40 years ago John Muir wrote to a friend, I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer. all the morbidness that has been hooded at me have not dimmed my glacial eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at nature's loveliness. How gloriously he fulfilled the promise of his early manhood. Fame, all unbidden, wore a path to his door, but he always remained a modest, unspoiled mountaineer. Kindred spirits, the greatest of his time, sought him out, even in his mountain cabin, and felt honoured by his friendship. Ralph Waldo Emerson urged him to visit Concord and rest awhile from the strain of his solitary studies in the Sierra Nevada, but nothing could dislodge him from the glacial problems of the High Sierra, with passionate interest he kept at his task. The grandeur of these forces and their glorious results he once wrote, overpower me and inhabit to my whole being. Waking or sleeping I have no rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow lines of cleavage, or struggle with the difficulties of some extraordinary rock form. There is a note of Pathos, the echo of an unfulfilled hope, in the record of his later visit to Concord. It was seventeen years after our parting on Wawona Ridge that I stood beside his, Emerson's, grave, under a pine-tree on the hill, above Sleepy Hollow. He had gone to higher Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in friendly recognition. And now John Muir has followed his friend of other days to the higher Sierras. His earthly remains lie among trees planted by his own hand. To the pine-tree of Sleepy Hollow answers a guardian sequoia in the sunny Alhambra Valley. In eighteen seventy-nine John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest of the tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon his book of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen departure, John Muir expended the last months of his life. It was begun soon after his return from Africa in nineteen-twelve. His eager leadership of the ill-fated campaign to save his beloved Hetch Hetchie Valley from commercial destruction seriously interrupted his labours. Illness also interposed some checks as he worked with characteristic care and thoroughness through the great mass of Alaska notes that had accumulated under his hands for more than thirty years. The events recorded in this volume end in the middle of the trip of eighteen ninety. Muir's notes on the remainder of the journey have not been found, and it is idle to speculate how he would have concluded the volume if he had lived to complete it. But no one will read the fascinating description of the northern lights without feeling a poetical appropriateness in the fact that his last work ends with a portrayal of the auroras. One of those phenomena which elsewhere he described as the most glorious of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. Muir's manuscripts bear on every page impressive evidence of the pains he took in his literary work and the lofty standard he set himself in his scientific studies. The counterfeiting of a fact or of an experience was a thing unthinkable in connection with John Muir. He was tireless in pursuing the meaning of it, physiological fact, and his extraordinary physical endurance usually enabled him to trail it to its last hiding place. Often when telling the tale of his adventures in Alaska his eyes would kindle with youthful enthusiasm, and he would live over again the red-blooded years that yielded him, shapeless harvests of revealed glory. For a number of months just prior to his death he had the friendly assistance of Mrs. Marion Randall Parsons. Her familiarity with the manuscript and with Mr. Muir's expressed and penciled intentions of revision and arrangement made her the logical person to prepare it in final form for publication. It was a task to which she had brought devotion as well as ability. The labour involved was the greater in order that the finished work might exhibit the last touches of Muir's master hand, and yet contain nothing that did not flow from his pen. All readers of his book will feel grateful for her labour of love. I add these preparatory lines to the work of my departed friend with pensive misgiving, knowing that he would have deprecated any discharge of musketry over his grave. His daughters Mrs. Thomas Ria Hannah and Mrs. Buell Alvin Funk have honoured me with the request to transmit the manuscript for publication, and later to consider with them what salvage may be made from among their father's unpublished writings. They also wish me to express their grateful acknowledgments to Houghton Mifflin Company with whom John Muir has always maintained close and friendly relations. William Frederick Bade, Berkeley, California, May 1915, end of preface. Chapter 1 of Travels in Alaska. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 1. Puget Sound and British Columbia. After eleven years of study and exploration in the Sierra Nevada of California and the mountain ranges of the Great Basin, studying in particular their glaciers, forests, and wildlife above all their ancient glaciers and the influence they exerted in sculpturing the rocks over which they passed with tremendous pressure, making new landscapes, scenery, and beauty which so mysteriously influenced every human being, and to some extent all life. I was anxious to gain some knowledge of the regions to the northward about Puget Sound and Alaska. With this grand object in view, I left San Francisco in May 1879 on the steamer Dakota without any definite plan, as with the exception of a few of the Oregon Peaks and their forests all the wild north was new to me. To the mountaineer, a sea voyage is a grand, inspiring, restful change. For forests and plains with their forests and fruits we have new scenery, new life of every sort, water hills and dales in eternal visible motion for rock waves, types of permanence. It was curious to note how suddenly the eager countenances of the passengers were darkened as soon as the good ship passed through the Golden Gate and began to heave on the waves of the open ocean. The crowded deck was speedily deserted on account of sea sickness. It seemed strange that nearly everyone afflicted should be more or less ashamed. Next morning a strong wind was blowing, and the sea was gray and white, with long breaking waves across which the Dakota was racing half buried in spray. Very few of the passengers were on deck to enjoy the wild scenery. Every wave seemed to be making enthusiastic eager haste to the shore, with long iris tresses streaming from its tops. Some of its outer fringes borne away and scud to refresh the wind, all the rolling, pitching, flying water exulting in the beauty of rainbow light. Goals and albatrosses, strong, glad life in the midst of the stormy beauty, skimmed the waves against the wind, seemingly without effort, oftentimes flying nearly a mile without a single wingbeat, gracefully swaying from side to side and tracing the curves of the briny water hills with the finest precision, now and then just grazing the highest. And yonder, glistening amid the iris t spray, is still more striking revelation of warm life in the so-called howling waste. A half dozen whales, their broad backs like glaciated bosses of granite heaving aloft in near view, spouting lustily, drawing a long breath and plunging down home in colossal health and comfort. A merry school of porpoises, a square mile of them, suddenly appear, tossing themselves into the air in abounding strength and hilarity, adding foam to the waves and making all the wilderness wilder. One cannot but feel sympathy with and be proud of these brave neighbors, fellow citizens in the commonwealth of the world, making a living like the rest of us. Our good ship also seemed like a thing of life, its great iron heart beating on through calm and storm, a truly noble spectacle. But think of the hearts of these whales beating warm against the sea day and night, through dark and light, on and on for centuries, how the red blood must rush and gurgle in and out, bucketfuls, barrelfuls at a beat. The cloud colors of one of the four sunsets enjoyed on the voyage were remarkably pure and rich in tone. There was a well-defined range of cumuli a few degrees above the horizon and a massive dark gray rain cloud above it, from which depended long, bent fringes overlapping the lower cumuli and partially veiling them. And from time to time sunbeams poured through narrow openings and painted the exposed bosses and fringes in ripe yellow tones, which, with the reflections on the water, made magnificent pictures. The scenery of the ocean, however sublime in vast expanse, seems far less beautiful to us dry-shot animals than that of the land seen only in comparatively small patches. But when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. The California coasthills and cliffs look bare and uninviting as seen from the ship, the magnificent forests keeping well back out of sight beyond the reach of the sea winds. Those of Oregon and Washington are in some places clad with conifers nearly down to the shore. Even the little detached islets, so marked a feature to the northward, are mostly tree-crowned. Up through the straits of Juan de Fuca, the forests, sheltered from the ocean gales and favored with abundant rains, flourish in marvelous luxuriance on the glacier-sculptured mountains of the Olympic Range. We arrived in Esquimalt Harbor, three miles from Victoria, on the evening of the fourth day, and drove to the town through a magnificent forest of Douglas spruce, with an undergrowth in open spots of oak, madrone, hazel, dogwood, alder, spirea, willow, and wild rose, and around many an up-swelling monton rock, freshly glaciated and furred with yellow mosses and lichens. Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, was in 1879 a small, old-fashioned English town on the south end of Vancouver Island. It was said to contain about 6,000 inhabitants. The government buildings and some of the business blocks were noticeable, but the attention of the traveler was more worthily attracted to the neat cottage homes found here, empowered in the freshest and floweriest climbing roses and honeysuckles conceivable. Californians may well be proud of their home roses loading sunny verandas, climbing to the tops of the roofs, and falling over the gables in white and red cascades. But here, with so much bland fog and dew and gentle laving rain, a still finer development of some of the commonest garden plants is reached. English honeysuckle seems to have found here a most congenial home. Still more beautiful were the wild roses, blooming in wonderful luxuriance along the woodland paths, with corroyas two and three inches wide. This rose and three species of spirea fairly filled the air with fragrance after showers, and how brightly then did the red dogwood berries shine amid the green leaves beneath trees 250 feet high. Strange to say, all of this exuberant forest and flower vegetation was growing upon fresh moraine material scarcely at all moved or in any way modified by post-glacial agents. In the town gardens and orchards, peaches and apples fell upon glacier-polished rocks, and the streets were graded in moraine gravel, and I observed scratched and grooved rock bosses as unweathered and telling as those of the high Sierra of California 8,000 feet or more above sea level. The Victoria Harbor is plainly glacial in origin, eroded from the solid, and the rock islets that rise here and there in it are unchanged to any appreciable extent by all the waves that have broken over them since first they came to light toward the close of the glacial period. The shores also of the harbor are strikingly grooved and scratched and in every way as glacial in all their characteristics as those of newborn glacial lakes. That the domain of the sea is being slowly extended over the land by incessant wave action is well known, but in this freshly glaciated region the shores have been so short a time exposed to wave action that they are scarcely at all wasted. The extension of the sea affected by its own action in post-glacial times is probably less than the millionth part of that affected by glacial action during the last glacier period. The direction of the flow of the ice sheet to which all the main features of this wonderful region are due was in general southward. From this quiet little English town I made many short excursions, up the coast to Nanaimo, to Bird Inlet, now the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, to Puget Sound, up Fraser River to do Westminster and Yale at the head of the navigation, charmed everywhere with the wild newborn scenery. The most interesting of these and the most difficult to leave was the Puget Sound region, famous the world over for the wonderful forests of gigantic trees about its shores. It is an arm and many fingered hand of the sea reaching southward from the Straits of Wanda Fuca about a hundred miles into the heart of one of the noblest forests on the face of the globe. All its scenery is wonderful, broad river-like reaches sweeping in beautiful curves around bays and capes and jutting promontaries. Opening here and there into smooth blue lake-like expanses dotted with islands and feathered with tall spirey evergreens, their beauty doubled on the bright mirror water. Sailing from Victoria, the Olympic mountains are seeing right ahead. Rising in bold relief against the sky with jagged crests and peaks, from six to eight thousand feet high, small residual glaciers and ragged snowfields beneath them in wide amphitheaters opening down through the forest filled valleys. These valleys mark the courses of the Olympic glaciers at the period of their greatest extension when they poured their tribute into that portion of the great northern ice sheet that overswept Vancouver Island and filled the strait between it and the mainland. On the way up to Olympia, then a hopeful little town situated at the end of one of the longest fingers of the sound, one is often reminded of Lake Tahoe. The scenery of the wildest expanses is so lake-like in the clearness and stillness of the water and the luxuriance of the surrounding forests. Doubling cape after cape, passing uncounted islands, new combinations break on the view in endless variety, sufficient to satisfy the lover of wild beauty through a whole life. When the clouds come down, blotting out everything, one feels as if it's sea. Again lifting a little, some islet may be seen standing alone with the tops of its trees dipping out of sight in gray misty fringes. Then the ranks of spruce and cedar bounding the water's edge come to view, and when at length the whole sky is clear, the colossal cone of Mount Rainier may be seen in spotless white, looking down over the dark woods from a distance of 50 or 60 miles. But so high and massive and so sharply outlined, it seems to be just back of a strip of woods only a few miles wide. Mount Rainier, or Tahoma, the Indian name, is the noblest of the volcanic cones extending from Lassen, Butte, and Mount Shasta along the Cascade Range to Mount Baker. One of the most telling views of it hereabouts is obtained near Tacoma. From a bluff back of the town, it was revealed in all its glory, laden with glaciers and snow down to the forested foothills around its finely curved base. Up to this time, 1879, it had been ascended but once. From observations made on the summit with a single aneroid barometer, it was estimated to be about 14,500 feet high. Mount Baker, to the northward, is about 10,700 feet high, a noble mountain. So also are Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Hood. The latter, overlooking the town of Portland, is perhaps the best known. Rainier, about the same height as Shasta, surpasses them in massive icy grandeur. The most majestic solitary mountain I had ever yet beheld. How eagerly I gazed and longed to climb it, and study its history, only the mountaineer may know, but I was compelled to turn away and bide my time. The species forming the bulk of the woods here is the Douglas Spruce, Surosuga, Douglasi, one of the greatest of the western giants. A specimen that I measured near Olympia was about 300 feet in height and 12 feet in diameter, four feet above the ground. It is a widely distributed tree, extending northward through British Columbia, southward through Oregon and California, and eastward to the Rocky Mountains. The timber is used for shipbuilding, spars, piles, and the framework of houses, bridges, etc. In the California lumber markets it is known as Oregon Pine. In Utah, where it is common on the Wasatch Mountains, it is called Red Pine. In California, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, it forms, in company with the Yellow Pine, Sugar Pine, and Incense Cedar, a pretty well-defined belt at a height of from three to six thousand feet above the sea. But it is only in Oregon and Washington, especially in this Puget Sound region, that it reaches its very grandest development, tall, straight, and strong, growing down close to tide water. All the towns of the Sound had a hopeful, thrifty aspect. Port Townsend, picturesquely located on a grassy bluff, was the port of clearance for vessel sailing to foreign parts. Seattle was famed for its coal mines, and claimed to be the coming town of the North Pacific Coast. So also did its rival, Tacoma, which had been selected as a terminus of the much talked of Northern Pacific Railway. Several coal veins of astonishing thickness were discovered the winter before on the Carbon River, to the east of Tacoma, one of them said to be no less than 21 feet, another 20 feet, another 14, with many smaller ones, the aggregate thickness of the veins being upwards of 100 feet. Large deposits of magnetic iron ore and brown hematite, together with limestone, had been discovered in advantageous proximity to the coal, making a bright outlook for the Sound region in general in connection with its railroad hopes, its unrivaled timber resources, and its far-reaching geographical relations. After spending a few weeks in the Puget Sound, with a friend from San Francisco, we engaged passage on the little male steamer, California, at Portland, Oregon, for Alaska. The sail down the broad lower reaches of the Columbia and across its foamy bar, around Cape Flattery, and up the Wanda Fuca Strait, was delightful, and after calling again at Victoria and Port Townsend, we got fairly off for icy Alaska. End of Chapter 1. Recording by L. Lambert Lawson, Escondido, California. Chapter 2. Alexander Archipelago and the Home I Found in Alaska. To the lover of pure wildness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world. No excursion that I know of may be made into any other American wilderness, where so marvelous an abundance of noble newborn scenery is so charmingly brought to view as on the trip through the Alexander Archipelago to Fort Rangel and Sitka. Gazing from the deck of the steamer one is born smoothly over calm blue waters, through the midst of countless forest-clad islands, the ordinary discomforts of a sea voyage are not felt for nearly all the whole long way is on inland waters that are about as waveless as rivers and lakes. So numerous are the islands that they seem to have been sown broadcast, long tapering vistas between the largest of them open in every direction. Day after day in the fine weather we enjoyed, we seemed to float in true fairyland, each succeeding view seeming more and more beautiful, the one we chance to have before us the most surprisingly beautiful of all. Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond description. To sketch picturesque bits definitely bounded is comparatively easy, a lake in the woods, a glacier meadow, or a cascade in its del, or even a grand master view of lakes beheld from some commanding outlook after climbing from height to height above the forest. These may be attempted, and more or less telling pictures made of them, but in these coast landscapes there is such indefinite on leading expansiveness, such a multitude of features without apparent redundance, their lines graduating delicately into one another in endless succession, while the whole is so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all penwork seems hopelessly unavailing. Tracing shiny ways through fjord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains, and far azure headlands, it seems as if shortly we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed. Some idea of the wealth of this scenery may be gained from the fact that the coastline of Alaska is about 26,000 miles long, more than twice as long as all the rest of the United States. The islands of the Alexander archipelago, with the straits, channels, canals, sounds, passages, and fjords, form an intricate web of land and water embroidery 60 or 70 miles wide. Fringing the lofty icy chain of coast mountains from Puget Sound to Cook Inlet and the infinite variety, the general pattern is harmonious throughout its whole extent of nearly a thousand miles. Here you glide into a narrow channel hemmed in by mountain walls, forested down to the water's edge, where there is no distant view, and your attention is concentrated on the objects close about you. The crowded spires of the spruces and hemlocks rising higher and higher on the steep green slopes, stripes of paler green where winter avalanches have cleared away the trees, allowing grasses and willows to spring up, zigzags of cascades appearing and disappearing among the bushes and trees, short steep glens with brawling streams hidden beneath alder and dogwood, seen only where they emerge on the brown algae of the shore and retreating hollows, with lingering snowbags marking the fountains of ancient glaciers. The steamer is often so near the shore that you may distinctly see the cones clustered on the tops of the trees and the ferns and bushes at their feet. But new scenes are brought to view with magical rapidity, rounding some bossy cape the eyes called away into far-reaching vistas, bounded on either hand by headlands in charming array, one dipping gracefully beyond another and growing fainter and more ethereal in the distance. The tranquil channel stretching river-like between may be stirred here and there by the silvery plashing of up-springing salmon, or by flocks of white gulls floating like waterlilies among the sun's baggles, while mellow, tempered sunshine is streaming over all, blending sky, land, and water in pale misty blue. Then, while you are dreamingly gazing into the depths of this leafy ocean lane, the little steamer, seeming hardly larger than a duck, turning into some passage not visible until the moment of entering it, glides into a wide expanse, a sound filled with islands, sprinkled and clustered in forms and compositions such as nature alone can invent. Some of them so small the trees growing on them seem like single handfuls culled from the neighbouring woods and sent in the water to keep them fresh, while here and there at wide intervals you may notice bare rocks just above the water, mere dots punctuating grand, out-swelling sentences of islands. The variety we find, both as to the contours and the collocation of the islands, is due chiefly to differences in the structure and composition of their rocks, and the unequal glacial denudation different portions of the coast were subject to. This influence must have been especially heavy toward the end of the glacial period, when the main ice sheet began to break up into separate glaciers. Moreover, the mountains of the larger islands nourished local glaciers, some of them of considerable size, which sculptured their summits and sides, forming in some cases wide cirques with canyons or valleys leading down from them into the channels and sounds. These causes have produced much of the bewildering variety of which nature is so fond, but nonetheless will the studious observer see the underlying harmony, the general trend of the islands in the direction of the flow of the main ice mantle from the mountains of the coast range, more or less varied by subordinate foothill ridges and mountains. Furthermore, all the islands, great and small, as well as the headlands and promontories of the mainland, are seen to have a rounded, over-rubbed appearance produced by the over-sweeping ice flood during the period of greatest glacial abundance. The canals, channels, straits, passages, sounds, etc., are subordinate to the same glacial conditions in their forms, trends, and extent as those which determine the forms, trends, and distribution of the land masses, their basins being the parts of the preglacial 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 outleaning 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. Feud 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 hole 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 Wrangel July 14, and after a short stop of a few hours went on to Sitka, and returned on the 20th to Wrangel, 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, groggy, 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 seems 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 and 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 hard tack, 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 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 good-naturedly 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. McFarland 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 and the large clearings made by the military when the fort was occupied, causing wondering speculation among the wrangle 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 and 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 and 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 a 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.  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 campfires I have elsewhere built, none was just like this one. Rejoicing in triumphant strength and beauty in the heart of a rain-laden gale, it was wonderful. The background, the colors, the illumined rain and clouds mingled together, and the trees glowing against the jet background, the colors of the mossy, lichen 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. Needed 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 tattleway 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 wrangle. 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 men call a volcano, or an igneous fatuous. When Mr. Young was calm from his bed to pray, he too confoundedly astonished, and at a loss of 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 men call St. Elmo's Fire, or Will of the Wisp. These explanations, though not convincingly clear, perhaps serve 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 campfires 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 fur 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 wrangle campfire, 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 had brought to light. End of Chapter 2. Recording by John Denison South Portland, Maine Chapter 3 of Travels in Alaska This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Denison. Travels in Alaska by John Muir Chapter 3 Wrangle Island and Alaska Summers Wrangle Island is about fourteen miles long, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel or fjord, 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 acts of the lumberman in all their long, century lives. Beneath soft shady clouds, with abundance of brain, 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 sundays enable them to ripen their cones and send myriads of seeds flying every autumn to ensure the permanence of the forests and feed the multitude of animals. The Wrangle 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 Wrangle 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 cassier gold mines, some 250 or 300 miles inland by way of the Stakeen River and Deeson Lake. Two stern-wheeled steamers plied on the river between Wrangle and Telegraph Creek at the head of navigation, 150 miles from Wrangle, 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 1800 miners and prospectors were sent to have passed through Wrangle that season of 1879, about half of them being Chinaman. Nearly a third of this whole number set out from here in the month of February, traveling on the Stakeen River, which usually remained 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 Wrangle, dosing away the long winter as best they could. Indians, mostly of the Stakeen tribe, occupied the two ends of the town, the whites of whom there were about 40 or 50, 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 shown all the more brightly in their somber surroundings. The ground occupied by the fort, by being carefully levelled 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 myery 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 maybe observed among moraine boulders, wrangle 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 and threatening ranks suggesting energy of an overbearing destructive kind, but forming a bland, mild, laving bath. The cloudless days are calm, pearl grey and brooding in tone, inclining to rest and peace. The island seemed to drowse and float on the glassy water, and in the woods scarce a leaf stirs. The very brightest of wrangled 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 and wrangle, 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 barn-like caverns 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.  Some of the little children were also blackened, and none were overclad, 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 tannagers and a flock of blackbirds. The women, seated on the steps and platform of the trader's 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.  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, beat 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 potlashes 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 epiloveum. Yonder goes a whole family, grandparents and all, making a direct course for some favorite stream and campground. 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, salmonberries, 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 Wrangel, 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 cat making was done, laughing and chattering and natural animal enjoyment. The collector went up the stream to examine a meadow at its head with reference to the quantity of hay at my 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 karex bogs of Wisconsin and Canada. Here I found many of my old favorites, the Heathwarts, Kaumaya, Pirola, Chia-Gines, Huckleberry, Cranberry, etc. On the margin of the meadow, darling, Linaya was in its glory. Purple, panicle grasses and full flower reached over my head, and some of the caresses 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 gathered 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 nutca cypress. With a few pines, Pinus contorta, on the margin of the meadow, some of them nearly a hundred feet high, draped with gray usenia, the bark also gray with scale lichens. We met all the berry pickers at the lake, accepting only a small girl and the campkeeper. In their bright colors they made a lively picture among the quivering bushes, keeping up a low pleasant chattering 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 campground 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. While I was at wrangle, the chiefs and headmen of the Stikin tribe got up at grand dinner and entertainment in honor of their distinguished visitors. Three doctors of divinity and their wives. Fellow passengers on the steamer with me, whose object was to organize the Presbyterian Church, to both the dinner and dances I was invited, was adopted by the Stikin tribe and given an Indian name and Kutahin said to mean adopted chief. I was inclined to regard this honor as being unlikely to have any practical value, but I was assured by Mr. Vanderbilt, Mr. Young, and others that it would be a great safeguard while I was on my travels among the different tribes of the Archipelago. For travelers without an Indian name might be killed and robbed without the offender being called to account as long as the crime was kept secret from the whites. But, being adopted by the Stikins, no one belonging to the other tribes would dare attack me, knowing that the Stikins would hold them responsible. The dinner tables were tastefully decorated with flowers and the food and general arrangements were in good taste, but there was no trace of Indian dishes. It was mostly imported canned stuff served Boston fashion. After the dinner we assembled in Chief Shacky's large blockhouse and were entertained with lively examples of their dances and amusements, carried on with great spirit, making a very novel, barbarous derby. The dances seemed to me wonderfully like those of the American Indians in general, a monotonous stamping accompanied by hand-claping, head-jerking, and explosive grunts kept in time to grim drum beats. The chief dancer and leader scattered great quantities of downy feathers like a snowstorm as blessings on everybody while all chantled, he, he, he, uh, uh, jumping up and down until all were bathed in perspiration. After the dancing excellent imitations were given of the gait, gestures, and behavior of several animals under different circumstances, walking, hunting, capturing, and devouring their prey, etc. While all were quietly seated, waiting to see what next was going to happen, the door of the big house was suddenly thrown open and inbounced a bear, so true to life and form and gestures we were all startled, though it was only a bear skin nicely fitted on a man who was intimately acquainted with the animals and knew how to imitate them. The bear shuffled down into the middle of the floor and made the motion of jumping into a stream and catching a wooden salmon that was ready for him. Carrying it out onto the bank, throwing his head around to listen and see if anyone was coming, then tearing it to pieces, jerking his head from side to side, looking and listening in fear of hunter's rifles. Besides the bear dance there were porpoise and deer dances, with one of the party imitating the animals by stuffed specimens with an Indian inside, and the movements were so accurately imitated that they seemed the real thing. These animal plays were followed by serious speeches interpreted by an Indian woman. Dear brothers and sisters, this is the way we used to dance. We liked it long ago when we were blind. We always danced this way, but now we are not blind. The good Lord has taken pity upon us and sent his son, Jesus Christ, to tell us what to do. We have danced today only to show you how blind we were to like to dance in this foolish way. We will not dance any more. Another speech was interpreted as follows. Dear brothers and sisters, the chief says, this is the way we used to dance and play. We do not wish to do so any more. We will give away all the dance dresses you have seen us wearing, though we value them very highly. He says he feels much honoured to have so many white brothers and sisters at our dinner and plays. Several short explanatory remarks were made all through the exercises by Chief Shakis presiding with grave dignity. The last of his speeches concluded thus, Dear brothers and sisters, we have been long, long in the dark. You have led us into strong guiding light and taught us the right way to live and the right way to die. I thank you for myself and all my people, and I give you my heart. At the close of the amusements there was a potlatch when rubs made of the skins of deer wild sheep, marmots and sables were distributed, and many of the fantastic headdresses that had been worn by shamans. One of these fell to my share. The floor of the house was strewn with fresh hemlock boughs, bunches of showy wildflowers adorned the walls, and the hearth was filled with huckleberry branches and epilobium. Altogether it was a wonderful show. I have found Southeastern Alaska a good healthy country to live in. The climate of the islands and shores of the mainland is remarkably bland and temperate and free from extremes of either heat or cold throughout the year. It is rainy, however, so much so that haymaking will hardly ever be extensively engaged in here. Whatever the future may show in the way of the development of mines, forests and fisheries. This rainy weather, however, is of good quality, the best of the kind I ever experienced, mild in temperature, mostly gentle in its fall, filling the fountains of the rivers and keeping the whole land fresh and fruitful, while anything more delightful than the shining weather in the midst of the rain, the great round Sundays of July and August, may hardly be found anywhere, north or south. An Alaska summer day is a day without night. In the far north, at Point Barrow, the sun does not set for weeks, and even here in Southeastern Alaska it is only a few degrees below the horizon and its lowest point. And the topmost colors of the sunset blend with those of the sunrise, leaving no gap of darkness between. Midnight is only a low noon, the middle point of the night is only the middle point of the gloaming. The thin clouds that are almost always present are then colored yellow and red, making a striking advertisement of the sun's progress beneath the horizon. The day opens slowly, the low arc of the light steals around to the north eastward with gradual increase of height and span and intensity of tone. And when at length the sun appears it is without much of that stirring, impressive pop of flashing, awakening, triumphant energy, suggestive of the Bible imagery, a bridegroom coming out of his chamber and rejoicing like a strong man to run a race. The red clouds with yellow edges dissolve in hazy dimness. The islands, with grayish white ruffs of mist about them, cast ill-defined shadows on the glistening waters, and the whole downbending firmament becomes pearl gray. For three or four hours after sunrise there is nothing especially impressive in the landscape. The sun, though seemingly unclouded, may almost be looked in the face, and the islands and mountains, with their wealth of woods and snow, and varied beauty of architecture, seem comparatively sleepy and uncommunicative. As the day advances toward high noon, the sun-flood streaming through the damp atmosphere lights the water levels and the sky to glowing silver. Brightly play the ripples about the bushy edges of the islands and on the plume-shaped streaks between them, ruffled by gentle passing wind currents. The warm air throms and makes itself felt as a life-giving, energizing ocean, embracing all the landscape, quickening the imagination, and bringing to mind the life and motion about us, the tides, the rivers, the flood of light streaming through the satiny sky, the marvelous abundance of fishes feeding in the lower ocean, the misty flocks of insects in the air, wild sheep and goats on a thousand grassy ridges, beaver and mink far back on many a rushing stream, Indians floating and basking along the shores, leaves and crystals drinking the sunbeams and glaciers on the mountains, making valleys and basins for new rivers and lakes and fertile beds of soil. Through the afternoon all the way down to the sunset, the day grows in beauty, the light seems to thicken and become yet more generously fruitful without losing its soft mellow brightness. Everything seems to settle into conscious repose. The winds breathe gently or are wholly at rest. The few clouds visible are downy and luminous and combed out fine on the edges. Gulls here and there, winnowing the air on easy wing, are brought into striking relief and every stroke of the paddles of Indian hunters in their canoes is told by a quick glancing flash. Bird choirs in the grove are scarce heard as they sweeten the brooding stillness and the sky, land and water meet and blend in one inseparable scene of enchantment. Then comes the sunset with its purple and gold, not a narrow arch on the horizon but oftentimes filling all the sky. The level cloud bars usually present are fired on the edges and the spaces of clear sky between them are greenish yellow or pale amber, while the orderly flocks of small overlapping clouds, often seen higher up, are mostly touched with crimson like the outleaning sprays of maple groves in the beginning of an eastern Indian summer. Soft, mellow purple flushes the sky to the zenith and fills the air, fairly steeping and transfiguring the islands and making all the water look like wine. After the sun goes down the glowing gold vanishes, but because it descends on a curve nearly in the same plane with the horizon, the glowing portion of the display lasts much longer than in more southern latitudes, while the upper colors with gradually lessening intensity of tone sweep around to the north, gradually increase to the eastward and unite with those of the morning. The most extravagantly colored of all the sunsets I have yet seen in Alaska was one I enjoyed on the voyage from Portland to Wrangel, when we were in the midst of one of the most thickly islanded parts of the Alexander archipelago. The day had been showery, but late in the afternoon the clouds melted away from the west, all save a few that settled down in narrow level bars near the horizon. The evening was calm and the sunset colors came on gradually, increasing in extent and richness of tone by slow degrees as if requiring more time than usual to ripen. At a height of about 30 degrees there was a heavy cloud bank, deeply reddened on its lower edge and the projecting parts of its face. Below this were three horizontal belts of purple edged with gold, while a vividly defined, spreading fan of flame streamed upward across the purple bars and faded in a feather edge of dull red. But beautiful and impressive as was this painting on the sky, the most novel and exciting effect was in the body of the atmosphere itself, which, laden with moisture, became one mass of color, of fine translucent purple haze in which the islands with softened outlines seemed to float, while a dense red ring lay around the base of each of them as a fitting border. The peaks, two in the distance, and the snowfields and glaciers and fleecy rolls of mist that lay in the hollows were flushed with a deep rosy alpine glow of ineffable loveliness. Everything near and far, even the ship, was comprehended in the glorious picture and the general color effect. The mission divines we had aboard seemed then to be truly divine as they gazed transfigured in the celestial glory. So also seemed our bluff, storm-fighting old captain, and his tarry sailors and all. About one-third of the summer days I spent in the wrangle region were cloudy, with very little or no rain. One-third decidedly rainy, and one-third clear. According to a record kept here of a hundred and forty-seven days, beginning May 17 of that year, there were sixty-five on which rain fell, forty-three cloudy with no rain, and thirty-nine clear. In June rain fell on eighteen days, in July eight days, in August fifteen days, in September twenty days. But on some of these days there was only a few minutes rain, like showers scarce enough to count. While, as a general thing, the rain fell so gently and the temperature was so mild, very few of them could be called stormy or dismal. Even the bleakest, most bedraggled of them, all usually had a flush of late or early color to cheer them, or some white illumination about the noon hours. I never before saw so much rainfall with so little noise. None of the summer winds make roaring storms, and thunder is seldom heard. I heard none at all. This wet misty weather seems perfectly healthful. There is no mildew in the houses so far as I have seen, or any tendency toward moldiness in nooks hidden from the sun, and neither among the people nor the plants do we find anything flabby or dropsical. In September clear days were rare, more than three-fourths of them were either decidedly cloudy or rainy, and the rains of this month were, with one wild exception, only moderately heavy, and the clouds between showers drooped and crawled in a ragged, unsettled way, without betraying hints of violence, such as one often sees in the gestures of mountain storm clouds. July was the brightest month of the summer, with fourteen days of sunshine, six of them in uninterrupted succession, with a temperature at seven a.m. of about sixty degrees, at twelve midday, seventy degrees. The average seven a.m. temperature for June was fifty-four point three degrees, the average seven a.m. temperature for July was fifty-five point three degrees, at twelve midday the average temperature was sixty-one point four five degrees, the average seven a.m. temperature for August was fifty-four point one two degrees, degrees, 12 midday 61.48 degrees, the average 7am temperature for September was 52.14 degrees, and 12 midday 56.12 degrees. The highest temperature observed here during the summer was 76 degrees. The most remarkable characteristic of this summer weather, even the brightest of it, is the velvet softness of the atmosphere. On the mountains of California, throughout the greater part of the year, the presence of an atmosphere is hardly recognized, and the thin, white, bottomless light of the morning comes to the peaks and glaciers as a pure spiritual essence, the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. The clearest of Alaskan air is always appreciably substantial, so much so that it would seem as if one might test its quality by rubbing it between the thumb and finger. I never before saw summer days so white and so full of subdued luster. The winter storms, up to the end of December when I left Wrangle, were mostly rain at a temperature of 35 or 40 degrees, with strong winds which sometimes roughly lash the shores and carry scud far into the woods. The long nights are then gloomy enough, and the value of snug homes with crackling yellow cedar fires may be finally appreciated. Snow falls frequently, but never to any great depth or to lie long. It is said that only once since the settlement of Fort Wrangle has the ground been covered to a depth of four feet. The mercury seldom falls more than five or six degrees below the freezing point unless the wind blows steadily from the mainland. Back from the coast, however, beyond the mountains, the winter months are very cold. On the Stokene River of Glenora, less than a thousand feet above the level of the sea, a temperature of from thirty to forty degrees below zero is not uncommon. The most interesting of the short excursions we made from Fort Wrangle was the one up the sticking river to the head of steam navigation. From Mount St. Elias the coast range extends in a broad lofty chain beyond the southern boundary of the territory, gashed by stupendous canyons each which carries a lively river, though most of them are comparatively short as their highest sources lie in the icy solitudes of the range within forty or fifty miles of the coast. A few, however, of these foaming, roaring streams, the Alec the Chirkaut, the Chilku, Taku, Stokene, and perhaps others head beyond the range with some of the southwest branches of the Mackenzie and Yukon. The largest side branches and the main trunk canyons of all these mountain streams are still occupied by glaciers which descend in showy ranks, their messy, bulging snouts lying back a little distance in the shadows of the walls or pushing forward among the cottonwoods that line the banks of the rivers or even stretching all the way across the main canyons, compelling the rivers to find a channel beneath them. The sticking was perhaps the best known of the rivers that crossed the coast range because it was the best way to the Mackenzie River to catch the Cassier gold mines. It is about three hundred and fifty miles long and is navigable for small steamers a hundred and fifty miles to Glenora and sometimes to telegraph Greek, fifteen miles farther. It first pursues a westerly course through grassy plains darkened here and there with groves of spruce and pine, then curving southward and receiving numerous tributaries from the north it enters the coast range and sweeps across it through a magnificent canyon three thousand to five thousand feet deep and more than a hundred miles long. The majestic cliffs and mountains forming the canyon walls display endless varieties of form and sculpture and are wonderfully adorned and enlivened with glaciers and waterfalls while throughout almost its whole extent the floor is a flowery landscape garden like Yosemite. The most striking features of the glaciers hanging over the cliffs, descending the side canyons and pushing forward to the river greatly enhancing the wild beauty of all the others. Gliding along the swift flowing river the views change with bewildering rapidity. Wonderful too are the changes dependent on the seasons of the weather. In spring when the snow is melting fast you enjoy the countless rejoicing waterfalls, the gentle breathing of warm winds, the colors of the young leaves and flowers when the bees are busy and wafts of fragrance are drifting hither and thither from miles of wild roses, clover and honeysuckle. The swaths of birch and willow on the lower slopes following the melting of the winter avalanche snow banks. The bossy cumulized swelling in white and purple piles above the highest peaks, grey rain clouds breathing the outstanding brows and battlements of the walls and the breaking forth of the sun after the rain, the shining of the leaves and streams and crystal architecture of the glaciers, the rising of fresh fragrance, the song of the happy birds and the serene color grandeur of the morning and evening sky. In summer you find the groves and gardens in full dress, glaciers melting rapidly under sunshine and rain, waterfalls in all their glory, the river rejoicing in its strength, young birds trying their wings, bears enjoying salmon and berries, all the life of the canyon brimming full like the streams. In autumn comes rest as if the year's work were done, the rich hazy sunshine streaming over the cliffs calls forth the last of the gentians and golden rods. The groves and thickets and meadows bloom again as their leaves change to red and yellow petals, the rocks also and the glaciers seem to bloom like the plants in the mellow golden light. And so goes the song, change succeeding change and sublime harmony through all the wonderful seasons and weather. My first trip up the river was made in the spring with the missionary party soon after our arrival at Wrangel. We left Wrangel in the afternoon and anchored for the night above the river delta and started up the river early next morning when the heights above the big sticking glacier and the smooth domes and copings and arches of solid snow along the tops of the canyon walls were glowing in the early beams. We arrived before noon at the old trading post called Bucks in front of the sticking glacier and remained long enough to allow the few passengers who wished a nearer view to cross the river to the terminal moraine. The sun beams streaming through the ice pinnacles along its terminal wall produced a wonderful glory of color and the broad sparkling crystal prairie and the distant snowy fountains were wonderfully attractive and made me pray for opportunity to explore them. Of the many glaciers, a hundred or more, that adorn the wall of the great sticking river canyon, this is the largest. It draws its sources from snowy mountains within fifteen or twenty miles of the coast, pours through a comparatively narrow canyon about two miles in width in a magnificent cascade and expands in a broad fan five or six miles in width separated from the sticking river by its broad terminal moraine, fringed with spruces and willows. Around the beautifully drawn curve of the moraine, the sticking river flows having evidently been shoved by the glacier out of its direct course. On the opposite side of the canyon another somewhat smaller glacier, which now terminates four or five miles from the river, was once united front to front with the greater glacier, though at first both were tributaries of the main sticking glacier, which once filled the whole grand canyon. After the main trunk canyon was melted out, its side branches drawing their sources from a height of three or four to five or six thousand feet were cut off and of course became separate glaciers occupying cirks and branch canyons along the tops and sides of the walls. The Indians have a tradition that the river used to run through a tunnel under the united fronts of the two large tributary glaciers mentioned above, which entered the main canyon from either side, and that on one occasion an Indian anxious to get rid of his wife had her sent a drift in a canoe down through the ice tunnel expecting that she would trouble him no more, but to his surprise she floated through under the ice in safety. All the evidence connected with the present appearance of these two glaciers indicates that they were united and formed a dam across the river after the smaller tributaries had melted off and had receded to a greater or lesser height above the valley floor. The big sticking glacier is hardly out of sight, ere you come upon another that pours a majestic crystal flood through the evergreens while almost every hollow and tributary canyon contains a smaller one, the size of course varying with the extent of the area drained. Some are like mere snow banks, other with the blue ice apparent, depend in massive bulging curves and swells and graduate into the river like forms that maze through the lower forested regions and are so striking and beautiful that they are admired even by the passing miners with gold dust in their eyes. Thirty-five miles above the big sticking glacier is the dirt glacier, the second in size. Its outlet is a fine stream abounding in trout. On the opposite side of the river there is a group of five glaciers, one of them descending to with a hundred feet of the river. Near Glenora, on the northeastern flank of the main coast ridge, just below a narrow gorge called the canyon, terraces first make their appearance where great quantities of moraine material have been swept through the flood choked gorge and of course outspread and deposited on the first open levels below. Here too occurs a marked change in climate and consequently in forests and general appearance of the face of the country. On account of destructive fires the woods are younger and are composed of smaller trees about a foot to eighteen inches in diameter and seventy-five feet high, mostly two-leaved pines, which hold their seeds for several years after they are ripe. The woods here are without a trace of those deep accumulations of mosses, leaves and decaying trunks which make so damp an unclearable mass in the coast forests. While mountain sides are covered with gray moss and lichens where the forest has been utterly destroyed. The riverbank cottonwoods are also smaller and the birch and contour pines mingle freely with the coast hemlock and spruce. The birch is common on the lower slopes and is very effective. It's round leafy pale green head contrasting with the dark narrow spires of the conifers and giving a striking character to the forest. The taramac pine or black pine as the variety of Pinus Cordata is called here is yellowish green. In marked contrast with the dark lichen draped spruce which grows above the pine at a height of about two thousand feet in groves and belts where it has escaped fire and snow avalanches. There is another handsome spruce earbouts, Piscia alba, very slender and graceful in habit, drooping at the top like a mountain hemlock. I saw fine specimens a hundred and twenty-five feet high on deep bottom land a few miles below Glenora. The tops of some of them were almost covered with dense clusters of yellow and brown cones. We reached the old Hudson's Bay trading post at Glenora about one o'clock and the captain informed me that he would stop here until the next morning where he would make an early start for wrangle. At a distance of about seven or eight miles to the northeastward of the landing there is an outstanding group of mountains crowning as spur from the main chain of the coast range whose highest point rises about 8,000 feet above the level of the sea. And as Glenora is only a thousand feet above the sea the height is to be overcome and climbing this peak is about 7,000 feet. Though the first time was short I determined to climb it because of the advantageous position it occupied for general views of the peaks and glaciers of the east side of the great range. Although it was now 20 minutes past three and the days were getting short I thought that by rapid climbing I could reach the summit before sunset in time to get a general view and a few pencil sketches and make my way back to the steamer in the night. Mr. Young one of the missionaries asked permission to accompany me saying that he was a good walker and climber and would not delay me or cause any trouble. I strongly advised him not to go explaining that it involved a walk coming and going of 14 or 16 miles and climbing through brush and boulders of 7,000 feet a fairer day's work for a seasoned mountaineer to be done in less than half a day and part of a night. But he insisted that he was a strong walker could do a mountaineer's day work in half a day and would not hinder me in any way. Well I have warned you I said and will not assume responsibility for any trouble that may arise. He proved to be a stout walker and we made rapid progress across a brushy timbered flat and up the mountain slopes open in some places and in others thatched with dwarf furs resting a minute here and there to refresh ourselves with huckleberries which grew in abundance in open spots. About half an hour before sunset when we were near a cluster of crumbling pinnacles that formed the summit I had ceased to feel anxiety about the mountaineering strength and skill of my companion and pushed rapidly on. In passing around the shoulder of the highest pinnacle where the rock was rapidly disintegrating and the danger of slipping was great I shouted in a warning voice be very careful here this is dangerous. Mr. Young was perhaps a dozen or two yards behind me but out of sight I afterwards reproached myself for not stopping and lending him a steadying hand and showing him the slight footsteps I had made by kicking out little blocks of the crumbling surface instead of simply warning him to be careful. Only a few seconds after giving this warning I was startled by a scream for help and hurrying back found the missionary face downward his arms outstretched clutching little crumbling knobs of the brink of a golly that plunges down a thousand feet or more to a small residual glacier.  He then told me that both of his arms were dislocated it was almost impossible to find available footholds on the treacherous rock and I was at my wit's end to know how I could get him rolled or dragged to a place where I could get about him find out how much he was hurt and a way back down the mountain. After narrowly scanning the cliff and making footholds I managed to roll and lift him a few yards to a place where the slope was less steep and there I attempted to set his arms. I found however that this was impossible in such a place I therefore tied his arms to his sides with my suspenders and necktie to prevent as much as possible inflammation from movement. I then left him telling him to lie still and that I would be back in a few minutes and that he was now safe from slipping. I hastily examined the ground and saw no way of getting him down except by the steep glacier gully. After scrambling to an outstanding point that commands a view of it from top to bottom to make sure that it was not interrupted by sheer precipices I concluded that with great care and the digging of slight footholds he could be slid down to the glacier where I could lay him on his back and perhaps be able to set his arms. Accordingly I cheered him up telling him I had found a way but that it would require lots of time and patience. Digging a footstep in the sand or crumbling rock five or six feet beneath him I reached up took hold of him by one of his feet and gently slid him down on his back placing his heels in the step then descending another five or six feet dug heel notches and slid him down to them. Thus the whole distance was made by a succession of narrow steps and very short intervals and the glacier was reached perhaps about midnight. Here I took off one of my boots tied a handkerchief around his wrist for a good hold and placed my heel in his armpit and succeeded in getting one of his arms into place but my utmost strength was insufficient to reduce the dislocation of the other. I therefore bound it closely to his side and asked him if in his exhausted and trembling condition he was still able to walk. Yes, he bravely replied. So with a steadying arm around him and many stops for rest I marched him slowly down in the starlight on the comparatively smooth unassured surface of the glacier to the terminal moraine a distance of perhaps a mile crossed the moraine bathed his head at one of the outlet streams and after many rests reached a dry place and made a brush fire. I then went ahead looking for an open way through the brush where larger wood could be had made a good lasting fire of resiny silver fir roots and a leaf bed beside it. I now told him I would run down the mountain hasten back with help from the boat and carry him down in comfort but he would not hear of my leaving him. No, no, he said, I can walk down, don't leave me. I reminded him of the roughness of the way his nerve-shaking condition and assured him I would not be gone long but he insisted on trying saying on no account whatever I must leave him. I therefore concluded to try to get him to the ship by short walks from one fire and resting place to another. While he was resting I went ahead looking for the best way through the brush and rocks then returning got him on his feet and made him lean on my shoulder while I steadied him to prevent his falling. This slow staggering struggle from fire to fire lasted until long after sunrise. When at last we reached the ship and stood at the foot of the narrow single plank with outside rails that reached from the bank of the deck at a considerable angle I briefly explained to Mr. Young's companions who stood looking down at us that he had been hurt in an accident and requested one of them to assist me in getting him abroad. But strange to say instead of coming down to help they made haste to reproach him for having gone on a wild goose chase with Muir. These foolish adventures are well enough for Mr. Muir, they said, but you, Mr. Young, have a work to do. You have a family, you have a church, and you have no right to risk your life on treacherous peaks and precipices. The captain, Nat Lane, son of Senator Joseph Lane, had been swearing in anger and patience for being compelled to make so late a start and thus encounter a dangerous wind in a narrow gorge, and was threatening to put the missionaries ashore to seek their lost companion while he went on down the river about his business. But when he heard my call for help he hastened forward and elbowed the divines away from the end of the gang plank, shouting in angry irreverence, oh, blank, this is no time for preaching, don't you see the man is hurt. He ran down to our help, and while I steadied my trembling companion from behind, the captain kindly led him up the plank into the saloon and made him drink a large glass of brandy. Then, with the man holding down his shoulders, we succeeded in getting the bone into its socket, notwithstanding the inflammation and contraction of the muscles and ligaments. Mr. Young was then put to bed, and he slept all the way back to wrangle. In his mission lectures in the East, Mr. Young oftentimes told this story, I made no record of it in my notebook and never intended to write a word about it, but after a miserable sensational character of the story had appeared in a respectable magazine, I thought it but fair to my brave companion that it should be told just as it happened.


This is a Tune, actually. Oh, go on, start sedging to the disperse, my boy.