CHAPTER VI.

WRANGELL NARROWS AND TAKU GLACIERS.

F there were not so many more wonderful places in Alaska, Wrangell Narrows would give it a scenic fame, and make its fortune in the coming centuries when tourists and yachts will crowd these waters, and poets and seafaring novelists desert the Scotch coast for these northwestern isles. Instead of William Black's everlasting Oban, and Staffa, and Skye, and heroines with a burr in their speech, we will read of Kasa-an and Kaigan, Taku and Chilkat, and maidens who lisp in soft accents the deep, gurgling Chinook, or the older dialects of their races. Wrangell Narrows is a sinuous channel between mountainous islands, and for thirty miles it is hard to determine which one of the perpendicular walls at the end of the strait will finally stop us with its impassable front. There are dangerous ledges and rocks, and strong tides rushing through this pass, and the average depth of from four to twelve fathoms is very shallow water for Alaska. Although long known and used by the Indians and the Hudson Bay Company's traders, it was not considered a safe inside passage; and as Vancouver had not explored it, and there were not any complete charts, it was little traversed by regular commerce. After United States occupation,

and the increased travel to Sitka, the perils of Cape Ommaney, off the south end of Baranoff Island, quite matched any dangers there might be in the unknown channel. Captain R. W. Meade, in command of the U. S. S. Saginaw, made a survey of the Narrows in 1869, and gradually the way through the ledges and flats and tide rips became better known. In 1884 Captain Coghlan, commander of the U. S. S. Adams carefully sounded and marked off the channel with stakes and buoys, and the navigators now only look for the favorable turn of the tide in going through the picturesque reaches.

Leaving Fort Wrangell in the afternoon, it was an enchanting trip up that narrow channel of deep waters, rippling between bold island shores and parallel mountain walls. Besides the clear, emerald tide, reflecting every tree and rock, there was the beauty of foaming cataracts leaping down the sides of snowcapped mountains, and the grandeur of great glaciers pushing down through sharp ravines, and dropping miniature icebergs into the water. Three glaciers are visible at once on the east side of the Narrows, the larger one extending back some forty miles, and measuring four miles across the front, that faces the water and the terminal moraine it has built up before it. The great glacier is known as Patterson Glacier, in honor of the late Carlisle Patterson, of the United States Coast Survey, and is the first in the great line of glaciers that one encounters along the Alaska coast. Under the shadow of a cloud the glacier was a dirty and uneven snow field, but touched by the last light of the sun it was a frozen lake of wonderland, shimmering with silvery lights, and showing a pale ethe

real green, and deep, pure blue, in all the rifts and crevasses in its icy front.

With the appearance of this first glacier, and the presence of ice floating in the waters around us, the conversation of all on board took a scientific turn, and facts, fancies, and wild theories about glacial origin and action were advanced that would have struck panic to any body of geologists. Being all laymen, there was no one to expound the mysteries and speak with final authority on any of these frozen and well-established truths; and we floundered about in a sea of suppositions, and were lost in a labyrinth of lame conclusions.

A long chain of snow-capped mountains slowly unrolled as the ship emerged from Wrangell Narrows, more glaciers were brought to view, and that strange granite monument, the "Devil's Thumb," as named by Commander Meade, signalled us from a mountain top.

Farther up, in Stephens Passage, floating ice tells of the great glaciers in Holkam or Soundoun Bay, and beside the one great Soundoun glacier flowing into the sea, there are three other glaciers hidden in the high-walled fiords that open from the bay. One of the first and most adventurous visitors to the Soundoun glacier was Captain J. W. White, of the Revenue Marine, who anchored the cutter Lincoln in the bay in 1868. Seeing a great arch or tunnel in the front of the glacier, he had his men row the small boat into the deep blue grotto, and they went a hundred feet down a crystalline corridor whose roof was a thousand feet thick. The colors, he said, were marvellous, and, like the galleries cut in the Alpine gla

ciers, showed fresh wonders with each advance. At the furthest point the adventurous boatmen poured out libations and drank to the spirits of the ice kingdom. In 1876 gold was discovered, and the Soundoun placers were the first ones worked in Alaska. Professor Muir visited the glacier and mines of Soundoun Bay in 1879, and at Shough, a camp in a valley at the head of the inlet, found miners at work with their primitive rockers and sluices. In 1880 these mines yielded $10,000, and the miners believed the bed of gold-bearing gravel inexhaustible. The discovery of gold at Juneau drew the most of them away, and the Soundoun placers have hardly been heard of in later years.

Winding north, through a broad channel with noble mountain ranges on either side, we passed the old Hudson Bay Company's trading post of Taku, and at mention of this name those who believe in the Asiatic origin of the Alaska Indians cried out in delighted surprise: "There is a Chinese city of the same name and spelled in the same way as thisTaku."

Reaching the mouth of Taku Inlet, into which the Taku River empties, the floating ice gave evidence of the great glaciers that lie within; and, following up this fiord for about fifteen miles to a great basin, we came suddenly in sight of three glaciers. One sloped down a steep and rather narrow ravine, and its front was hidden by another turn in the overlapping hills. The second one pushed down between two high mountains, and, resting its tongue on the water, dropped off the icebergs and cakes that covered the surface of the dull, gray-green water. The front

of this icy cliff stretched entirely across the half-mile gap between the mountains, and its face rose a hundred and two hundred feet from the water, every foot of it seamed, jagged, and rent with great fissures, in which the palest prismatic hues were flashing. As the tide fell, large pieces fell from this front, and avalanches of ice-fragments crashed down into the sea and raised waves that rocked our ship and set the icefloes grinding together. On the other point of the crescent of this bay there lay the largest glacier, an ice-field that swept down from two mountain gorges, and, spreading out in fan shape, descended in a long slope to a moraine of sand, pebbles, and boulders. Across its rolling front this glacier measured at least three miles, and the low, level moraine was one mile in width. The moraine's slope was so gradual that when the small boats were lowered and we started for shore, they grounded one hundred feet from the water-mark and there stuck until the passengers were taken off one by one in the lightest boat, and then carried over the last twenty feet of water in the sailors' arms. It was a time for old clothes, to begin with, and everyone wore their worst when they started off; but at the finish, when the same set waded through a quarter of a mile of sand and mineral mud left exposed by the falling tide, and were dumped into the boats by the sailors, a near relative would not have owned one of us. The landing of the glacier pilgrims was a scene worthy of the nimblest caricaturist, and sympathy welled up for the poor officers and sailors who shouldered stout men and women and struggled ashore through sinking mud and water. The burly captain picked out the slight