier. The true glacial region of Alaska begins a little beyond the international boundary and runs from there along the coast as far as from New York to Chicago. It skirts the ocean and extends for a hundred miles or so back into the interior. Most of the glaciers are north and west of Skagway within an area about 100 miles wide and 500 miles long, a region perhaps as large as New York State. This does not comprise one-tenth of Alaska, but it is that part of the country most frequented by tourists whose stories have given the idea that the territory is nothing but mountains of ice. The interior of Alaska is comparatively low. The coast glacial region is rugged and high. Many of the mountains are lost in the clouds and some of them kiss the skies at an altitude higher than any other part of the continent. They are so high, so steep and so cold that they precipitate the moisture rising from the warm ocean currents that wash southern Alaska and give the snowfall that has built up the glaciers and keeps them alive. Let me show you some of these big ice masses. Taku Inlet is a fjord 18 miles long, walled with steep mountains and guarded by islands. In steaming up it, one can count 45 glaciers. At the end is the Taku, the front of which, where it enters the sea, is a mile wide and more than 200 feet high. At a little distance from the sea, the glacier is two miles wide and it continues to broaden for about eight miles until it is lost in a great ice field close to the boundary of British Columbia. The Taku Glacier is a live glacier. That is, it is moving down to the ocean and dropping great bergs into the sea. It is traveling at the rate of eight or ten feet a day and some of the masses which fall from it are as large as a city skyscraper. Close by, so near that it can be photographed by a swing of the camera, a dead glacier shows out gray and dusty on the other side of the hill at the west. This is about a mile wide, but it seems to end at the shore. It was at five o'clock in the morning that I had my first sight of the Taku Glacier. The sun was already two hours high and its rays catching the icebergs floating about in the inlet turned them to enormous sapphires. There were hundreds of these blue masses through which our steamer pushed its way to the face of the ice wall. It took us right up to the glacier so that we were within 600 feet of the ice when we stopped. At that moment the sun came out of the clouds and shone full on the glacier which became one vast expanse of silver frosted with diamonds and sparkling with sapphires. A moment later with a deafening report a great fragment of ice broke off and the face of the glacier looked like a mighty cutting of the whitest ice cream while the berg fell into the water and rose up a gigantic floating mass of aquamarine. As we anchored the wind came to us over the glacier. It had been warm in the inlet, but here the icy breath of jack frost sent a chill to our bones. It was so cold that I could hardly write. The face of the glacier is ragged. Its top has hundreds. I might say thousands of peaks. Some of them as sharp as spires and others broken and shattered. It reminds one of the relief map of a rugged mountain range. The ice is melting and now and then with a noise like thunder a great mass plunges off into the water. The shooting of a cannon would bring down hundreds of icebergs and the vibration of the air caused by the blowing of our steam whistle never failed to send an avalanche of ice into the water. The captain of the Humboldt gave a number of salutes to show the effect of the sound. As the shriek of the whistle tore the air immense blocks began to drop from the glacier. As the whistle continued to blow there was crash after crash and at one time a mass as big as a New York office building broke away and splashed down into the ocean. It buried itself in the water throwing a mighty spray almost to the top of the glacier and causing great billows to roll out to the steamer. A moment later it rose to the height of a hundred feet above the sea and moved up and down on the surface of the water. As the mountain of ice fell I said to the captain of the Humboldt a giant of a man you remind me of Joshua who commanded the trumpets to blow and the walls of Jericho fell. The scenery of the glacier was so beautiful as to be awe inspiring. It brought out expressions of wonder from the tourists. I remember especially the words of one woman who stood at my elbow. She said, my ain't that grand. It reminds me of the drop curtain at our opera house, but there ain't no polar bear here. As the great ice mass fell into the water a man he may have been a restaurant keeper remarked, gee what a lot of ice cream a man could make out of that bunch. The ice as it comes from the glaciers seems pure enough for ice cream or even lemonade. The ships sometimes fill their ice chests by lassoing the smaller bergs and hoisting them on board. For a long time considerable business was done in picking up this ice and selling it to the mining camps and towns. About 50 years ago glacier ice was shipped from southern Alaska to San Francisco at $75 a ton and a little later contracts were made at $35. Not far from the glacier we saw a large deer swimming about in the water. Our steamer passed within 200 feet of him and a texan on board said he could have lassoed him from the deck. The deer had magnificent antlers, its horns and head rose above the water and its body could be seen close to the surface. It was still swimming as we moved onward and we saw some hunters near the shore start out to catch it. They chased the animal this way and that and finally dragged it into their boat. From Juneau I rode out in an automobile to see the Mendenhall Glacier. The moraine of this mighty ice mass lies within nine miles of the city. One can leave the liveliest section of the liveliest town in Alaska surrounded by mines and mills, by stores and banks and the other activities of businessmen and within less than an hour be in the heart of the wilds and in the shadow of one of the most famous glaciers of this wonderful territory. Think of going to a glacier by automobile. I have climbed Vesuvius by a wire cable and have crawled up the Rigi by the famous Kog Railway but this was my first experience in shooting a moraine in a gasoline car. I went as the guest of Mr. B. H. Barrens, the banker of Juneau. A man who, as they say down south, is the very spitten image of James Whitcomb Rally and in good fellowship quite the equal of the Hoosier poet. We rode from Juneau right into the woods, trees from 50 to 100 feet high climb the steep walls about us and elderberry bushes with trunks as big around as my arm brushed our wheels as we passed. The sides of the road were lined with ferns of a dozen varieties and wildflowers blue, red and yellow. We passed through great beds of crimson fireweed and rode through thousands of lupins, the hue of the sky. There were also wild carrots with their lace like blossoms of white and fuzzy yellow devil clubs. In some places the grass was as high as my waist and the mountain slopes on both sides of the road were the greenest of green. The vegetation was more like that of the mountains of Java than I had expected to find in Alaska. Our way was over the path of the glacier, the valley through which we went was once filled with its ice but this has slowly receded leaving the earth covered with cobbles and great boulders ground smooth and round in their long glacial ride. Nevertheless, flowers grow among the stones and their red and blue blossoms dot the landscape. As we came nearer the glacier the size of the boulders increased, some of them weighed many tons. They were of white and black granite with here and there some slate. In the windings of the valley we turned to the right and all at once came in sight of the glacier. The mountains on each side are as high as the crest of the Alleghenes and the glacier half fills the valley between. It jets out in a precipitous ice wall which runs back and gradually rises to the skyline until it seems to fill the whole space between the hills and to merge into the clouds. Coming closer we rode almost to the foot of the glacier. There we left the car and climbed over the rocks of the moraine to the edge of the glacial stream which flows along the foot of the ice wall. The Mendenhall Glacier where it bursts forth from the mountain is about a mile wide. It is a huge corrugated wall of blue and white ice sloping upward into ice mountains which in the distance seems to be of carved marble. Its face is plowed by deep furrows and pitted with many small holes which the guides tell the credulous chichaco or tenderfoot have been made by the ice worms. They say there are certain worms that live in the ice and are often caught and eaten by the starving miners. Indeed they prove the story by showing a photograph of a miner actually chewing the worms which he is sucking from the ice. The man is real but the worms are strings of spaghetti. From the Lynn Canal westward for a distance of four or five hundred miles are to be found the greatest glaciers of Alaska. General Greeley catalogued the names and locations of more than 200 of them and G.K. Gilbert of the Harriman Expedition says the ice covers from 15,000 to 20,000 square miles. Most of these glaciers are within 100 miles of the ocean the largest being on the south side of the coast range. There are 11 wide glaciers on Prince William Sound and standing on the street corner in Seward one can see glaciers all about on the sides of the mountains. Nearly every Alaskan river has its source in a glacier. The tributaries of the Yukon and the Cuscoquim are fed by ice masses. The Tanana upon which the town of Fairbanks is located is formed by the Chisana and Nebesna rivers both of which rise in glaciers in the Wrangol Mountains. And the Susitna springs forth from a glacier of the Alaskan range. The Copper River is fed by glaciers and the railway which goes through its valley connecting the Kennecott mines with the sea. Passes between the Child's Glacier and the Miles Glacier on its way to Cordoba. Glacier Bay only a short distance from the end of the Lynn Canal is a body of water 50 miles long with more than half a dozen glaciers of enormous size sloping down to it. The biggest is the Muir Glacier named after John Muir who discovered it. It is three miles wide where it enters the water and the height of the ice wall is almost 1,000 feet, 700 feet being lost in the bay. The Muir Glacier is very lively. It has been supposed by some to move as much as 60 feet a day but a fair estimate would be about one-sixth of that speed. Very few of the well-known glaciers move more than a foot a day although there are some in Alaska that move from 5 to 10 feet. There is one in Northern Greenland that is said to travel over four feet every hour. The movement of a glacier may be measured by laying stones upon it or by driving posts into the surface. As the mass slips onward the space between these posts and fixed points on the landscape shows how fast it is traveling. In addition to the valley glaciers, Alaska has great ice fields or caps such as the Malaspina Glacier, a sheet of ice larger than the state of Rhode Island. It has a front of about 50 miles as it faces the sea and runs 30 miles inland to the St. Elias Range. It is really a vast plain or plateau of ice with lakes and rivers and with hills and mountains of gravel. It is the biggest ice field on the North American continent although it is only a patch in comparison with the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. The Greenland cap has an area of over 400,000 square miles being two-thirds as big as the whole of Alaska. The ice sheet of Antarctica is supposed to cover about 3 million square miles. It is as big as the United States. Some years ago the Malaspina Glacier was shaken by an earthquake which changed its whole surface, twisting the bedrock and uprooting the timber for miles about. In 1912 a lake in one of the crevasses of the Miles Glacier burst through the walls of ice and hurled blocks weighing thousands of tons down into the river. A wave 30 feet high spread over the flats and icebergs weighing many tons were jammed against the bridge of the Copper River Railroad. End of Chapter 11 Chapter 12 of Carpenter's World Travels. Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Chapter 12, Skagway, Gateway to the Klondike. In the days of the Klondike Gold Rush, Skagway here at the head of the Lynn Canal was one of the most talked of towns in the world. It was the chief gate to the rich new gold fields and miners came by the thousands to tramp their way over the passes to the headwaters of the Yukon and then flowed down to Dawson. A little later it became the terminus of the White Pass Railway which was built when the gold fever was at its height and runs from here to White Horse. The head of the navigation of the Yukon. As if by magic it sprang from a village of tents to a bustling city of wood and stone of 15,000 population. Most of these people were transients moving back and forth from the gold mines. Then the mines began to play out and the blood of Skagway grew weak. The cream had been skimmed from the Klondike and the bottle was empty. The miners grew fewer and fewer and the city dwindled and pined until it now has all told only five or six hundred. The saloons and dance halls have all disappeared. The hotels and rooming shacks have rotted away and many of the better class houses are vacant. The town has changed from a booming wide open community of gamblers, fortune hunters and miners to a staid little settlement living on the travelers who passed through on their way to Yukon territory and the interior of Alaska and on the tourists who come north by the thousands every season to view the glaciers and other scenic wonders. The usual tour of Alaska is confined to the islands of the southeastern part and ends at Skagway. Many travelers make the excursion by rail to the top of the White Pass and return during the stay of their steamer in Port. So far not a great many have gone on into Canadian territory to Dawson while those who make the long trip down the Yukon and across Norton Sound to Gnome as I have set out to do are fewer still. Many of the tourists who mean to go no farther than Skagway do not return with the steamer that brought them but stay on for several days or even weeks. The place is fast becoming a summer resort. It has a mild climate with much less rain than other parts of the panhandle. In addition Skagway offers no end of excursions on horseback on foot or by motorboat. This tourist travel will increase as soon as our people awake to the wonders of Alaska and know they can be warm enough comfortably housed and well fed while they enjoy them. I can well see how Skagway got its title of The Flower City of Alaska. Flowers are everywhere. One of the gardens I visited was that of Mr. F. J. Weber who is in charge of the shops of the White Pass Railway. He has more than 40 varieties of dahlias of every color and tint. Some are snow white, some blood red, others of a delicate salmon. He has even blue dahlias of the deep view of the mountains far off in the distance. In such dahlias the stems of some of the plants reach to a height of 9 feet and their blossoms were as big around as dinner plates. I took my 2 foot rule and found that this was so by actual measure. One gorgeous purple blossom was 9 inches across. Another, the geisha dahliah with blossoms of old gold and fiery red measured more than 10 inches from side to side. Indeed the size of the flowers was so great that I had myself photographed standing at the roots of one of the plants to make the camera testify to the truth of my story. The stem reached so high above me that I could just touch the blossom and as I looked up the flower seemed as big as a pie pan. Nevertheless it grew from a bulb planted in the open just about 2 months ago. Most of Mr. Weber's dahlias are growing not in hot houses but in beds in a lawn and their only protection is a windshield, a wire fence walled with glass which faces the channel to keep off the cold blasts from the sea and the mountains. Among the other flowers I saw in this garden were marigolds 5 inches wide and red geraniums equally large. There were also Japanese gold banded lilies with flowers as long as your hand. I counted 19 such lilies on a single plant. Just now great beds of white clover grow on the sides of the streets and the hills are covered with bushes and wild flowers. Many of the residents have garden patches where they grow all the vegetables used by the town. I saw one patch of raspberries this morning which had bushes as high as my head and berries as thick as my thumb. I saw rhubarb with leaves as big as two pages of a newspaper and stems that reach to my shoulders. I am staying at the Pullen House, a place which, it is said, has entertained more distinguished guests than any other hotel in Alaska. It is run by Mrs. Harriet Pullen who came to Skagway in the days of the Gold Fever landing on the beach with four children and seven dollars. Now she has this modern hotel of 20 rooms with many baths and several acres of grounds. Around the main building are bungalows which may be rented by families or parties of friends. The lawn is planted with trees and flowers. In the middle of the mountain stream flowing through it is a little island and there are rustic bridges here and there giving a pleasing Japanese effect. This morning when I came down to breakfast I found beside my plate a blue enameled pan full of rich milk from which I skimmed the cream for my coffee and cereal. This is one of the special features of the Pullen House. Mrs. Pullen gets her fruit, vegetables, and dairy products from her 320 acre farm which covers the site of the old town of Daiya. She tells me she has 40 acres in oats which she is raising for grain hay and that she has already put her rye hay crop in the barn. The barn by the way is one of the deserted houses built during the mining boom when Daiya had something like 10,000 people. Other of the houses have been torn away to make room for the crops and practically nothing of the once thriving mining center is now to be seen. When gold was first discovered in the Klondike there were two roads or trails from the head of the Ling Canal over the mountains. One started here at Skagway and climbed up through the white pass to Lake Bennett then went on down the Yukon to Dawson. The other began at Daiya four miles away and went over the Chilkut Pass to the Yukon. At first Daiya had the lead over Skagway. It built an aerial tramway running on a cable that carried freight up the pass although the passengers had to walk or as they say here, mush it. Up the sheer 3,500 feet of Chilkut Pass. As the cars rose into the air upheld by the wire rope they swung this way and that and now and then some of the freight was spilled out. Once a car carried 94 hogs the motion made them dizzy and seasick and half of them jumped out and were crushed on the rocks far below. The building of the white pass railway sounded the death knell of Daiya. The inhabitants rushed to Skagway where the new road began. Many of them left their houses without trying to sell them and some abandoned their furniture. One family departed leaving a table half set for dinner. All were crazy to get to the gold mines or to share in the prosperity which it was thought Skagway would have. After a short while all had left with the exception of a man named Emil Klatt who took up a homestead on the site of the abandoned city, plowed the streets and laid out his fields among the town lots. He farmed there for years and became generally known as the mayor of Daiya although his only constituents were cattle and sheep. I do not think he made any money. At all events he finally sold the property which now belongs, as I have said, to Mrs. Pullen. It is interesting to hear the Skagwayans tell of the days when their town was at the height of its drunken prosperity. It was, to use a slang phrase, wide open having 61 saloons each with its dance hall adjoining. There were neither courts nor police. At that time there was no law in Alaska under which a municipal government could be organized and the only representative of Uncle Sam was a deputy marshal. He was a rough character and was supposed to be in league with the criminal element. At least he did nothing to control it and bands of thugs held up the chichaco and even robbed the old miners as they came from the Klondike. A little later the criminal element was combined by one Randolph Jefferson Smith who has a traditional fame here, something like that of Slade of Mark Twain's roughing it. Smith got the nickname of Soapy in Colorado because he peddled soap which to the purchaser seemed to be wrapped in ten and twenty dollar bills. The game is a swindle well known throughout the West. Arriving in Skagway about the time the United States declared war on Spain Soapy got together four hundred of the vicious element of the place and offered them to President McKinley as a band of rough writers ready to fight the Spaniards and the president who had been posted as to their character declined their services. Soapy then armed and drilled them and used them to prey upon the community. They robbed strangers singly and in crowds. They committed a number of murders and it was almost sure death to oppose them. The people were intimidated and there began a reign of terror that lasted for months. The gang had all sorts of ways of fleecing the miners who passed through on their way to the Klondike as well as getting the gold of those who came back. The advance agents of Soapy's gang would go to Seattle and come back with the crowd on the steamer. The passengers were mostly gold seekers each of whom had an outfit that had cost about five hundred dollars besides enough money to get him to Dawson. Some had more some less. Soapy's agents who pretended to be miners would organize companies with a view to getting cheap freight to take from each member of the company in order to the ship to release his goods to the packers or men who carried the goods over the trail. Upon landing the men would run the miners into Soapy's gambling saloon where within an hour they were sure to lose all their money at cards. They then had not enough to pay their freight bills and as a result their outfits would fall into the hands of the gang. Captain Bowman of the SS Humboldt told me that it would take only about forty or fifty minutes after the ship came to anchor for the prospectors to land and lose all their money and come back weeping and begging for a steerage passage home. As time went on the robbers grew bolder and matters became worse and worse. Miners coming out from Dawson had their bags of gold stolen from them and it finally became unsafe for any stranger in Skagway. Stories of the outrages went to the outside and hurt the town. The climax was capped by the robbing of a young miner named Stuart who had just come from Dawson with a poke containing twenty-seven hundred dollars in gold dust. The man made a fuss and prominent businessmen went to Soapy and asked him to give back the money. When he refused a vigilance committee was formed. Soapy threatened to shoot upon sight any man that dared to attack him and when four attempted to make an arrest he put his cocked rifle against the stomach of their leader Frank Reed. Reed grabbed the gun and drew his revolver but Smith pulled the trigger and the ball passed through Reed's body. At the same time Reed fired two or three shots in rapid succession and one of his bullets pierced Soapy Smith's heart while another wounded him in the leg. Before falling Smith fired a second shot striking Reed in the leg. Then both men fell Soapy Smith's stone dead and Frank Reed mortally wounded. News of Smith's deaths and his gang scurrying for the hills like Jack Rabbits. In their panic not one of his men thought of him and his body lay on the spot where it had fallen until two o'clock in the morning when some women took it away. I asked Captain Bauman who knew Soapy Smith what became of his money. Captain replied he spent it as fast as it came and when he was killed he had nothing to speak of except about six hundred dollars of the gold dust he had taken from Stuart. This was found in a poke in his trunk. Soapy gave a good deal to the men who were with him. In fact he was one of the most open-handed men that ever came to Alaska. He paid the expenses of many who went broke and helped them out of the country. When the man died Soapy was always ready to spend several hundred dollars on groceries for his widow and children. He was free also in his gifts of money while his orders for provisions to be sent to the poor were so generous that his trade was worth hundreds of dollars a week to several of the Skagway stores. This was one reason why some of the citizens said nothing against him. A few days before his death he was actually Marshall of the Fourth of July. Even preachers sometimes ask his aide. They tell a story here of a young Chichaco sky pilot who once got Soapy to help him get contributions for some church work. Smith turned in with a will on the understanding that the minister should handle all the cash. When the sum seemed satisfactory to the outlaw he sent one of his gang to steal it from the confiding divine. Another reason why his career was not interrupted sooner was the fact that Soapy's enemies had a strange way of disappearing and being never more heard from. The Skagway of today is an orderly community with good schools, waterworks and sewers, electric lights and telephones, a daily newspaper and several churches. The chief business of the town seems to be the selling of curios to the tourists. There are half a dozen stores that sell jewelry, carvings, moccasins and baskets. The jewelry is made by the Indians who pound it out of silver dollars. The carvings are of walrus tusks cut by the Eskimos and the moccasins and baskets are manufactured by the natives about Skagway and in other parts of Alaska. None of these things is cheap. The best baskets, little ones that will not hold more than a quart bring from fifty to one hundred dollars while cigarette cases of the same character sell for fifteen dollars apiece. No basket of fine workmanship can be bought for less than eight or ten dollars. The best are made under water. They are of straw woven finer than the finest Panama hat and so delicate and intricate that it takes several months to make a basket as big as the head of a baby. The best ones come from the Aleutian Islands. They are woven by the older of the Indian women for the art is dying out and will probably pass away with this generation. Most of the carvings come from the Nome Eskimos and the Indian settlements about the mouth of the Yukon, although some very good carvings are done by the Indians about Skagway and Sitka. The Indians make their own carving tools, grinding them out of old razor blades. In working they pull the instrument toward them digging out the ivory after the style of the Japanese. This is just opposite to the way our carvers work. The commercial photographer also reaps a rich harvest in Alaska with its wonderful scenery and its picturesque natives. I know of one photograph that has netted its owner five hundred dollars and there are many steady sellers which bring in a good income every season. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of Carpenters World Travels. Alaska Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter. This Libre Box recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Chapter 13 Over the Goldseekers Trail I have just taken a trip over the first railway line ever built in Alaska. This is the White Pass which runs from Skagway over the Coast Range to Whitehorse at the headwaters of the Yukon. The road was built at the height of the Klondike Stampede to carry passengers over the mountains to where they could get shipped for Dawson. The work was begun in 1898 and finished less than two years later when the first passenger train, a string of flat cars, brought at gold dust worth two million dollars. The White Pass railway is only one hundred and eleven miles long and although not as expensive as the Copper River Road of the Guggenheims, it cost millions to build. The first twenty miles cost on the average more than one hundred thousand dollars per mile and there are sections which cost half as much more. During the construction, three thousand five hundred men were employed, less than thirty of whom died or were killed on the job. The work went right on through the winter and within eighteen months after the first pick was raised, the trains were carrying thousands of passengers and millions of dollars worth of freight down to the seacoast. Beginning at Skagway at the head of the Lynn Canal, the White Pass railway runs through the rocks along the winding valley of the Skagway River and up the steep slope of the Coast Mountains. Here and there the track hangs to the sides of cliffs so steep that the workmen had to be lowered in slings from above to drill and blast out the ledges or the roadbed. After reaching the top of the pass, the track runs for twenty-seven miles along the winding shores of Lake Bennett, crosses a canyon two hundred and fifteen feet deep upon a great bridge of steel, skirts the White Horse Rapids, famous in the days of the Klondike and finally ends at White Horse, three hundred and fifty miles from Dawson by the Overland Trail and over one hundred miles more by the river. The bridge over the canyon is the farthest north Canneleaver Bridge in the world. The road was well planned and well built and has been well managed from the start. Notwithstanding the heavy snowfalls, it has most of the time been kept open throughout the winter. It has rotary snow plows which will cut a path twelve feet deep through the drifts. There were few accidents during the construction work. At one place an engine jumped off the cliffs but the men raised it with block and tackle. At another place, now marked by an iron cross, perhaps two feet high, a rock weighing more than one hundred tons fell from the side of the mountain and crushed two men who were blasting the way for the track. The rock was so heavy that it could not be moved and the monument was sunk in its center. The endurance of the workmen was almost incredible. At one of the construction camps at the top of the pass, the festoons of ice that formed in the dining tent in winter from the steam of the cooking had to be swept down before each meal. But the icicles would form again before the meal was over. Everyone ate muffled up in coat, hat, and gloves. Enormous quantities of supplies were needed and the base was a thousand miles away. Not only must they be brought to Skagway by steamer from Vancouver or Seattle, but after they arrived they had to be packed up the steep trail to where the building was going forward. Many of the workers were gold seekers, glad of the chance to make expenses while they waited for the spring to open up the way into the interior. They were high class labor but not always dependable. When news came of the gold strike at Atlin, some twenty-five miles east of the White Pass, fifteen hundred of them dropped their picks and started helter-skelter for the new fields. The man who built the White Pass road was Michael J. Henney, who afterward constructed the Copper River Railway for the Guggenheim Syndicate. Henney was an expert engineer, had an iron nerve, and was a master in handling men. He would not allow liquor or gambling inside his camp. At one time a desperado belonging to Sophie Smith's gang set up a gambling saloon in a tent close to the route. When Henney ordered him to go away, he refused. Henney then turned to his camp foreman and, pointing to a rock half as big as a house that hung over the tent of the saloon keeper, told him in the hearing of the gambler to blast that rock out of the way by five o'clock the next morning. The gambler, thinking that this was only a bluff to make him move, did nothing about it. At five minutes to five o'clock the next morning the foreman came and told him that he must get up and leave, or he would be killed by the rock. The gambler replied that the foreman might go to Hades, whereupon the latter said, I'm too busy to go there this morning, but if you are not out of this tent within two minutes by this watch, you will find yourself there. I shall order my men to touch off the time fuse within 60 seconds. The fuse will burn one minute only, and at the end of that time the rock will fall and crush you to death in this tent. Then the foreman ordered fire and sought the shelter of a rock. Ten seconds later the gambler rushed after him with his shirt flapping against his bare legs. He continued to go, and when last seen was on a dead run down the trail. But come with me for a ride over this first railroad of Alaska. The cars are comfortable, and we shall have moving pictures of magnificent scenery all the way up the mountains. We shoot out of Skagway into a canyon, through which flows a rushing glacial river. We follow this for a mile before climbing the hills, and pass on the way some log cabins, which the old timers tell us belong to a town nicknamed Lyresville, because no one who lived there could tell the truth. A little beyond we can see where the river breaks through, and farther up the mountains we find it tumbling down over the rocks, splashing like the falls of Lodore. Great beds of red flowers line the track all the way to the top of the pass. There are trees on the lowland and everything is green. Passing onward the engine toils up the steep sides of the cliffs, winding about in horseshoe curves until it reaches the top 2,900 feet up from the sea. The white pass makes this great climb within 20 miles and has only one tunnel along its whole route. As we go up the mountains the climate rapidly changes. Now and then we get a breeze from a glacier, and Jack Frost, traveling on the wings of the wind over the perpetual ice, chills us to the marrow. This is perceptible as we cross the canyon and catch the cold air of the mirror glacier, not far away. We see one glacier with a silver thread falling down the green slope below it. A little lower the thread swells to a rope. Lower still it has become a great cable, and it ends in the foaming Skagway River, dashing down over the rocks to the sea. Passing over the mountains of the coastal range, we come into a new and different country. Skagway is as moist as Puget Sound while White Horse in Yukon Territory is as dry as Denver. In southeastern Alaska it rains almost every day and the soil is like a wet sponge. Once over the pass we are in a region which is as dry as a bone and in mid-summer as hot as the Sahara. It suffers from many forest fires. There is plenty of soil on the northern slope of the range and at first sight the country would seem excellent for farming. I am told that it is not. The soil is sand on a bed of gravel and the rain sinks through and is lost. Farther north the soil changes, but the air grows drier and the climate is like that of our Rocky Mountain Plateau. All the way up the mountains runs the trail the gold hunters climbed before the iron track was constructed. They made their way through the ice and snow and many died, never reaching the top of the pass. One part of the trail, known as the Dead Horse Canyon, was so named for the horses that, unable to bear the toil of the journey, gave up their equine ghosts at that point. The year before the road was built more than 5,000 dead horses were counted on the trail. Some had lost their footing and were dashed to death on the rocks below. Others had sunk under their burdens and utter exhaustion and had to be thrown over the rocks, while still others lost heart and actually committed suicide by throwing themselves over the cliffs. One minor driving a mule team got the animals at last to the top, when the leader, who had been twice over the trail, jumped over the precipice dragging the others with him. Not far from Dead Horse Canyon are traces of the old road built by George A. Brackett before the steam line was constructed. Brackett came from Minneapolis to Skagway and built a road up the mountains. He had toll gates here and there and the charges ranged from 50 cents each for foot passengers to $2 for a four-horse team. It is said that when the White Pass Railway put him out of business, he sold his route for $40,000 cash. During the winter of 1897-98, 33,000 men and women came up over the trails on their way to Dawson. Most of them carried packs on their backs, some making numerous trips with loads of from 50 to 100 pounds at a time. Some had sleds, which they pulled up the mountains, carrying perhaps 200 pounds on a sled. The average outfit of the Klondiker weighed about one ton, or 2,000 pounds, and the cost of getting this over the trail was enormous. Mules and horses were used, and Indians were hired at the rate of 7 cents and upward a pound for taking an outfit 50 miles. The natives worked in families. A man would pack from 100 to 140 pounds, a squaw from 80 to 100 pounds, and girls and boys from 25 to 50 pounds apiece. Some of the white men went into packing and teaming as a business. One man is said to have made $300,000 by transporting the baggage and supplies of the gold-seekers. Another threw a log across his stream and charged 50 cents toll for the use of his bridge. During my trip over the White Pass route, I had as a seatmate Elmer J. White, along our American consul at Whitehorse. His stories of the queer sites of the trail are interesting. Said he, the men carried goods of every description. I remember one prospector who packed a grindstone up the hills on his back. Everyone wondered what under the sun he was going to do with it. He brought it to Whitehorse and finally to Dawson. There he had a carpenter make him a frame for the stone. When this was completed, he let the miners sharpen their axes and picks at 25 cents apiece. They did the work while he set back and took in a dollar or more an hour for the rent of the grindstone. Another man was loaded with 7 by 9 inch glass window panes. When he got to Dawson, he sold them for $2 apiece. Glass was so scarce at that time that beer bottles brought a price as window panes for log cabins. They were piled up lengthwise or set end-wise into the windows and chinked round with mud. The town of White Pass in those days consisted of thousands of tents occupied by men and women waiting for rafts and boats to carry them down by the lakes and river to Dawson. In the spring of 1898 there were 20,000 persons camped at the head of Lake Bennett awaiting the ice break. And on the shores of the lake you can still see the remains of Mike King's sawmill which cut lumber at the rate of $80 per thousand and upward for the making of boats to cross the lake. All of these settlements said Mr. White had their saloons and dance halls and games of chance of one kind or another. The men who were crazy for amusement did all sorts of strange things. I remember one night coming into a saloon at White Pass where a dozen miners stood around the bar gambling for drinks. Their goddess of fortune was the wee insect that Bobby Burns immortalized in one of his poems when he saw it creeping on a young lady's bonnet. As this kind of wee beastie was very common in those days, the miners had no trouble in finding one for their sport. The louse was placed on the bar and the gamblers laid their right hands about it at equal distances away. Then they waited to see upon whose hand it would crawl first. The unfortunate man paid for the drinks. As the crow flies, the distance from Skagway to the summit of the White Pass is only 14 miles, but the railroad track is six miles longer on account of the grades. Our trains stopped at Carcross on the crest of the pass where the waters flowing into the two oceans divide and where side by side float the flags of America and Canada. Here, within a few feet of each other, are two streams. One flows toward the west through United States territory and after a course of 20 odd miles, tumbles into the Pacific at Skagway. The other winds its way on down into the Yukon and has over 2,000 miles to go before it reaches the Bering Sea. Through a couple of chips into the streams, one has long since been lost in the Pacific Ocean and I am in hopes that the other will in time reach the same body of water, not far from the Arctic. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of Carpenter's World Travels, Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Chapter 14 in the Yukon Flats I am right under the Arctic Circle at Fort Yukon. For days past I have been steaming slowly down the Yukon River through the wilds of Alaska. This mighty stream rises only 25 miles from the Pacific Ocean in the headwaters of the Luz and the Peli Rivers. It flows far into the interior of Canada's Yukon territory then bends toward the Bering Sea where it ends its 2,000 mile course. The Yukon is one of the world's largest rivers, only four on the North American continent. The Mississippi, Missouri, the Winnipeg Nelson, the Mackenzie and the St. Lawrence surpass it in length in the area of the basin drained. Here, in what are called the Yukon Flats, the stream is from 10 to 20 miles wide and the channel winds sluggishly in and out among islands of all shapes and sizes. Some are circular, some oval and some are perfect crescents of vegetation and sand. The waters are like glass, putty-colored during the daytime and with all the hues of the rainbow when the sun rises or sets. Just now it is about midnight and the river is one sheet of molten gold or the hue of flowing copper as the metal pours forth from the furnace. At Whitehorse, the northern terminus of the White Pass Railway, I took the steamer which brought me on through the Canadian Yukon territory and passed Dawson. About nine hours after leaving Dawson, I crossed the international boundary and was once more on United States soil which I had left at Carcross on the railroad. The course of the Yukon from Whitehorse to Dawson is as picturesque as any part of the Rhine or the Danube and the whole of the journey has all of the wildness and charm of a virgin country. In coming down the upper Yukon, we steamed by mountains rising to the clouds passed by rocks like lofty castles and wound our way among hills blanketed with pink flowers recalling the heather-clad hills of old Scotland. Just inside the Canadian boundary I saw two rocks facing each other on opposite sides of the river. One bore the almost perfect face of a man whereas the profile of the other was that of a woman. The rocks are known as the Old Man and the Old Woman. A little farther downstream is a place where the Yukon cuts its way through towering cliffs banded with a dozen different colors white, gold, black, brown, green and red. The strata lie in undulating folds like the stripes of a waving flag. They look rough enough to have been gnawed out by the snaggy teeth of old Father Time. In Europe this rock formation would have some romantic title. Here it is called the Calico Bluff. As we went by it in the steamer one of the passengers who had a revolver amused himself by sending bullets into the strata declaring in advance just which colored ribbon he expected to hit. Leaving the bluffs we struck a patch of green forest and frightened two moose that had come to the river to drink. We saw links swimming the river and a mile farther on passed a fishing wheel which turned by the current was scooping up pink salmon and throwing them into a wooden box at the end. Behind the wheel on the shore were the tents of the Athopascan Indians who were thus laying in winter food for themselves and their dogs. I'd been interested in the homes of the Athopascans on this part of the Yukon. They live in substantial log cabins painted in all the colors of the rainbow. Many of their houses have framed doors and glass windows. Some of these Indians are now planting gardens and not a few use cook stoves and other furniture like that of the whites. Most of them have become Christians although they retain many of their old superstitions and customs. The government has established public schools in all of the large villages where the younger generation is learning to speak English. The Canadian boundary line is so marked that it can be easily seen. It is a wide strip cut through the woods uphill and downdale from south to north from where our line ends near the Pacific Ocean to the Arctic Ocean. It starts within 30 miles of the Pacific and goes straight toward the north pole for a distance of 875 miles. It is the longest continuous straight boundary line ever surveyed. We could see it from the steamer coming down the slopes on the south side of the river and climbing straight up to the hills at the north. At the international boundary the Yukon is comparatively narrow. Its width varies according to the level of the river from 1200 to 1300 feet. It has two channels at that point one of which is 600 feet wide and 20 feet deep and the other 400 feet wide and 26 feet deep. The river widens as it leaves the boundary and keeps on its winding way through the hills for 200 or 300 miles until it reaches circle where the great inland sea of the Yukon flats begins. Here in the flats the land is low and built up by the silt of the river. The flats which have an area almost as large as that of South Carolina lie between the two ranges of mountains bordering Alaska at the north and the south. The Yukon corkscrews for 200 miles through these lowlands in a network of sloughs, great inland lakes and oxbows made by the islands. The river stretches on and on as though it would drop into space and the low wooded banks seem fences over which if one climbed one would fall into nothingness. Standing on the bridge of the steamer one can almost look over the trees. The earth as far as one can see is flat. Everywhere the Yukon is at its work of earth building. Its waters are melting the prehistoric ice that begins 2 or 3 feet under the moss and muck covering and great blankets of earth studded with trees fall down into the river. Sandbars rise in the season and islands are created or swept away with the floods of one spring. There are no rocks anywhere. The bed of the river is silt which goes down to great depths. There are so many channels among the islands that a man without a compass and sailing directions would surely get lost. Indeed in the early days the chichacos or tender feet coming here to get gold were facetiously warned to beware of the Yukon flats as they might wander into channels that would lead them into the Arctic Ocean instead of the main course of the river. Our steamer had spars at the side which could be dropped into the sand so that the engine could pry itself off in case it grounded on a newly made or uncharted shoal. The river is wonderfully quiet. Sometimes we sailed a hundred miles or more without seeing a town or any sign of habitation. The few men living along its course within the flats chop wood to sell to the steamers. The captain asked one of them the other day the price of the wood. The man replied, Dave Drollett has been telling around the neighborhood that I have been selling wood at $5 a quart but it ain't so. Neighborhood indeed. The man's nearest neighbor is 40 miles off and Dave Drollett lives 100 miles off the river. This absence of man made the wilderness impressive. The mighty stream and the great dome of the sky with the slow-hung clouds which seemed always stationary made me feel but an atom in God's mighty world. Most of the time the only living things visible were those on our boat and the only noises the splashing of the paddle wheel at the stern, the voices of the people on deck, and the howls of the dogs we were carrying to the road houses downstream. The first settlement over the international boundary is an Indian village above which on a pole erected beside a log church floats the American flag. Nearby may be seen the black mast of the wireless station of boundary, the first outpost of the signal core of our army, whose telegraph system covers the greater part of the territory. Still farther on is Eagle, the first American town on the Yukon. Eagle prides itself on its Americanism. It has a poem celebrating the advantages of Alaska over Canada which was prepared as a greeting for the tourist on crossing the boundary. I give you a part of one verse. You may here forget there are crowns and kings, ladies in waiting and such like things, for now you are under the eagle's wings. We could see the American flags of Eagle even before we caught sight of the houses. Every cabin had a tail flag staff attached to its roof, and from the Yukon I counted a dozen flags floating in the breeze. The eagle of today is a has-been. It is like the deserted mining camps of the West which were abandoned when the goal played out. In its palmy days it was known as Eagle City and had hundreds of inhabitants and all the riotous life that came from the successful diggings close by. It still has about 101 storey log cabins, but half of them are deserted and some are falling to ruins. Many of the cabins have gardens about them in which are large crops of potatoes and carrots. The streets are grass grown and grass and flowers grow luxuriously on the dirt roofs of the cabins. As our boat came to anchor I heard a rooster crowing and as I walked up the banks I could hear the bells of the cows pasturing near the town pump. The town pump is one of the features of Eagle. It stands over a well and is worked by a windmill. There is a tall white tower beside the windmill and a drinking place at the front. In the days before prohibition Eagle had a first-class saloon but no public school. I asked one of the women why this was. She replied, the only revenue the town had was the $1,000 license paid by the saloon and it took all that to keep up the town pump. Leaving Eagle we stopped next to Circle, another half-deserted village, living on the memories of its past. It sprang up in 1892 when gold was discovered on Birch Creek nearby and a little later it had a population of 1,000 miners. It boasted that it was the largest log cabin town in the world. Then the gold began to give out and most of the men left in the stampede to the Klondike. It has now many abandoned homes made of logs, a store or so, and a restaurant. The population altogether is two or three hundred. While the steamer was tied up there I called at the restaurant and its owner, Fred Brentlinger showed me a pair of Arctic oxhorns which he had dug from the ice 30 feet under the ground. These horns measure three feet from tip to tip and are well preserved. He told me the price was $500. The whole country has the remains of prehistoric animals locked up in vaults of perpetual ice. In the Klondike there have been dug up the bones of mastodons and other giant animals of the past. In nearly every town has a great ivory tusk or skeleton of an animal that lived in Alaska before the Ice Age began. Curios made of such ivory are for sale in many of the stores and if one wants a tusk or tooth some hundred thousand years old it is easy to get it. Brentlinger has two bear cubs each of which lives in a ten gallon keg back of the restaurant. They are as black as ink and as lively as kittens. It is wonderful how tame these Alaskan bears become caught as cubs and treated as pets. I find some in every mining settlement. There are two here at Fort Yukon within a stone's throw of where the steamer lands. They watch for the stranger and will eat and drink out of his hand. I have amused myself feeding them pop out of a bottle. I buy the pop at Jim Haley's Roadhouse and the bearers will drink it out of a bottle while I hold it in my hand. Or I can give the bottle to Bruin and he will sit down and drink it all by himself. Fort Yukon is just inside the Arctic Circle and at this time of the year it is light for 24 hours. It is the most northerly point on the Yukon River and a fine place to see the midnight sun. I have experimented here with taking photographs at midnight. My snapshots are fairly good and with the gentle squeeze of the bulb I got the best of results. Fort Yukon has been of great importance as a mining center, but is today better known as a fur trading post. The Hudson's Bay Company used to come here to buy furs and boat loads are now brought down the Porcupine River by the Indians and other fur traders. The Porcupine is navigable for 225 miles or as far as Rampart House on the other side of the international boundary. One of our passengers was Dan Kadzo, the trader who lives there. He left us here to go up the Porcupine to his trading station. Everyone in Alaska has heard of Dan Kadzo. He is one of the biggest traders of the far north. Kadzo is content to live almost all alone in the wilds 200 miles from the nearest settlement. His home is about 150 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, a little farther from Fort McPherson on a branch of the Mackenzie and 225 miles from Fort Yukon. Nevertheless, he likes it. He said to me today, I am mighty glad to get back from outside. I am tired of the crowd and want to be where it is quiet again. I ask him to tell me about his home in the wilderness. He replied, My house is about 16 by 40 with wings at the side. It is made of logs and lined with the best beaver board. We have double windows and our wood stoves keep us warm as toast. Though the thermometer sometimes goes down to 70 degrees below zero. Tell me something about your store. It is just over the boundary in Canada and I take my goods there in my own steamer up the Porcupine River. Most of the freight on this trip belongs to me. My stock is worth about $20,000. I use it to trade with the Indians, Eskimos and white trappers who hunt there for furs. We have the best of goods, get high prices and pay cash for furs. We buy thousands of dollars worth of furs every season. Most of them come from the Indians where there are not a half a dozen white men in the whole country. We are so far away that we did not know there was a war in 1914 until we came out with our furs in 1915. You see, our nearest mail station is here at Fort Yukon and we have to go 450 miles every time we call at the post office. End of chapter 14 Chapter 15 of Carpenter's World Travels Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Chapter 15, Winter Tales of Tanana Tanana claims to be the hub of Alaska. It is a little town lying on the right bank of the Yukon, just about halfway between the Pacific and the Arctic Oceans and halfway down the Yukon on its course from the Canadian line at Eagle. I have come 800 miles down the river from Canada on my way to this point and I have 800 miles more to go before I can get the little steamer that will take me over Bering Sea to Nome. Just opposite where my boat is anchored is the mouth of the Tanana River, a wide sluggish stream having a course of something like 600 miles from the Wrangle Mountains to where it flows into the Yukon. It will take me two days to go up it to Fairbanks. There is no doubt that Tanana can offer room for all the population she may have in the future. The corporate limits at present are large enough to give an acre to every man, woman, and child of the population of less than 300 and leave some to spare. The log and frame buildings of the town are strung out along the waterfront for more than a mile. At the lower end of it begins the army post to Fort Gibbon which extends three miles farther and which has a government reservation of 60 square miles. The people of Tanana are enthusiastic Alaskans. They have a live chamber of commerce, a camp of the Arctic Brotherhood and a lodge of the loyal order of the Moose. Talk to them about their village and they will make you think it is a paradise as beautiful as the veil of Kashmir and as salubrious as Los Angeles. I asked Judge Den, the United States Commissioner who has been here a number of years what he thought of the climate. He replied, I like it and I keep healthy and happy summer and winter. Our summers which last from May until the middle of September are more delightful than those anywhere in the States. The thermometer ranges from 45 to 90 degrees and for most of the time there is scarcely an hour that you cannot read within doors without artificial light. From June 15th to the 10th of July there is no real darkness even at midnight. How about your winters I asked. The man who went away from here and said that we have nine months of hard winter and after that three months of bad slaying is a liar. Our winter starts in about October 1st when the thermometer drops to 15 degrees above zero. At that time the ground freezes and remains solid all winter. The frost goes down to the bed of glacial ice that lies under a great part of Alaska and as far as we know we live on a solid ice block for seven months of the year. The glacial ice does not melt in summer. The frost gets only through the moss and muck which is 10 inches or more deep and where you pull up the muck from below frozen solid. If you clear off the moss and the muck it will thaw down to 8 or 10 feet but in the winter such ground seems to freeze from the top and the bottom both until it is all hard as rock. The frost begins to go out of the ground about May 1st when the hot sun thaws the ice. It is then that summer begins. But your winter weather must be terribly cold. Not so bad not so bad said Judge Den the weather keeps growing colder and colder from October on until it gets down to 15 degrees below zero. It holds that average throughout the winter although it now and then falls to 40 and even 60 degrees below. I have seen it down to 73 below. Zero is warm winter weather and we do not consider 15 degrees below that point uncomfortable. At such times we wear our ordinary winter clothing and take off our top coats if we are at hard manual labor. I came here from Canton, Ohio 15 degrees below zero on the Yukon does not seem as cold as 15 above in Ohio. Our air is dry and we do not feel the cold. Besides continued the judge our houses keep out the cold. They are made of logs chinked with Arctic moss. The warmest building I have is my log chicken house which is lined and sealed with a framework the space between being filled with shavings. I keep an airtight stove going in it and my hands lay all winter. I went out with the judge to see his chickens. He has 150 mostly Rhode Island reds and Plymouth rocks. He sells his pure red fowls at five dollars a piece and he gets a dollar and a half a dozen for eggs in summer and two dollars and a half in winter. Speaking of chickens I have been greatly interested in how they are handled in these cold regions of the far north. We brought 800 brooded fowls on our ship down the Yukon. They had come from Seattle and were consigned to a man in Fairbanks. They are still on the boat and will go up the Tanana River tomorrow. At Dawson I met Chicken Billy who at one time had 900 chickens and it was sold eggs in the winter for as much as five dollars a dozen. The chickens imported from the states will not lay unless there is the same proportion of light and darkness in their days as they were used to at home. I heard of a man at Circle who imported a lot of fowls from the states with the idea of starting a chicken farm. After a week or so they grew droopy. They lost flesh and he got no eggs whatever. He was then told the chickens were suffering from lack of sleep. It was mid-summer when the light is bright throughout the 24 hours. The chickens had no sun set to mark their bedtime and they kept on scratching gravel all night. The man decided to put them in darkened coops at 8 p.m. and keep them there until morning. The hens at once regained their old vigor and began to drop ranch eggs which sold at top prices. I am told also that the coops must be lighted during the long days of the winter in order to make the hens lay. In the past few years there has been a craze in Alaska of the helpful hen. Most of the residents have been keeping chickens and raising their own eggs. At first many kept them throughout the summer and sold them as cold weather came on to save the expense of warming and lighting the coops during the long winter nights. They would import a second flock for the following summer. Today it is the custom to keep your chickens in summer and put them out to board in winter. In several of the largest towns there are a number of chicken boarding houses where fowls are cared for in well warmed, well lighted coops at a regular rate. The eggs lay during the winter go to the landlord. As soon as the warm weather comes on the owner takes back his chickens and is thus able to raise broilers and pullets and at the same time have plenty of eggs. All winter the whole country is a cold storage plant so that it is easy to keep meat. When decided how many chickens she will put out to board kills the rest. She cleans and dresses them and hangs them out of doors or in an unheated building. They freeze solid the first night and can then be laid away in a cold place and used as needed. A teacher told me how they managed to have fresh meat all winter long. Said he, we bring our beef and mutton in on the hoof before navigation closes. About the middle of October when we are sure of a steady cold until spring we kill and dress them and hang them up out of doors. We then lay them away and thaw them out as the market demands. We freeze caribou and mousse the same way. Last year one of the butchers froze a caribou with the skin and horns on just as it looked when alive. He stood the carcass out in front of his shop and used it for a sign. Betting on the ice in the river is a regular sport in this part of the world and many are the speculations on when it will form, how deep it will freeze and when it will go out in the spring. One of the river captains tells me he has measured the ice of the Yukon and found it at times five feet thick. In the ordinary season the ice on the main part of the stream is only two and one half or three feet deep. The ice forms the great highway of travel in winter weather. I asked this captain to tell me more about the ice on the Yukon. He said navigation opens at Dawson between the sixth and sixteenth of May and it usually closes about the 25th of October. Long before the center of the river is frozen there is a continuous strip of ice along the shores and cakes of it float in the channel. As the cold weather continues the ice extends farther and farther out until the channel grows so narrow that the steamers cannot make their way through. The floating cakes increase in number and pile up until at last they make gorgeous at the narrow places and form solid ice there. As winter settles down into a steady cold the whole river is frozen from bank to bank so solidly that a train of cars could be run over it. The most interesting time on the Yukon continued the captain is when the ice breaks up in the spring. That on the upper part of the river breaks first and pushes its way down the stream breaking the other ice as it goes. The boats start in behind the ice and move along as far as they can and sometimes small boats start in the ice. The water never freezes again after it once melts for we then have the long days and the sunshiny nights of the summer. I asked the captain to tell me about the bedding on the ice break. That is most exciting was his reply. All along the Yukon the people bet when the great ice break will occur. They organize pools at Dawson and Fairbanks where large sums are lost in one at the whim of Jack Frost. At Dawson they cut a hole in the ice in the middle of the Yukon and erect a pole about 4 inches thick and 20 feet high. This freezes solid. They then fasten one end of a wire cable to the top of the pole and the other end to an electric stop clock on the shore set to standard time. The moment the ice moves the pole the clock stops and that moment marks the record of the beginning of the ice break and decides all bets. As soon as the clock stops a steam whistle is blown and everyone knows the hour and the minute of the running. The usual date is about May 10th the time when corn is planted in the middle states. Generally the bedding pool at Dawson the captain went on and the total amount may be as much as $6,000. After a pool has been formed 60 slips of paper bearing the numbers from 1 to 60 are put in a hat. Each number represents a minute of the hour and the man who gets the minute shown by the stop clock as the flood reaches Dawson is given the purse. Bets are also made on the day of the month and week and upon the hour one year the engineer on the steamship Sarah invested $1 in a $500 pool and won it all. That was a day, hour and minute pool. He guessed the right time to a minute. There are also many individual bets. The crowds gather on the banks of the river as the ice shows signs of breaking and watch the pole. When the whistle blows the city goes mad. The same bedding goes on at Fairbanks. The time there is the exact minute when there is the way the bridge across the Chena River in the heart of the town does that every spring breaking the posts as though they were matches. I find there is a difference of opinion as to Alaska winners. All are not as enthusiastic about the delights of the cold and darkness as those I have quoted. I tell you the winners are awful said one of the women I met here. These people say they enjoy life when the thermometer is 20 and that that is not cold. I tell you it is cold although the still air does not make it so bitter. When it is more than 20 below we women stay in the house and so do the men as much as they can. We work by artificial light for most of the day and when spring comes everyone is peaked and death-like with the coming of the long days our color returns and in summer we are as healthy and rosy as can be. It is almost to breaking. You get tired of yourself and your friends and want something new in the way of amusement. You sleep as long as you can and pay but little attention to hours. All parties are held late and they often last far into the night and then the trouble of entertaining. Everyone has the same supplies and the same canned stuffs to select from. You go to your pantry and look at the shelves and despair. It is hard to know what to serve. When they are about into temperatures of 60 or 70 below they avoid violent exercise. I am told that a quick deep breath of the freezing air makes the lungs feel as if they had taken in burning steel. Horses are seldom allowed to go out of their warmed stables when the thermometer is around 50 below. As the icy air kills them by burning out their lungs as they say up here. Another alaskan talking to me about funerals said, In winter you sometimes have to chop the graves out of the ice. There is no need of brick walls or cement. The coffin is laid in its ice tomb. The earth shoveled back and soon all is frozen solid again. The dead buried in the winter remain frozen for an indefinite period and when taken up years later look just like the dead buried in the ice. The dead buried in the winter remain frozen for an indefinite period and when taken up years later look just as in life the ice has turned them, as it were, to statues of marble. In the long dark months the only contact with the outside is the mail brought over hundreds of frozen miles by dog team. It takes little imagination to realize what it means to the interior towns to have a poor mail service and we can readily sympathize with the complaints and pleas for delivery of letters, papers that bombard the government. The people complain that a large part of their newspapers and magazines which should arrive during the winter are held over until spring when they are delivered in bulk. For instance, one postmaster received in June 600 sacks of such mail, much of which was dated as far back as September, October and November of the previous year. Think of getting all the copies of your pet newspaper publish this winter in one big package in the coming May. Moreover, the people of Alaska say that the long winter is their time for reading and they want their newspapers and magazines delivered as they come out. They especially resent the fact that in Dawson situated far inland the Canadians get all their mail regularly in spite of transportation difficulties as great as those to be overcome in reaching Alaska towns. End of Chapter 15