Unknown - "Human Genome Project, Y Chromosome"

Moliere - "The School for Husbands"

Friedrich de la Motte Fouque - "Sintram and His Companions"

John Greenleaf Whittier - "Tales and Sketches"

Travels in Alaska

J >> John Muir >> Travels in Alaska




The canals, channels, straits, passages, sounds, etc., are
subordinate to the same glacial conditions in their forms, trends,
and extent as those which determined the forms, trends, and
distribution of the land-masses, their basins being the parts of the
pre-glacial margin of the continent, eroded to varying depths below
sea-level, and into which, of course, the ocean waters flowed as the
ice was melted out of them. Had the general glacial denudation been
much less, these ocean ways over which we are sailing would have been
valleys and canyons and lakes; and the islands rounded hills and
ridges, landscapes with undulating features like those found above
sea-level wherever the rocks and glacial conditions are similar. In
general, the island-bound channels are like rivers, not only in
separate reaches as seen from the deck of a vessel, but continuously
so for hundreds of miles in the case of the longest of them. The
tide-currents, the fresh driftwood, the inflowing streams, and the
luxuriant foliage of the out-leaning trees on the shores make this
resemblance all the more complete. The largest islands look like part
of the mainland in any view to be had of them from the ship, but far
the greater number are small, and appreciable as islands, scores of
them being less than a mile long. These the eye easily takes in and
revels in their beauty with ever fresh delight. In their relations
to each other the individual members of a group have evidently been
derived from the same general rock-mass, yet they never seem broken
or abridged in any way as to their contour lines, however abruptly
they may dip their sides. Viewed one by one, they seem detached
beauties, like extracts from a poem, while, from the completeness of
their lines and the way that their trees are arranged, each seems a
finished stanza in itself. Contemplating the arrangement of the trees
on these small islands, a distinct impression is produced of their
having been sorted and harmonized as to size like a well-balanced
bouquet. On some of the smaller tufted islets a group of tapering
spruces is planted in the middle, and two smaller groups that
evidently correspond with each other are planted on the ends at about
equal distances from the central group; or the whole appears as one
group with marked fringing trees that match each other spreading
around the sides, like flowers leaning outward against the rim of
a vase. These harmonious tree relations are so constant that they
evidently are the result of design, as much so as the arrangement
of the feathers of birds or the scales of fishes.

Thus perfectly beautiful are these blessed evergreen islands, and
their beauty is the beauty of youth, for though the freshness of
their verdure must be ascribed to the bland moisture with which
they are bathed from warm ocean-currents, the very existence of the
islands, their features, finish, and peculiar distribution, are all
immediately referable to ice-action during the great glacial winter
just now drawing to a close.

We arrived at Wrangell July 14, and after a short stop of a few hours
went on to Sitka and returned on the 20th to Wrangell, the most
inhospitable place at first sight I had ever seen. The little steamer
that had been my home in the wonderful trip through the archipelago,
after taking the mail, departed on her return to Portland, and as I
watched her gliding out of sight in the dismal blurring rain, I felt
strangely lonesome. The friend that had accompanied me thus far
now left for his home in San Francisco, with two other interesting
travelers who had made the trip for health and scenery, while
my fellow passengers, the missionaries, went direct to the
Presbyterian home in the old fort. There was nothing like a tavern
or lodging-house in the village, nor could I find any place in the
stumpy, rocky, boggy ground about it that looked dry enough to camp
on until I could find a way into the wilderness to begin my studies.
Every place within a mile or two of the town seemed strangely
shelterless and inhospitable, for all the trees had long ago been
felled for building-timber and firewood. At the worst, I thought, I
could build a bark hut on a hill back of the village, where something
like a forest loomed dimly through the draggled clouds.

I had already seen some of the high glacier-bearing mountains in
distant views from the steamer, and was anxious to reach them. A few
whites of the village, with whom I entered into conversation, warned
me that the Indians were a bad lot, not to be trusted, that the woods
were well-nigh impenetrable, and that I could go nowhere without a
canoe. On the other hand, these natural difficulties made the grand
wild country all the more attractive, and I determined to get into
the heart of it somehow or other with a bag of hardtack, trusting to
my usual good luck. My present difficulty was in finding a first base
camp. My only hope was on the hill. When I was strolling past the old
fort I happened to meet one of the missionaries, who kindly asked me
where I was going to take up my quarters.

"I don't know," I replied. "I have not been able to find quarters of
any sort. The top of that little hill over there seems the only
possible place."

He then explained that every room in the mission house was full,
but he thought I might obtain leave to spread my blanket in a
carpenter-shop belonging to the mission. Thanking him, I ran down to
the sloppy wharf for my little bundle of baggage, laid it on the shop
floor, and felt glad and snug among the dry, sweet-smelling shavings.

The carpenter was at work on a new Presbyterian mission building, and
when he came in I explained that Dr. Jackson [Dr. Sheldon Jackson,
1834-1909, became Superintendent of Presbyterian Missions in Alaska
in 1877, and United States General Agent of Education in 1885. [W. F.
B.]] had suggested that I might be allowed to sleep on the floor, and
after I assured him that I would not touch his tools or be in his
way, he goodnaturedly gave me the freedom of the shop and also of his
small private side room where I would find a wash-basin.

I was here only one night, however, for Mr. Vanderbilt, a merchant,
who with his family occupied the best house in the fort, hearing that
one of the late arrivals, whose business none seemed to know, was
compelled to sleep in the carpenter-shop, paid me a good-Samaritan
visit and after a few explanatory words on my glacier and forest
studies, with fine hospitality offered me a room and a place at his
table. Here I found a real home, with freedom to go on all sorts of
excursions as opportunity offered. Annie Vanderbilt, a little doctor
of divinity two years old, ruled the household with love sermons and
kept it warm.

Mr. Vanderbilt introduced me to prospectors and traders and some of
the most influential of the Indians. I visited the mission school and
the home for Indian girls kept by Mrs. MacFarland, and made short
excursions to the nearby forests and streams, and studied the rate of
growth of the different species of trees and their age, counting the
annual rings on stumps in the large clearings made by the military
when the fort was occupied, causing wondering speculation among the
Wrangell folk, as was reported by Mr. Vanderbilt.

"What can the fellow be up to?" they inquired. "He seems to spend
most of his time among stumps and weeds. I saw him the other day on
his knees, looking at a stump as if he expected to find gold in it.
He seems to have no serious object whatever."

One night when a heavy rainstorm was blowing I unwittingly caused
a lot of wondering excitement among the whites as well as the
superstitious Indians. Being anxious to see how the Alaska trees
behave in storms and hear the songs they sing, I stole quietly away
through the gray drenching blast to the hill back of the town,
without being observed. Night was falling when I set out and it was
pitch dark when I reached the top. The glad, rejoicing storm in
glorious voice was singing through the woods, noble compensation for
mere body discomfort. But I wanted a fire, a big one, to see as well
as hear how the storm and trees were behaving. After long, patient
groping I found a little dry punk in a hollow trunk and carefully
stored it beside my matchbox and an inch or two of candle in an
inside pocket that the rain had not yet reached; then, wiping some
dead twigs and whittling them into thin shavings, stored them with
the punk. I then made a little conical bark hut about a foot high,
and, carefully leaning over it and sheltering it as much as possible
from the driving rain, I wiped and stored a lot of dead twigs,
lighted the candle, and set it in the hut, carefully added pinches of
punk and shavings, and at length got a little blaze, by the light of
which I gradually added larger shavings, then twigs all set on end
astride the inner flame, making the little hut higher and wider. Soon
I had light enough to enable me to select the best dead branches and
large sections of bark, which were set on end, gradually increasing
the height and corresponding light of the hut fire. A considerable
area was thus well lighted, from which I gathered abundance of wood,
and kept adding to the fire until it had a strong, hot heart and sent
up a pillar of flame thirty or forty feet high, illuminating a wide
circle in spite of the rain, and casting a red glare into the flying
clouds. Of all the thousands of camp-fires I have elsewhere built
none was just like this one, rejoicing in triumphant strength and
beauty in the heart of the rain-laden gale. It was wonderful,--the
illumined rain and clouds mingled together and the trees glowing
against the jet background, the colors of the mossy, lichened trunks
with sparkling streams pouring down the furrows of the bark, and the
gray-bearded old patriarchs bowing low and chanting in passionate
worship!

My fire was in all its glory about midnight, and, having made a bark
shed to shelter me from the rain and partially dry my clothing, I had
nothing to do but look and listen and join the trees in their hymns
and prayers.

Neither the great white heart of the fire nor the quivering
enthusiastic flames shooting aloft like auroral lances could be seen
from the village on account of the trees in front of it and its being
back a little way over the brow of the hill; but the light in the
clouds made a great show, a portentous sign in the stormy heavens
unlike anything ever before seen or heard of in Wrangell. Some
wakeful Indians, happening to see it about midnight, in great
alarm aroused the Collector of Customs and begged him to go to the
missionaries and get them to pray away the frightful omen, and
inquired anxiously whether white men had ever seen anything like that
sky-fire, which instead of being quenched by the rain was burning
brighter and brighter. The Collector said he had heard of such
strange fires, and this one he thought might perhaps be what the
white man called a "volcano, or an ignis fatuus." When Mr. Young was
called from his bed to pray, he, too, confoundedly astonished and at
a loss for any sort of explanation, confessed that he had never seen
anything like it in the sky or anywhere else in such cold wet
weather, but that it was probably some sort of spontaneous combustion
"that the white man called St. Elmo's fire, or Will-of-the-wisp."
These explanations, though not convincingly clear, perhaps served
to veil their own astonishment and in some measure to diminish the
superstitious fears of the natives; but from what I heard, the few
whites who happened to see the strange light wondered about as wildly
as the Indians.

I have enjoyed thousands of camp-fires in all sorts of weather and
places, warm-hearted, short-flamed, friendly little beauties glowing
in the dark on open spots in high Sierra gardens, daisies and lilies
circled about them, gazing like enchanted children; and large fires
in silver fir forests, with spires of flame towering like the trees
about them, and sending up multitudes of starry sparks to enrich the
sky; and still greater fires on the mountains in winter, changing
camp climate to summer, and making the frosty snow look like beds of
white flowers, and oftentimes mingling their swarms of swift-flying
sparks with falling snow-crystals when the clouds were in bloom. But
this Wrangell camp-fire, my first in Alaska, I shall always remember
for its triumphant storm-defying grandeur, and the wondrous beauty of
the psalm-singing, lichen-painted trees which it brought to light.



Chapter III

Wrangell Island and Alaska Summers


Wrangell Island is about fourteen miles long, separated from the
mainland by a narrow channel or fiord, and trending in the direction
of the flow of the ancient ice-sheet. Like all its neighbors, it is
densely forested down to the water's edge with trees that never seem
to have suffered from thirst or fire or the axe of the lumberman
in all their long century lives. Beneath soft, shady clouds, with
abundance of rain, they flourish in wonderful strength and beauty to
a good old age, while the many warm days, half cloudy, half clear,
and the little groups of pure sun-days enable them to ripen their
cones and send myriads of seeds flying every autumn to insure the
permanence of the forests and feed the multitude of animals.

The Wrangell village was a rough place. No mining hamlet in the
placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw,
approached it in picturesque, devil-may-care abandon. It was a
lawless draggle of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines,
wrangling around the boggy shore of the island for a mile or so in
the general form of the letter S, without the slightest subordination
to the points of the compass or to building laws of any kind. Stumps
and logs, like precious monuments, adorned its two streets, each
stump and log, on account of the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted
with grass and bushes, but muddy on the sides below the limit of
the bog-line. The ground in general was an oozy, mossy bog on a
foundation of jagged rocks, full of concealed pit-holes. These
picturesque rock, bog, and stump obstructions, however, were not so
very much in the way, for there were no wagons or carriages there.
There was not a horse on the island. The domestic animals were
represented by chickens, a lonely cow, a few sheep, and hogs of a
breed well calculated to deepen and complicate the mud of the streets.

Most of the permanent residents of Wrangell were engaged in trade.
Some little trade was carried on in fish and furs, but most of the
quickening business of the place was derived from the Cassiar
gold-mines, some two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles inland,
by way of the Stickeen River and Dease Lake. Two stern-wheel steamers
plied on the river between Wrangell and Telegraph Creek at the head
of navigation, a hundred and fifty miles from Wrangell, carrying
freight and passengers and connecting with pack-trains for the mines.
These placer mines, on tributaries of the Mackenzie River, were
discovered in the year 1874. About eighteen hundred miners and
prospectors were said to have passed through Wrangell that season of
1879, about half of them being Chinamen. Nearly a third of this whole
number set out from here in the month of February, traveling on the
Stickeen River, which usually remains safely frozen until toward the
end of April. The main body of the miners, however, went up on the
steamers in May and June. On account of the severe winters they were
all compelled to leave the mines the end of September. Perhaps about
two thirds of them passed the winter in Portland and Victoria and the
towns of Puget Sound. The rest remained here in Wrangell, dozing away
the long winter as best they could.

Indians, mostly of the Stickeen tribe, occupied the two ends of
the town, the whites, of whom there were about forty or fifty, the
middle portion; but there was no determinate line of demarcation, the
dwellings of the Indians being mostly as large and solidly built of
logs and planks as those of the whites. Some of them were adorned
with tall totem poles.

The fort was a quadrangular stockade with a dozen block and frame
buildings located upon rising ground just back of the business part
of the town. It was built by our Government shortly after the
purchase of Alaska, and was abandoned in 1872, reoccupied by the
military in 1875, and finally abandoned and sold to private parties
in 1877. In the fort and about it there were a few good, clean homes,
which shone all the more brightly in their sombre surroundings. The
ground occupied by the fort, by being carefully leveled and drained,
was dry, though formerly a portion of the general swamp, showing how
easily the whole town could have been improved. But in spite of
disorder and squalor, shaded with clouds, washed and wiped by rain
and sea winds, it was triumphantly salubrious through all the
seasons. And though the houses seemed to rest uneasily among the miry
rocks and stumps, squirming at all angles as if they had been tossed
and twisted by earthquake shocks, and showing but little more
relation to one another than may be observed among moraine boulders,
Wrangell was a tranquil place. I never heard a noisy brawl in the
streets, or a clap of thunder, and the waves seldom spoke much above
a whisper along the beach. In summer the rain comes straight down,
steamy and tepid. The clouds are usually united, filling the sky, not
racing along in threatening ranks suggesting energy of an overbearing
destructive kind, but forming a bland, mild, laving bath. The
cloudless days are calm, pearl-gray, and brooding in tone, inclining
to rest and peace; the islands seem to drowse and float on the glassy
water, and in the woods scarce a leaf stirs.

The very brightest of Wrangell days are not what Californians
would call bright. The tempered sunshine sifting through the moist
atmosphere makes no dazzling glare, and the town, like the landscape,
rests beneath a hazy, hushing, Indian-summerish spell. On the longest
days the sun rises about three o'clock, but it is daybreak at
midnight. The cocks crowed when they woke, without reference to the
dawn, for it is never quite dark; there were only a few full-grown
roosters in Wrangell, half a dozen or so, to awaken the town and give
it a civilized character. After sunrise a few languid smoke-columns
might be seen, telling the first stir of the people. Soon an Indian
or two might be noticed here and there at the doors of their barnlike
cabins, and a merchant getting ready for trade; but scarcely a sound
was heard, only a dull, muffled stir gradually deepening. There were
only two white babies in the town, so far as I saw, and as for Indian
babies, they woke and ate and made no crying sound. Later you might
hear the croaking of ravens, and the strokes of an axe on firewood.
About eight or nine o'clock the town was awake. Indians, mostly
women and children, began to gather on the front platforms of the
half-dozen stores, sitting carelessly on their blankets, every other
face hideously blackened, a naked circle around the eyes, and perhaps
a spot on the cheek-bone and the nose where the smut has been rubbed
off. Some of the little children were also blackened, and none were
over-clad, their light and airy costume consisting of a calico shirt
reaching only to the waist. Boys eight or ten years old sometimes
had an additional garment,--a pair of castaway miner's overalls wide
enough and ragged enough for extravagant ventilation. The larger
girls and young women were arrayed in showy calico, and wore jaunty
straw hats, gorgeously ribboned, and glowed among the blackened and
blanketed old crones like scarlet tanagers in a flock of blackbirds.
The women, seated on the steps and platform of the traders' shops,
could hardly be called loafers, for they had berries to sell,
basketfuls of huckleberries, large yellow salmon-berries, and bog
raspberries that looked wondrous fresh and clean amid the surrounding
squalor. After patiently waiting for purchasers until hungry, they
ate what they could not sell, and went away to gather more.

Yonder you see a canoe gliding out from the shore, containing perhaps
a man, a woman, and a child or two, all paddling together in natural,
easy rhythm. They are going to catch a fish, no difficult matter, and
when this is done their day's work is done. Another party puts out to
capture bits of driftwood, for it is easier to procure fuel in this
way than to drag it down from the outskirts of the woods through
rocks and bushes. As the day advances, a fleet of canoes may be seen
along the shore, all fashioned alike, high and long beak-like prows
and sterns, with lines as fine as those of the breast of a duck. What
the mustang is to the Mexican vaquero, the canoe is to these coast
Indians. They skim along the shores to fish and hunt and trade, or
merely to visit their neighbors, for they are sociable, and have
family pride remarkably well developed, meeting often to inquire
after each other's health, attend potlatches and dances, and gossip
concerning coming marriages, births, deaths, etc. Others seem to sail
for the pure pleasure of the thing, their canoes decorated with
handfuls of the tall purple epilobium.

Yonder goes a whole family, grandparents and all, making a direct
course for some favorite stream and camp-ground. They are going to
gather berries, as the baskets tell. Never before in all my travels,
north or south, had I found so lavish an abundance of berries as
here. The woods and meadows are full of them, both on the lowlands
and mountains--huckleberries of many species, salmon-berries,
blackberries, raspberries, with service-berries on dry open places,
and cranberries in the bogs, sufficient for every bird, beast, and
human being in the territory and thousands of tons to spare. The
huckleberries are especially abundant. A species that grows well up
on the mountains is the best and largest, a half-inch and more in
diameter and delicious in flavor. These grow on bushes three or four
inches to a foot high. The berries of the commonest species are
smaller and grow almost everywhere on the low grounds on bushes from
three to six or seven feet high. This is the species on which the
Indians depend most for food, gathering them in large quantities,
beating them into a paste, pressing the paste into cakes about an
inch thick, and drying them over a slow fire to enrich their winter
stores. Salmon-berries and service-berries are preserved in the same
way.

A little excursion to one of the best huckleberry fields adjacent to
Wrangell, under the direction of the Collector of Customs, to which I
was invited, I greatly enjoyed. There were nine Indians in the party,
mostly women and children going to gather huckleberries. As soon
as we had arrived at the chosen campground on the bank of a trout
stream, all ran into the bushes and began eating berries before
anything in the way of camp-making was done, laughing and chattering
in natural animal enjoyment. The Collector went up the stream to
examine a meadow at its head with reference to the quantity of hay it
might yield for his cow, fishing by the way. All the Indians except
the two eldest boys who joined the Collector, remained among the
berries.

The fishermen had rather poor luck, owing, they said, to the sunny
brightness of the day, a complaint seldom heard in this climate. They
got good exercise, however, jumping from boulder to boulder in the
brawling stream, running along slippery logs and through the bushes
that fringe the bank, casting here and there into swirling pools at
the foot of cascades, imitating the tempting little skips and whirls
of flies so well known to fishing parsons, but perhaps still better
known to Indian boys. At the lake-basin the Collector, after he had
surveyed his hay-meadow, went around it to the inlet of the lake with
his brown pair of attendants to try their luck, while I botanized in
the delightful flora which called to mind the cool sphagnum and carex
bogs of Wisconsin and Canada. Here I found many of my old favorites
the heathworts--kalmia, pyrola, chiogenes, huckleberry, cranberry,
etc. On the margin of the meadow darling linnaea was in its glory;
purple panicled grasses in full flower reached over my head, and some
of the carices and ferns were almost as tall. Here, too, on the edge
of the woods I found the wild apple tree, the first I had seen in
Alaska. The Indians gather the fruit, small and sour as it is, to
flavor their fat salmon. I never saw a richer bog and meadow growth
anywhere. The principal forest-trees are hemlock, spruce, and Nootka
cypress, with a few pines (P. contorta) on the margin of the meadow,
some of them nearly a hundred feet high, draped with gray usnea, the
bark also gray with scale lichens.

We met all the berry-pickers at the lake, excepting only a small girl
and the camp-keeper. In their bright colors they made a lively
picture among the quivering bushes, keeping up a low pleasant
chanting as if the day and the place and the berries were according
to their own hearts. The children carried small baskets, holding two
or three quarts; the women two large ones swung over their shoulders.
In the afternoon, when the baskets were full, all started back to the
camp-ground, where the canoe was left. We parted at the lake, I
choosing to follow quietly the stream through the woods. I was the
first to arrive at camp. The rest of the party came in shortly
afterwards, singing and humming like heavy-laden bees. It was
interesting to note how kindly they held out handfuls of the best
berries to the little girl, who welcomed them all in succession with
smiles and merry words that I did not understand. But there was no
mistaking the kindliness and serene good nature.

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