Tobias Smollett - "The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Part II."

John Greenleaf Whittier - "My Summer With Dr. Singletary"

Alexandra Kuprin - "Yama (The Pit)"

Gerald R. Ford - "State of the Union Addresses of Gerald R. Ford"

Travels in Alaska

J >> John Muir >> Travels in Alaska




The cliff gardens of this hidden Yosemite are exceedingly rich in
color. On almost every rift and bench, however small, as well as on
the wider table-rocks where a little soil has lodged, we found gay
multitudes of flowers, far more brilliantly colored than would be
looked for in so cool and beclouded a region,--larkspurs, geraniums,
painted-cups, bluebells, gentians, saxifrages, epilobiums, violets,
parnassia, veratrum, spiranthes and other orchids, fritillaria,
smilax, asters, daisies, bryanthus, cassiope, linnaea, and a great
variety of flowering ribes and rubus and heathworts. Many of the
above, though with soft stems and leaves, are yet as brightly painted
as those of the warm sunlands of the south. The heathworts in
particular are very abundant and beautiful, both in flower and fruit,
making delicate green carpets for the rocks, flushed with pink bells,
or dotted with red and blue berries. The tallest of the grasses have
ribbon leaves well tempered and arched, and with no lack of bristly
spikes and nodding purple panicles. The alpine grasses of the Sierra,
making close carpets on the glacier meadows, I have not yet seen in
Alaska.

The ferns are less numerous in species than in California, but about
equal in the number of fronds. I have seen three aspidiums, two
woodsias, a lomaria, polypodium, cheilanthes, and several species of
pteris.

In this eastern arm of Sum Dum Bay and its Yosemite branch, I counted
from my canoe, on my way up and down, thirty small glaciers back of
the walls, and we saw three of the first order; also thirty-seven
cascades and falls, counting only those large enough to make
themselves heard several miles. The whole bay, with its rocks and
woods and ice, reverberates with their roar. How many glaciers may be
disclosed in the other great arm that I have not seen as yet, I
cannot say, but, judging from the bergs it sends down, I guess not
less than a hundred pour their turbid streams into the fiord, making
about as many joyful, bouncing cataracts.

About noon we began to retrace our way back into the main fiord, and
arrived at the gold-mine camp after dark, rich and weary.

On the morning of August 21 I set out with my three Indians to
explore the right arm of this noble bay, Mr. Young having decided, on
account of mission work, to remain at the gold-mine. So here is
another fine lot of Sum Dum ice,--thirty-five or forty square miles
of bergs, one great glacier of the first class descending into the
fiord at the head, the fountain whence all these bergs were derived,
and thirty-one smaller glaciers that do not reach tidewater; also
nine cascades and falls, large size, and two rows of Yosemite rocks
from three to four thousand feet high, each row about eighteen or
twenty miles long, burnished and sculptured in the most telling
glacier style, and well trimmed with spruce groves and flower
gardens; a' that and more of a kind that cannot here be catalogued.

For the first five or six miles there is nothing excepting the
icebergs that is very striking in the scenery as compared with that
of the smooth unencumbered outside channels, where all is so evenly
beautiful. The mountain-wall on the right as you go up is more
precipitous than usual, and a series of small glaciers is seen along
the top of it, extending their blue-crevassed fronts over the rims of
pure-white snow fountains, and from the end of each front a hearty
stream coming in a succession of falls and rapids over the terminal
moraines, through patches of dwarf willows, and then through the
spruce woods into the bay, singing and dancing all the way down. On
the opposite side of the bay from here there is a small side bay
about three miles deep, with a showy group of glacier-bearing
mountains back of it. Everywhere else the view is bounded by
comparatively low mountains densely forested to the very top.

After sailing about six miles from the mine, the experienced
mountaineer could see some evidence of an opening from this wide
lower portion, and on reaching it, it proved to be the continuation
of the main west arm, contracted between stupendous walls of gray
granite, and crowded with bergs from shore to shore, which seem to
bar the way against everything but wings. Headland after headland, in
most imposing array, was seen plunging sheer and bare from dizzy
heights, and planting its feet in the ice-encumbered water without
leaving a spot on which one could land from a boat, while no part of
the great glacier that pours all these miles of ice into the fiord
was visible. Pushing our way slowly through the packed bergs, and
passing headland after headland, looking eagerly forward, the glacier
and its fountain mountains were still beyond sight, cut off by other
projecting headland capes, toward which I urged my way, enjoying the
extraordinary grandeur of the wild unfinished Yosemite. Domes swell
against the sky in fine lines as lofty and as perfect in form as
those of the California valley, and rock-fronts stand forward, as
sheer and as nobly sculptured. No ice-work that I have ever seen
surpasses this, either in the magnitude of the features or
effectiveness of composition.

On some of the narrow benches and tables of the walls rows of spruce
trees and two-leaved pines were growing, and patches of considerable
size were found on the spreading bases of those mountains that stand
back inside the canyons, where the continuity of the walls is broken.
Some of these side canyons are cut down to the level of the water and
reach far back, opening views into groups of glacier fountains that
give rise to many a noble stream; while all along the tops of the
walls on both sides small glaciers are seen, still busily engaged in
the work of completing their sculpture. I counted twenty-five from
the canoe. Probably the drainage of fifty or more pours into this
fiord. The average elevation at which they melt is about eighteen
hundred feet above sea-level, and all of them are residual branches
of the grand trunk that filled the fiord and overflowed its walls
when there was only one Sum Dum glacier.

The afternoon was wearing away as we pushed on and on through the
drifting bergs without our having obtained a single glimpse of the
great glacier. A Sum Dum seal-hunter, whom we met groping his way
deftly through the ice in a very small, unsplitable cottonwood canoe,
told us that the ice-mountain was yet fifteen miles away. This was
toward the middle of the afternoon, and I gave up sketching and
making notes and worked hard with the Indians to reach it before
dark. About seven o'clock we approached what seemed to be the extreme
head of the fiord, and still no great glacier in sight--only a small
one, three or four miles long, melting a thousand feet above the sea.
Presently, a narrow side opening appeared between tremendous cliffs
sheer to a height of four thousand feet or more, trending nearly at
right angles to the general trend of the fiord, and apparently
terminated by a cliff, scarcely less abrupt or high, at a distance of
a mile or two. Up this bend we toiled against wind and tide, creeping
closely along the wall on the right side, which, as we looked upward,
seemed to be leaning over, while the waves beating against the bergs
and rocks made a discouraging kind of music. At length, toward nine
o'clock, just before the gray darkness of evening fell, a long,
triumphant shout told that the glacier, so deeply and desperately
hidden, was at last hunted back to its benmost bore. A short distance
around a second bend in the canyon, I reached a point where I obtained
a good view of it as it pours its deep, broad flood into the fiord in
a majestic course from between the noble mountains, its tributaries,
each of which would be regarded elsewhere as a grand glacier,
converging from right and left from a fountain set far in the silent
fastnesses of the mountains.

"There is your lost friend," said the Indians laughing; "he says,
'Sagh-a-ya'" (how do you do)? And while berg after berg was being
born with thundering uproar, Tyeen said, "Your friend has klosh
tumtum (good heart). Hear! Like the other big-hearted one he is
firing his guns in your honor."

I stayed only long enough to make an outline sketch, and then urged
the Indians to hasten back some six miles to the mouth of a side
canyon I had noted on the way up as a place where we might camp in
case we should not find a better. After dark we had to move with
great caution through the ice. One of the Indians was stationed in
the bow with a pole to push aside the smaller fragments and look out
for the most promising openings, through which he guided us,
shouting, "Friday! Tucktay!" (shoreward, seaward) about ten times a
minute. We reached this landing-place after ten o'clock, guided in
the darkness by the roar of a glacier torrent. The ground was all
boulders and it was hard to find a place among them, however small,
to lie on. The Indians anchored the canoe well out from the shore and
passed the night in it to guard against berg-waves and drifting
waves, after assisting me to set my tent in some sort of way among
the stones well back beyond the reach of the tide. I asked them as
they were returning to the canoe if they were not going to eat
something. They answered promptly:--

"We will sleep now, if your ice friend will let us. We will eat
to-morrow, but we can find some bread for you if you want it."

"No," I said, "go to rest. I, too, will sleep now and eat to-morrow."
Nothing was attempted in the way of light or fire. Camping that night
was simply lying down. The boulders seemed to make a fair bed after
finding the best place to take their pressure.

During the night I was awakened by the beating of the spent ends of
berg-waves against the side of my tent, though I had fancied myself
well beyond their reach. These special waves are not raised by wind
or tide, but by the fall of large bergs from the snout of the
glacier, or sometimes by the overturning or breaking of large bergs
that may have long floated in perfect poise. The highest berg-waves
oftentimes travel half a dozen miles or farther before they are much
spent, producing a singularly impressive uproar in the far recesses
of the mountains on calm dark nights when all beside is still. Far
and near they tell the news that a berg is born, repeating their
story again and again, compelling attention and reminding us of
earthquake-waves that roll on for thousands of miles, taking their
story from continent to continent.

When the Indians came ashore in the morning and saw the condition of
my tent they laughed heartily and said, "Your friend [meaning the big
glacier] sent you a good word last night, and his servant knocked at
your tent and said, 'Sagh-a-ya, are you sleeping well?'"

I had fasted too long to be in very good order for hard work, but
while the Indians were cooking, I made out to push my way up the
canyon before breakfast to seek the glacier that once came into the
fiord, knowing from the size and muddiness of the stream that drains
it that it must be quite large and not far off. I came in sight of it
after a hard scramble of two hours through thorny chaparral and
across steep avalanche taluses of rocks and snow. The front reaches
across the canyon from wall to wall, covered with rocky detritus, and
looked dark and forbidding in the shadow cast by the cliffs, while
from a low, cavelike hollow its draining stream breaks forth, a river
in size, with a reverberating roar that stirs all the canyon. Beyond,
in a cloudless blaze of sunshine, I saw many tributaries, pure and
white as new-fallen snow, drawing their sources from clusters of
peaks and sweeping down waving slopes to unite their crystal currents
with the trunk glacier in the central canyon. This fine glacier
reaches to within two hundred and fifty feet of the level of the sea,
and would even yet reach the fiord and send off bergs but for the
waste it suffers in flowing slowly through the trunk canyon, the
declivity of which is very slight.

Returning, I reached camp and breakfast at ten o'clock; then had
everything packed into the canoe, and set off leisurely across the
fiord to the mouth of another wide and low canyon, whose lofty outer
cliffs, facing the fiord, are telling glacial advertisements. Gladly
I should have explored it all, traced its streams of water and
streams of ice, and entered its highest chambers, the homes and
fountains of the snow. But I had to wait. I only stopped an hour or
two, and climbed to the top of a rock through the common underbrush,
whence I had a good general view. The front of the main glacier is
not far distant from the fiord, and sends off small bergs into a
lake. The walls of its tributary canyons are remarkably jagged and
high, cut in a red variegated rock, probably slate. On the way back
to the canoe I gathered ripe salmon-berries an inch and a half in
diameter, ripe huckleberries, too, in great abundance, and several
interesting plants I had not before met in the territory.

About noon, when the tide was in our favor, we set out on the return
trip to the gold-mine camp. The sun shone free and warm. No wind
stirred. The water spaces between the bergs were as smooth as glass,
reflecting the unclouded sky, and doubling the ravishing beauty of
the bergs as the sunlight streamed through their innumerable angles
in rainbow colors.

Soon a light breeze sprang up, and dancing lily spangles on the water
mingled their glory of light with that burning on the angles of the
ice.

On days like this, true sun-days, some of the bergs show a purplish
tinge, though most are white from the disintegrating of their
weathered surfaces. Now and then a new-born one is met that is pure
blue crystal throughout, freshly broken from the fountain or recently
exposed to the air by turning over. But in all of them, old and new,
there are azure caves and rifts of ineffable beauty, in which the
purest tones of light pulse and shimmer, lovely and untainted as
anything on earth or in the sky.

As we were passing the Indian village I presented a little tobacco to
the headmen as an expression of regard, while they gave us a few
smoked salmon, after putting many questions concerning my exploration
of their bay and bluntly declaring their disbelief in the ice
business.

About nine o'clock we arrived at the gold camp, where we found Mr.
Young ready to go on with us the next morning, and thus ended two of
the brightest and best of all my Alaska days.



Chapter XV

From Taku River to Taylor Bay


I never saw Alaska looking better than it did when we bade farewell
to Sum Dum on August 22 and pushed on northward up the coast toward
Taku. The morning was clear, calm, bright--not a cloud in all the
purple sky, nor wind, however gentle, to shake the slender spires of
the spruces or dew-laden grass around the shores. Over the mountains
and over the broad white bosoms of the glaciers the sunbeams poured,
rosy as ever fell on fields of ripening wheat, drenching the forests
and kindling the glassy waters and icebergs into a perfect blaze of
colored light. Every living thing seemed joyful, and nature's work
was going on in glowing enthusiasm, not less appreciable in the deep
repose that brooded over every feature of the landscape, suggesting
the coming fruitfulness of the icy land and showing the advance that
has already been made from glacial winter to summer. The care-laden
commercial lives we lead close our eyes to the operations of God as a
workman, though openly carried on that all who will look may see. The
scarred rocks here and the moraines make a vivid showing of the old
winter-time of the glacial period, and mark the bounds of the
mer-de-glace that once filled the bay and covered the surrounding
mountains. Already that sea of ice is replaced by water, in which
multitudes of fishes are fed, while the hundred glaciers lingering
about the bay and the streams that pour from them are busy night and
day bringing in sand and mud and stones, at the rate of tons every
minute, to fill it up. Then, as the seasons grow warmer, there will
be fields here for the plough.

Our Indians, exhilarated by the sunshine, were garrulous as the gulls
and plovers, and pulled heartily at their oars, evidently glad to get
out of the ice with a whole boat.

"Now for Taku," they said, as we glided over the shining water.
"Good-bye, Ice-Mountains; good-bye, Sum Dum." Soon a light breeze
came, and they unfurled the sail and laid away their oars and began,
as usual in such free times, to put their goods in order, unpacking
and sunning provisions, guns, ropes, clothing, etc. Joe has an old
flintlock musket suggestive of Hudson's Bay times, which he wished to
discharge and reload. So, stepping in front of the sail, he fired at
a gull that was flying past before I could prevent him, and it fell
slowly with outspread wings alongside the canoe, with blood dripping
from its bill. I asked him why he had killed the bird, and followed
the question by a severe reprimand for his stupid cruelty, to which
he could offer no other excuse than that he had learned from the
whites to be careless about taking life. Captain Tyeen denounced the
deed as likely to bring bad luck.

Before the whites came most of the Thlinkits held, with Agassiz, that
animals have souls, and that it was wrong and unlucky to even speak
disrespectfully of the fishes or any of the animals that supplied
them with food. A case illustrating their superstitious beliefs in
this connection occurred at Fort Wrangell while I was there the year
before. One of the sub-chiefs of the Stickeens had a little son five
or six years old, to whom he was very much attached, always taking
him with him in his short canoe-trips, and leading him by the hand
while going about town. Last summer the boy was taken sick, and
gradually grew weak and thin, whereupon his father became alarmed,
and feared, as is usual in such obscure cases, that the boy had been
bewitched. He first applied in his trouble to Dr. Carliss, one of the
missionaries, who gave medicine, without effecting the immediate cure
that the fond father demanded. He was, to some extent, a believer in
the powers of missionaries, both as to material and spiritual
affairs, but in so serious an exigency it was natural that he should
go back to the faith of his fathers. Accordingly, he sent for one of
the shamans, or medicine-men, of his tribe, and submitted the case to
him, who, after going through the customary incantations, declared
that he had discovered the cause of the difficulty.

"Your boy," he said, "has lost his soul, and this is the way it
happened. He was playing among the stones down on the beach when he
saw a crawfish in the water, and made fun of it, pointing his finger
at it and saying, 'Oh, you crooked legs! Oh, you crooked legs! You
can't walk straight; you go sidewise,' which made the crab so angry
that he reached out his long nippers, seized the lad's soul, pulled
it out of him and made off with it into deep water. And," continued
the medicine-man, "unless his stolen soul is restored to him and put
back in its place he will die. Your boy is really dead already; it is
only his lonely, empty body that is living now, and though it may
continue to live in this way for a year or two, the boy will never be
of any account, not strong, nor wise, nor brave."

The father then inquired whether anything could be done about it; was
the soul still in possession of the crab, and if so, could it be
recovered and re-installed in his forlorn son? Yes, the doctor rather
thought it might be charmed back and re-united, but the job would be
a difficult one, and would probably cost about fifteen blankets.

After we were fairly out of the bay into Stephens Passage, the wind
died away, and the Indians had to take to their oars again, which
ended our talk. On we sped over the silvery level, close alongshore.
The dark forests extending far and near, planted like a field of
wheat, might seem monotonous in general views, but the appreciative
observer, looking closely, will find no lack of interesting variety,
however far he may go. The steep slopes on which they grow allow
almost every individual tree, with its peculiarities of form and
color, to be seen like an audience on seats rising above one
another--the blue-green, sharply tapered spires of the Menzies
spruce, the warm yellow-green Mertens spruce with their finger-like
tops all pointing in the same direction, or drooping gracefully like
leaves of grass, and the airy, feathery, brownish-green Alaska cedar.
The outer fringe of bushes along the shore and hanging over the brows
of the cliffs, the white mountains above, the shining water beneath,
the changing sky over all, form pictures of divine beauty in which no
healthy eye may ever grow weary.

Toward evening at the head of a picturesque bay we came to a village
belonging to the Taku tribe. We found it silent and deserted. Not a
single shaman or policeman had been left to keep it. These people are
so happily rich as to have but little of a perishable kind to keep,
nothing worth fretting about. They were away catching salmon, our
Indians said. All the Indian villages hereabout are thus abandoned at
regular periods every year, just as a tent is left for a day, while
they repair to fishing, berrying, and hunting stations, occupying
each in succession for a week or two at a time, coming and going from
the main, substantially built villages. Then, after their summer's
work is done, the winter supply of salmon dried and packed, fish-oil
and seal-oil stored in boxes, berries and spruce bark pressed into
cakes, their trading-trips completed, and the year's stock of
quarrels with the neighboring tribe patched up in some way, they
devote themselves to feasting, dancing, and hootchenoo drinking. The
Takus, once a powerful and warlike tribe, were at this time, like
most of the neighboring tribes, whiskied nearly out of existence.
They had a larger village on the Taku River, but, according to the
census taken that year by the missionaries, they numbered only 269 in
all,--109 men, 79 women, and 81 children, figures that show the
vanishing condition of the tribe at a glance.

Our Indians wanted to camp for the night in one of the deserted
houses, but I urged them on into the clean wilderness until dark,
when we landed on a rocky beach fringed with devil's-clubs, greatly
to the disgust of our crew. We had to make the best of it, however,
as it was too dark to seek farther. After supper was accomplished
among the boulders, they retired to the canoe, which they anchored a
little way out, beyond low tide, while Mr. Young and I at the expense
of a good deal of scrambling and panax stinging, discovered a spot on
which we managed to sleep.

The next morning, about two hours after leaving our thorny camp, we
rounded a great mountain rock nearly a mile in height and entered the
Taku fiord. It is about eighteen miles long and from three to five
miles wide, and extends directly back into the heart of the
mountains, draining hundreds of glaciers and streams. The ancient
glacier that formed it was far too deep and broad and too little
concentrated to erode one of those narrow canyons, usually so
impressive in sculpture and architecture, but it is all the more
interesting on this account when the grandeur of the ice work
accomplished is recognized. This fiord, more than any other I have
examined, explains the formation of the wonderful system of channels
extending along the coast from Puget Sound to about latitude 59
degrees, for it is a marked portion of the system,--a branch of
Stephens Passage. Its trends and general sculpture are as distinctly
glacial as those of the narrowest fiord, while the largest
tributaries of the great glacier that occupied it are still in
existence. I counted some forty-five altogether, big and little, in
sight from the canoe in sailing up the middle of the fiord. Three
of them, drawing their sources from magnificent groups of snowy
mountains, came down to the level of the sea and formed a glorious
spectacle. The middle one of the three belongs to the first class,
pouring its majestic flood, shattered and crevassed, directly into
the fiord, and crowding about twenty-five square miles of it with
bergs. The next below it also sends off bergs occasionally, though
a narrow strip of glacial detritus separates it from the tidewater.
That forenoon a large mass fell from it, damming its draining stream,
which at length broke the dam, and the resulting flood swept forward
thousands of small bergs across the mud-flat into the fiord. In a
short time all was quiet again; the flood-waters receded, leaving
only a large blue scar on the front of the glacier and stranded bergs
on the moraine flat to tell the tale.

These two glaciers are about equal in size--two miles wide--and their
fronts are only about a mile and a half apart. While I sat sketching
them from a point among the drifting icebergs where I could see far
back into the heart of their distant fountains, two Taku
seal-hunters, father and son, came gliding toward us in an extremely
small canoe. Coming alongside with a goodnatured "Sagh-a-ya," they
inquired who we were, our objects, etc., and gave us information
about the river, their village, and two other large glaciers that
descend nearly to the sea-level a few miles up the river canyon.
Crouching in their little shell of a boat among the great bergs, with
paddle and barbed spear, they formed a picture as arctic and remote
from anything to be found in civilization as ever was sketched for us
by the explorers of the Far North.

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