Travels in Alaska 



took great pains to pull wool over our eyes, and made 

 haste to say that if "ice and sceneries" were what we 

 were looking for, this was a very poor, dull place. 

 There were "big rocks, gulches, and sceneries" of a 

 far better quality down the coast on the way to Wran- 

 gell. He and his party were prospecting, he said, but 

 thus far they had found only a few colors and they 

 proposed going over to Admiralty Island in the 

 morning to try their luck. 



In the morning, however, when the prospectors 

 were to have gone over to the island, we noticed a 

 smoke half a mile back on a large stream, the outlet 

 of the glacier we had seen the night before, and an 

 Indian told us that the white men were building a big 

 log house up there. It appeared that they had found 

 a promising placer mine in the moraine and feared we 

 might find it and spread the news. Daylight revealed 

 a magnificent fiord that brought Glacier Bay to mind. 

 Miles of bergs lay stranded on the shores, and the 

 waters of the branch fiords, not on Vancouver's chart, 

 were crowded with them as far as the eye could reach. 

 After breakfast we set out to explore an arm of the 

 bay that trends southeastward, and managed to force 

 a way through the bergs about ten miles. Farther 

 we could not go. The pack was so close no open water 

 was in sight, and, convinced at last that this part of my 

 work would have to be left for another year, we 

 struggled across to the west side of the fiord and 

 camped. 



I climbed a mountain next morning, hoping to 

 gain a view of the great fruitful glaciers at the head of 



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