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First and Second Day Out,

August 23, 1903.

We arrived in Vancouver by the steamer “Charmer” from Victoria about ten o’clock A. M. – two hours late – a small boat, packed with passengers. We could not get a state-room to ourselves, so were glad of berths, while many people lay on mattresses in the cabin and many sat up. Tourist travel surprises the slow-going Canadian, and he does not catch up with it.

We went to the Hotel Vancouver, where we had been staying, and there breakfasted.

Our boat, “City of Seattle,” is roomy and comfortable. We have a large upper state-room on the starboard side, plenty of fresh air and sunlight. It is loaded down with an immense cargo of miscellaneous freight, from piles of boxes of Iowa butter and fresh eggs, to sheep and live stock, chickens and pigs, vegetables and canned goods, most of it billed to Dawson and even to points below. The Yukon has been so low this year – less snow than usual falling last winter – that the bulk of the freight “going in” has had to be shipped via these Skagway boats and the White Pass Railway, despite the exorbitant freight rates they are charging for everything.

The travellers are of two sorts. A good many making the round trip from Seattle to Skagway, and the Yukoner “going in” for the winter. The former are not of much concern to us, but among the latter I have found a number of interesting acquaintances. One, a man who hunts for a business, and is full of forest lore and hunting tales. He is also something of a naturalist and taxidermist, and I have been showing him our volumes of the report of the Harriman Expedition, to his delight. He has also explored along the Kamtschatka coasts of Siberia, and describes it as a land stocked with salmon and fur animals. He says, too, that I have done right to bring along my gun, for there are lots of ptarmigan as well as mountain sheep and goats in the Yukon Valley, and caribou and moose are also plentiful.

Another man has spent a year or more on the Yukon – our chief engineer – and thinks we will have no difficulty in getting a boat down from Dawson, and the scenery he says is grand. Another is a lumber-man of Wrangel – from Pennsylvania – and tells me they have some fine timber there, though most of that of these far northern latitudes is too small to now profitably compete with the big logs of Washington.

Our vis-a-vis at table is going up to the Porcupine Placer district to try his luck with finding gold, and several men are going into Atlin – whither we are bound – to find work at big pay.

The atmosphere of the company is buoyant and hopeful, even the women have a dash of prosperity about them – gold chains and diamonds – of which there are not a few.

From all I can pick up, an immense trade is already developed with Alaska and is still growing with bounds. The United States Government statisticians give thirty-seven millions as the figure for the trade of the past year. Already three or four lines of steamers ply between Skagway alone and Puget Sound ports, and several more run to St. Michaels and Nome.

The sail from Vancouver is most delightful. You come out of a narrow channel through which the tides foam and churn, and then turn north through the “Gulf of Georgia,” twenty or thirty miles wide. Vancouver Island stretches for three hundred miles along the west, fir-clad, backboned by a chain of mountains rising up into the snows. On the east a coast indented with multitudinous bays and deep channels, sharp promontories and islands; the forest coming to the water’s edge, the mountains rising sharply six and seven thousand feet into the snows and clouds, as lofty as the fjelde of Norway, but not so bare and naked, the dense, deep green fir forests growing from water to snow line.

We were crossing Queen Charlotte Sound when we awoke this morning, and all day long have been threading our way among islands, through narrow channels, across seemingly shut-in lakes, ten and twelve miles wide, and then no wider than the Kanawha River or even narrower. As we come north the mountains grow higher and come closer to the water we sail upon, and there is more snow on their summits.

You might imagine yourself with Henrik Hudson on his first voyage, when the Hudson valley was covered with primeval forests.

Last evening we saw a number of humpbacked whales, and to-day more. This morning saw my first sea lions and also fur and hair seals. To-morrow, they say, we shall see yet more. Only gulls, a few terns and ducks to-day. No larger birds as yet.

Monday, August 24, 1903.

The greyness of yesterday is vanished. The sky is cloudless, the atmosphere translucent. The mountains are more lofty, the snow patches grown into wide fields, and the air has taken on a certain added keenness, telling of distant snow and ice. To-morrow we shall see more snow and even glaciers. All day we have been going from one broad sound or channel through narrow straits into others as broad. We crossed Dixon’s Channel at breakfast-time, through which the commerce of the Orient will come to Port Simpson, the Canadians hope, when the Grand Trunk Pacific shall have been built.

About noon we came around a wooded island and made our first port of Ketchikan, where there are salmon canneries, and hard by quartz mines yielding gold, and saloons and stores. Here we had our first view of near-by totem poles, and our first sight of the shoals of salmon that make alive these waters. From a foot-bridge crossing a little creek that debouched near our steamer wharf, we looked down into the clear water and saw it fairly swarming with salmon, fish from ten to fifteen pounds, “small ones,” they said. But the waters were choked with them. Dipping a net down, you might haul up a wagon load as easily as one. Yet no one was catching them. So plentiful are the fish that no one wants to eat salmon except as a last resort – “food fit only for dogs,” they say, and the distant tenderfeet whom the canneries supply. And these swarming fish below us shoved each other upon the shallow shore continually, when there would be a great splashing to get back.

From Ketchikan we have come out into the great Clarence Strait, with Belim and Ernest Sounds stretching away into the snow-covered mountains toward the east. The strait is as wide as the Hudson at the Palisades, the shores fir clad, the mountains six to seven thousand feet, up into clouds and snow. The water to-day is like a mirror, and many porpoises are playing about. I have just seen three big blue herons, and awhile ago we passed a loon. Last night just at dusk, we saw several flocks of snipe or plover, small, brown, swift in flight, close above the water.

We have just looked upon the most superb panorama we have yet beheld. The last four hours the mountains both east and west of us have come closer to the shores, and risen higher, the fir mantle enveloping them has grown a darker green, larger timber than for the last few hundred miles, and then we came round a bend in our great strait – about six to ten miles wide – forty or fifty miles long – and there in front of us, bounding the horizon on the north, stretched an immense mass of jagged, serrated mountain chain, glittering like silver in the slanting sun rays. Not mere snow patches, not mere fields of snow, but vast “fjellen” of snow, snow hiding all but the most ragged rock peaks, and even sometimes enveloping these. Valleys all snow-filled and from which descend mighty glaciers. Below the miles of snow lay the deep green forests of the lesser mountain summits and sloping flanks, and then the dark blue waters of the giant fjord, dotted with many fir-clad islands. We agree that we have seen nothing in our lives so sublimely beautiful. Never yet nature on so stupendous a scale.

The quiet waters of the last two days are now alive with gulls and ducks and grebes and divers, many loons. More bird life than we have yet seen. Just as is told by the Harriman naturalist. Only at Wrangel does the real bird life of the north begin. Curving around another wooded promontory, we beheld the town of Wrangel, at Fort Wrangel, on Wrangel Island, ten miles away, nestling at the mouth of a little valley, below the firs and snow summits behind. We are now tied up to the pier at this port, and shall lie here till 2 A. M., when flood tide will allow us to continue the voyage, and at daylight pass through the narrowest and most hazardous strait of the trip. We mean to be waked at four o’clock so as to see the pass.

In the village, which claims to be the second town in Alaska, we have walked about and seen some of the totem poles which stand before many of the Indian cabins. Grotesque things, surely.

It is now near nine o’clock and yet the lingering twilight permits one to read. At Dawson, they tell me, there is in June no night, and baseball matches are played at 10 P. M.

August 25, 1903.

We did not leave Wrangel till 2 A. M., lying there waiting for the flood of the tide. We were to pass through the very tortuous, narrow and difficult straits and passages between Wrangel Bay and Frederick Sound, through which the tides rush with terrific fury – the tides rise twenty or thirty feet along these shores – and the ship would only venture at flood tide and after dawn. In order to see these picturesque passages, I climbed out between three and four o’clock this morning, wrapped in a blanket shawl above my overcoat, and stood in the ice-chilled air while we threaded slowly our dangerous way. Along sheer mountain-sides, between low wooded islands (all fir), a channel carefully marked with many buoys and white beacons, with many sharp turns, finally entering the great Frederick Sound, where many whales were blowing, and we saw our first real icebergs – masses of ice, blue and green, translucent, with deep, clear coloring.

All day we have sailed up this great land-locked sheet of blue water, the icebergs and floes increasing in number as we approached Taku Inlet, from whose great live glaciers they are incessantly shed off.

4 P. M. – We have landed at the Treadwell Mines on Douglas Island, where the largest stamp mill in the world crushes a low grade quartz night and day the year around, and where is gathered a mining population of several thousand. Then we crossed the fjord to the bustling port of Juneau, the would-be capital of Alaska, the rival of Sitka. A curious little town of wooden buildings, wooden streets, wooden sidewalks, nestling under a mighty snow-capped mountain, and, like those other towns, largely built on piles, on account of the tides.

Now we are off for Skagway, a twelve hours’ run with our thirteen-knot speed.

To-day we have fallen in with two more fellow-travelers. One a young fellow named Baldwin, attached to the U. S. Fish Commission, who tells me much about the fishing on these coasts, and the efforts now being made to stay the indiscriminate slaughter. Another, a grave-faced, sturdy man from Maine who is panning free gold near Circle City, and has endured much of hardship and suffering. He hopes to win enough this winter and coming summer from his claim to go back to California and make a home for his old mother who waits for him there.

Skagway, Alaska, Wednesday, August 25.

We are tied to an immense pier, and mechanical lifters seem to be dragging out the very entrails of the ship. Across the line of the warehouses I see the trucks of the railway, the hackmen are crying out their hotels. “This way, free ’bus to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”