4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



important gold location on Bonanza Creek in August of the year 

 previous. 



On the 24th of July of the past year I found myself on the prin- 

 cipal thoroughfare of Skaguay, the ubiquitous Broadway, contem- 

 plating a journey to the new north. The route of travel had been 

 determined for me in part by the non-arrival at Seattle of the ex- 

 pected steamers from the mouth of the Yukon River, and by that 

 woeful lack of knowledge regarding " conditions " which so fre- 

 quently distinguishes steamship companies. It was to-be, therefore, 

 the overland route, and from Skaguay it was merely the alternative 

 between the White Pass and the Chilkoot Pass or Dyea trails. The 

 two start from points barely four miles apart, cross their summits at 

 very nearly the same distance from one another, and virtually ter- 

 minate at the same body of inland water, Lake Lindeman, the navi- 

 gable head of the great Yukon River. A more than generous supply 

 of summer heat gave little warning of that bleak and severe interior 

 with which the world had been made so well familiar during the 

 last twelvemonth, and from which we were barely six hundred miles 

 distant ; nor did the character of the surroundings betray much of an 

 approach to the Arctic Circle. Mountains of aspiring elevations, six 

 thousand to seven thousand feet, most symmetrically separated off into 

 pinnacles and knobs, and supporting here and there enough of snow 

 to form goodly glaciers, look down upon the narrow trough which to- 

 day is the valley of the Skaguay River. At the foot of this ancient 

 fiord lies the boom town of Skaguay. Charming forests, except 

 where the hand of man has leveled the work of Nature to suit the re- 

 quirements of a constructing railway, yet clothe the mountain slopes 

 and fill in the gap that lies between them, shadowing the dense herb- 

 age and moss which almost everywhere form an exquisite carpeting 

 to the underlying rock. The ear may catch the strains of a few mos- 

 quitoes, or the mellow notes of the robin or thrush, but rising far 

 above these in the majesty of tone and accent is the swish of the 

 tumbling cataracts which bring the landscape of Norway to America. 

 Man, it is claimed, is much the same the world over; but there is a 

 limitation. The second habitation of white man in Skaguay was 

 established less than a year before my visit; yet at that time, pre- 

 sumably to meet the demands of a resident population of nearly five 

 thousand, and of the wandering hordes pressing to the interior, the 

 destructive hand of the advertiser had already inscribed on the walls 

 of rock, in characters twenty feet or more in height, and sufficiently 

 elevated to make them nearly the most conspicuous elements of the 

 landscape, the glories of cigars, the value of mental and physical 

 specifics, and of other abominations which were contrived to fatten 

 the Yankee pocket. 



