CHAPTER IV 



THE STICKEEN RIVER 



THE most interesting of the short excursions we 

 made from Fort Wrangell was the one up the 

 Stickeen River to the head of steam navigation. 

 From Mt. St. Elias the coast range extends in a 

 broad, lofty chain beyond the southern boundary of 

 the territory, gashed by stupendous canons, each of 

 which carries a lively river, though most of them are 

 comparatively short, as their highest sources lie in the 

 icy solitudes of the range within forty or fifty miles 

 of the coast. A few, however, of these foaming, roar- 

 ing streams — the Alsek, Chilcat, Chilcoot, Taku, 

 Stickeen, and perhaps others — head beyond the 

 range with some of the southwest branches of the 

 Mackenzie and Yukon. 



The largest side branches of the main-trunk canons 

 of all these mountain streams are still occupied by 

 glaciers which descend in showy ranks, their massy, 

 bulging snouts lying back a little distance in the 

 shadows of the walls, or pushing forward among the 

 cotton-woods that line the banks of the rivers, or even 

 stretching all the way across the main canons, com- 

 pelling the rivers to find a channel beneath them. 



The Stickeen was, perhaps, the best known of the 

 rivers that cross the Coast Range, because it was the 

 best way to the Mackenzie River Cassiar gold-mines. 

 It is about three hundred and fifty miles long, and 



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