364 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
The Yukon territory is most easily reached by steamer from Van- 
couver through the lovely forest-clad islands and straits on the coast 
of British Columbia and the United States coastal belt of southern 
Alaska. In the last part of this most interesting voyage of nearly . 
1,000 miles the route lies along the Lynn Canal, a narrow arm of the 
sea that reminds a Scot of Loch Linnhe, but is bordered by higher 
mountains with snowy crests, and glaciers creeping down the glens 
to near sea level. The Lynn Canal is a straight fiord about 85 miles 
long, but it is only the prolongation northward into the mountains 
of the Chatham Strait, a deep submerged valley among large islands, 
whose whole length is 250 miles. The width varies from 3 to 6 miles, 
and the depth from 1,000 to 2,500 feet. Although this narrow inlet 
penetrates so far up into the mainland, its head, with that of all the 
other fiords on the coast north of the Portland Canal, now belongs 
to the United States. The latter claimed it, and Lord Alverstone as 
chairman decided in their favor and against Canada in the boundary 
dispute whose settlement caused so much bitterness in the Dominion 
in 1903. The head of the Lynn Canal lies at Skagway, the gateway 
to the Yukon, a wretched little town with decayed wooden houses 
and grass-grown streets, the scene of many robberies, riots, and 
murders at the time of the gold rush, which the police authorities 
outside of British territory had neither the power nor the energy to 
control. Skagway is not and can never be of much use to the United 
States, except as an obstruction to Canadian progress, but it might be 
of some advantage to the vast Canadian hinterland less than 20 
miles inland. If, at some future time, the United States Government 
ever wished a cheap opportunity to show a little practical good will 
to their progressive northern neighbor, they might advantageously 
dispose of the head of the Lynn Canal, and thus give Canada one 
much needed outlet along a strip of some 500 miles of seacoast from 
which the Dominion has been cut off by the award of the lord chief 
justice. 
Skagway is surrounded on three sides by a plateau of steep and 
rugged mountains through which to the north there are two trails, 
by the White Horse and the Chilcoot passes, respectively. Up fess 
wild and difficult ravines thousands of hardy adventurers trekked and 
struggled with their heavy packs, tools, and tents, in the mad rush 
to the expected El Dorado, 500 miles away. Soon eee the gold was 
found in sufficient Gitdantitien? a 3-foot-gauge mountain railway was 
laid up the White Pass (fig.1). It runs from Skagway to the summit 
at 2,887 feet abovesea level and on to Lake Bennett, a distance of 
about 40 miles. It traverses a wild, ice-worn, granitic plateau, 
strewn with moraines and sprinkled over with -lakes at the foot of 
bare snowy peaks, 5,000 to 6,000 feet in height, reminding one of 
parts of the west coast of Sutherland or of the interior of Norway. 
