of mountaineers, and the most arrogant, treacherous. and turbulent of all the northwestern tribes, but their day is nearly passed. The early explorers— Krause, Everette and others-took this pass, and it was here that E. J. Glave first tried (in 1891) to take pack horses across the mountains, and succeeded so well as to show the feasibility of that method of carriage, which put a check upon the extortion and faithlessness of the Indian carriers. His account of his adventures in making this experiment, over bogs, wild rocky heights, snow fields, swift rivers and forest barriers, has been detailed in The Century Magazine for 1892, and should be read by all interested. "No matter how important your mission," Mr. Glave wrote, "your Indian carriers, though they have duly contracted to accompany you, will delay your departure till it suits their convenience, and any exhibition of impatience on your part will only remind them of your utter dependency on them; and then intrigue for increase of pay will at once begin. While en route they will prolong the journey by camping on the trail for two or three weeks, tempted by good hunting or fishing. In a land where the open season is so short, and the ways are so long, such delay is a tremendous drawback. Often the Indians will carry their loads some part of the way agreed on, then demand an

extravagant increase of pay or a goodly share of the white man's stores, and, failing to get either, will fling down their packs and return to their village, leaving their white employer helplessly stranded.

The usual charge for Indian carriers is $2 a day and board, and they demand the best fare and a great deal of it, so that the white man finds his precious stores largely wasted before reaching his destination. These facts are mentioned, not because it is now necessary to endure this extortion and expense, but to show how little dependence can be placed upon the hope of securing the aid of Indian packers in carrying the goods of prospectors or explorers elsewhere in the interior, and the great expense involved. This pass descends to a series of connected lakes leading down to Lake Labarge and thence by another stream to the Lewes; and it requires twelve days of pack-carrying-far more than is necessary on the other passes. As a consequence, this pass is now rarely used except by Indians going to the Aksekh river and the coast ranges northward.

Chilkoot, Taiya or Parrier Pass.-This is the pass that has been used since 1885 by the miners and others on the upper Yukon, and is still a route of travel. It starts from the head of canoe navigation on Taiya inlet, and follows up a stream valley, gradually leading to the divide, which

The first day's

is only 3,500 feet above the sea. march is to the foot of the ascent, and over a terrible trail, through heavy woods and along a steep, rocky and often boggy hillside, broken by several deep gullies. The ascent is then very abrupt and over huge masses of fallen rock or steep slippery surfaces of rock in place. At the actual summit, which for seven or eight miles is bare of trees or bushes, the trail leads through a narrow rocky gap, and the whole scene is one of the most complete desolation. Naked granite rocks, rising steeply to partly snowclad mountains on either side. Descending the inland or north slope is equally bad traveling, largely over wide areas of shattered rocks where the trail may easily be lost. The further valley contains several little lakes and leads roughly down to Lake Lindeman. The distance from Taiya is twenty-three and a half miles, and it is usually made in two days. Miners sometimes cross this pass in April, choosing fine weather, and then continue down the lakes on the ice to some point where they can conveniently camp and wait for the opening of navigation on the Yukon; ordinarily it is unsafe to attempt a return in the autumn later than the first of October.

Lake Lindeman is a long narrow piece of water navigable for boats to its foot, where a very bad river passage leads into the larger Lake Bennett, where

the navigation of the Yukon really begins.

"The Chilkoot Pass," writes one of its latest travelers, "is difficult, even dangerous, to those not possessed of steady nerves. Toward the summit there is a sheer ascent of 1,000 feet, where a slip would certainly be fatal. At this point a dense mist overtook us, but we reached Lake Lindeman—the first of a series of five lakes-in safety, after a fatiguing tramp of fourteen consecutive hours through half-melted Here we had to build our own boat, first

snow.

felling the timber for the purpose. The journey down the lakes occupied ten days, four of which were passed in camp on Lake Bennett, during a violent storm, which raised a heavy sea. The rapids followed. One of these latter, the "Grand Canyon," is a mile long, and dashes through walls of rock from 50 to 100 feet high; six miles below are the "White Horse Rapids," a name which many fatal accidents have converted into the "Miner's Grave." But snags and rocks are everywhere a fruitful source of danger on this river, and from this rapid downward scarcely a day passed that one did not see some cairn or wooden cross marking the last resting place of some drowned pilgrim to the land of gold. The above is a brief sketch of the troubles that beset the Alaskan gold prospector-troubles that, although unknown in the eastern states and Canada, have for