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- Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
'To the lover of pure wildness Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.' First published in 1915, Travels in Alaska is the last book that Muir wrote, detailing the adventures and experiences that were arguably most dear to him. Alaska's picturesque forests, grand mountains, and unique glacier range impacted Muir from the moment he first visited: 'Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond description… we must surely have reached the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed.' As Muir expert Terry Gifford observes in the foreword, 'From the first trip, Muir set out to learn as much about the people as the glaciers'; and this willingness to surround himself in all aspects of the atmosphere is evident throughout, with beautifully detailed descriptions of everything from the tribes that he meets, to the canyons, rivers and animals he encounters. Muir's unwavering adventurous spirit shines through in Travels in Alaska; no challenge is too great and even when faced with the unimaginable – being caught near death between two icebergs while canoeing, or saving an inexperienced mountaineer from slipping and falling – he does not lose his faithful 'get up and go' attitude. Travels in Alaska details three of Muir's trips to Alaska: 1879, 1880 and 1890. Each one a refreshing account of the joys of exploring and the rewards of the outdoors: 'Never before had rocks and ice and trees seemed so beautiful and wonderful, even the cold, biting rainstorm that was blowing seemed full of loving kindness, wonderful compensation for all that we had endured, and we sailed down the bay through the grey, driving rain rejoicing.' Embedded with stunning metaphors, a dedicated love of Mother Nature and a desire to protect and preserve wildness, this book is an insight not only into Alaska, but Muir himself. The enthusiasm contained within these pages is infectious, and as well as making a powerful read, Muir will inspire you, too, to go out and experience the paradise that is natural wildness.
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Travels in Alaska
John Muir
www.v-publishing.co.uk
Contents
Series introduction by Terry Gifford
We have never needed nature more than now. At a time when our relationship with our home planet is under stress, the positive words of John Muir (1838–1914) can help us to reconnect, retune, and readjust what it is that we should value for the survival of our species. In 1901 John Muir opened his book Our National Parks with words that might resonate for readers today: ‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find that going to the mountains is going home’. This Scot, transplanted to the USA at the age of eleven by his family to help carve a farm out of the wilds of Wisconsin, came to invent the modern notion of a national park for the ‘recreation’ of future generations. His initial inspiration was Yosemite Valley, deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where he was sought out by the US President, Theodore Roosevelt, who was persuaded on a characteristic Muir camping trip that such an uplifting place and its rich ecology should be preserved in perpetuity for the nation.
Anticipating the modern concept of ‘biophilia’ – our need for regular contact between our inner nature with the outer nature around us – Muir’s opening sentence continued with the idea ‘that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life’. Muir’s suggestion that the fountains of our own lives need to be in contact with the self-renewing cycles of life in wild landscapes led him to be recognised as the founder of the American conservation movement. His establishment of the Sierra Club – still to this day a vigorous local and national conservation organisation in the US – arose because Muir understood the importance of local people holding government to account through membership of a national environmental movement. Muir knew that national policies would be needed if the balance between the economic ‘usefulness’ of timber and rivers was to be controlled. By the end of Our National Parks Muir’s tone had changed. ‘Any fool can destroy trees’, he declared in full preaching mode. ‘God has cared for these trees … but he cannot save them from fools – only Uncle Sam can do that’.
Actually, it was Muir’s ecological knowledge, gained by close observation, by scientific experiment and by always reflecting upon the larger forces at work in nature, that resulted in insights ahead of their time, like the idea that unregulated clear cutting of timber reduced the usefulness of those irrigating rivers as ‘fountains of life’. At a time just before the notion of ‘Oekology’ was being proposed, Muir wrote that, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’. And it is in such unassuming, seductively approachable prose that Muir explored his vision of nature and our relationship with it. It was as a popular writer of newspaper and journal articles that Muir gained his following as a writer. Late in life he began crafting these little lyrical discoveries into the inspirational books that speak so clearly to our heightened environmental awareness today.
Foreword by Terry Gifford
When John Muir died on Christmas Eve 1914, the pages of the book he was writing were strewn across his bed. That book, almost completed, was Travels in Alaska, on which he was working from seven in the morning until ten at night, assisted by a Sierra Club friend, Marion Randall Parsons, who put the book together after his death. Muir was seventy-six, but the earliest journals he was drawing from were written by a forty-one year old who, just days after his engagement to be married, could not defer the plans he had made to make his first visit to Alaska in 1879. And the same the next summer. And the one after that. Muir could not get enough of Alaska and returned again in 1890 and 1899. Although this book purports to cover just three trips, there is no doubt that Muir’s total of five trips informs these pages. Actually, in Alaska the local Chilcat people, when considering taking a missionary/teacher to live with them, offered Muir ‘many wives’ if he would stay because he was such a good speaker about nature and their ‘fine foodful country’, as Muir put it. They got a missionary instead.
From the first trip, Muir set out to learn as much about the people as the glaciers. He not only admired their ‘kindliness and serene good nature’, but their skills in making a living from a severe and unforgiving environment. The Stickeen people, in turn, recognised in Muir an inner dignity and humility, giving him, on his first trip ‘an Indian name (Ancoutahan) said to mean adopted chief’. Muir realised that in order to travel safely in this dangerous world of snow, ice, water and icebergs, he needed to quickly learn those skills himself. Nevertheless, the book comes to a climax of increasingly frequent accounts of close calls. To travel by canoe, well provisioned, enabled Muir to feel ‘truly independent, and enter into partnership with nature; to be carried with the winds and currents, accept the noble invitations offered all along [the] way to enter the mountain fiords, the homes of the waterfalls and glaciers’. But on a last trip to the glacier that, by then, bore his name, the Muir Glacier, his familiar fast method of descending snow – glissading on his heels with an ice-axe rudder – got out of control on a patch of blue ice until he was stopped by moraine at the foot of the slope ‘without a scratch’. A chilling scream announced the arrival of two ravens, ‘impatiently waiting for bone-picking time’. Muir shouted at them, ‘Not yet, not yet!’ But in the final pages of the book Muir admits to the closest call of all when, canoeing by himself after his companions had called it a day, he entered a channel between two icebergs which he came to realise were slowly closing. Backing out, Muir wrote that ‘just as the bow of the canoe cleared the sheer walls they came together with a growling crunch’.
Of course, these were scientific expeditions focussed upon gaining a deeper understanding of glaciation in particular. Climbing mountains for this purpose, and with a storm blowing, was hard for local people to comprehend. Muir’s indigenous guide, Toyette, said, ‘Muir must be a witch to seek knowledge in such a place as this and in such miserable weather’. Perhaps the translation of Toyette’s words should have been ‘shaman’ rather than ‘witch’, which would have been closer to Muir’s role for those who received the narratives of his perilous journeys into what must have seemed an icy dream world. For Muir brought back to urban America the first descriptions of this distant alien land. The new knowledge returned by the writing of Travels in Alaska included topography and ethnology, as well as botany and glaciation. Empirical science was certainly delivered by Muir, who measured the movement of stakes in a glacier at a hundred feet in eight days at its centre. A new plant which Muir brought back from the Arctic coast was named by his friend Asa Gray at Harvard in his honour as Erigeron muirii. Again, Muir’s insatiable curiosity was matched, he noticed by that of the indigenous people. Around a campfire Muir sits down with them under the stars, which become the subject of what he calls ‘a long talk’. He says, ‘their eager, childlike attention was refreshing to see as compared with the deathlike apathy of weary town-dwellers, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched in toil and care and poor shallow comfort’. Why, asks Muir of the Kadachan people, with enemies so wise and powerful as wolves, are the deer not all killed? The answer he receives points to the wisdom in restraint of power. ‘Wolves knew better’, he was told, ‘than to kill them all and thus cut off their most important food-supply.’ Muir would have appreciated the irony that the wisdom of wolves, shared by their human neighbours in the Alaskan ecosystems, was not shared by American hunters who, at this very time, were exterminating the buffalo and the passenger pigeon.
Because Travels in Alaska was revised from journals and earlier articles by a writer nearing the end of a lifetime of learning from nature, the book contains some of John Muir’s most memorable statements. Right from the beginning Muir’s vision and philosophy are expressed in metaphors of startling originality. The trees on Alaskan islands have apparently ‘been sorted and harmonised as to size like a well-balanced bouquet’, which he then compares to ‘the arrangement of feathers on a bird’. As ever, Muir has a grasp of long-term processes which can only be positive in their outcomes: ‘Out of all the cold darkness and glacial crushing and grinding comes this warm, abounding beauty and life to teach us that what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call destruction is creation finer and finer.’ Perhaps most breathtaking of all is his cosmic vision of these processes: ‘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.’
– Part 1 –
The Trip of 1879
– 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 wild life, 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 influence 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 flowers 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 seasickness. It seemed strange that nearly every one afflicted should be more or less ashamed.
Next morning a strong wind was blowing, and the sea was grey and white, with long breaking waves, across which the Dakota was racing half-buried in spray. Very few passengers were on deck to enjoy the wild scenery. Every wave seemed to be making enthusiastic, eager haste to the shore, with long, irised tresses streaming from its tops, some of its outer fringes borne away in scud to refresh the wind, all the rolling, pitching, flying water exulting in the beauty of rainbow light. Gulls 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 wing-beat, 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 irised spray, is a 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 neighbours, 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 colours 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-grey raincloud 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-shod 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 coast hills 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 favoured with abundant rains, flourish in marvellous luxuriance on the glacier-sculptured mountains of the Olympic Range.
We arrived in Esquimault Harbour, 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, spiraea, willow, and wild rose – and around many an upswelling moutonné 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 traveller was more worthily attracted to the neat cottage homes found here, embowered 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 corollas two and three inches wide. This rose and three species of spiræa 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 Harbour 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 harbour 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 Burrard Inlet, now the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, to Puget Sound, up Frazer River to New Westminster and Yale at the head of 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 Juan de Fuca about a hundred miles into the heart of one of the noblest coniferous 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 promontories, opening here and there into smooth, blue, lake-like expanses dotted with islands and feathered with tall, spiry evergreens, their beauty doubled on the bright mirror-water.
Sailing from Victoria, the Olympic Mountains are seen 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 amphitheatres 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 widest 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 at sea; again lifting a little, some islet may be seen standing alone with the tops of its trees dipping out of sight in grey 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 fifty or sixty 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 all 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 (Pseudotsuga douglasii), one of the greatest of the western giants. A specimen that I measured near Olympia was about 300 feet in height and twelve 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 ship building, 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 Wahsatch 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 vessels sailing to foreign parts. Seattle was famed for its coalmines, and claimed to be the coming town of the North Pacific Coast. So also did its rival, Tacoma, which had been selected as the 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 twenty-one feet, another twenty feet, another fourteen, with many smaller ones, the aggregate thickness of all the veins being upwards of a hundred 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 unrivalled timber resources, and its far-reaching geographical relations.
After spending a few weeks in the Puget Sound region with a friend from San Francisco, we engaged passage on the little mail 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 Juan de Fuca Strait, was delightful; and after calling again at Victoria and Port Townsend we got fairly off for icy Alaska.
– 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 excursions that I know of may be made into any other American wilderness where so marvellous an abundance of noble, newborn scenery is so charmingly brought to view as on the trip through the Alexander Archipelago to Fort Wrangell and Sitka. Gazing from the deck of the steamer, one is borne 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 chanced 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 dell; or even a grand master view of mountains beheld from some commanding outlook after climbing from height to height above the forests. 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 shining ways through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely 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 fiords, form an intricate web of land and water embroidery sixty or seventy miles wide, fringing the lofty ice chain of coast mountains from Puget Sound to Cook Inlet; and, with 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 snow banks 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 eye is 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 water lilies among the sun spangles; while mellow, tempered sunshine is streaming over all, blending sky, land, and water in pale, misty blue. Then, while you are dreamily 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 set 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, outswelling 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 subjected 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 none the less 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, overrubbed appearance produced by the oversweeping 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 determined 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 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 on 14 July, 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 travellers 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 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 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 Jackson1 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 washbasin.
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 white people 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 grey 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 campfires 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 colours of the mossy, lichened trunks with sparkling streams pouring down the furrows of the bark, and the grey-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-o’-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 white people who happened to see the strange light wondered about as wildly as the Indians.
