CHAPTER III 



WRANGELL ISLAND AND ALASKA SUMMERS 



WRANGELL ISLAND is about fourteen miles 

 long, separated from the mainland by a nar- 

 row channel or fiord, and trending in the direction of 

 the flow of the ancient ice-sheet. Like all its neigh- 

 bors, it is densely forested down to the water's edge 

 with trees that never seem to have suffered from 

 thirst or fire or the axe of the lumberman in all their 

 long century lives. Beneath soft, shady clouds, with 

 abundance of rain, 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 sun-days enable them to ripen their cones and 

 send myriads of seeds flying every autumn to insure 

 the permanence of the forests and feed the multitude 

 of animals. 



The Wrangell village was a rough place. No mining 

 hamlet in the placer gulches of California, nor any 

 backwoods village I ever saw, approached it in pic- 

 turesque, 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 



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