ALASKA. 2 1 



cloak of scrubby willows and rank grasses. The banks, wherever they are 

 lifted above the reddish current, are continually undermined and washed away 

 by the flood, and so sudden and precipitate are these landslides at times that 

 traders and natives have barely escaped with their lives. For loo miles up, 

 through an intricate labyrinth of tides, blind and misleading channels, sloughs, 

 and swamps, we pass through the same drearv, desolate region, until the higher 

 ground is first reached at Kusilvak, and until the bluffs at Andreievsky and at 

 Chatinakh give evidence of the fact that all the land in Alaska is not under 

 water. It is watered, however, here, there, and everywhere, and impresses one 

 with the idea of a vast inland sea, which impression holds good even as far up 

 the river as 700 or 800 miles, where there are many points, even far in the 

 interior, at which this river spans a breadth of 20 miles from shore to shore. 

 As we advance toward its source we are not surprised, when we view the character 

 of the country through which it rolls, at the vast quantity of water in its chan- 

 nel. It would seem as though the land itself, drained by the river on either 

 side within Alaska, were a sponge, into which all rain and moisture fi-om the 

 heavens and melting snow are absorbed, never finding their release by evapora- 

 tion, but conserved to drain, by myriads and myriads of rivulets, the great 

 watery highway of the Yukon. I noticed a striking evidence of the peculiar 

 nonconductive properties of the tundra mosses, or swale, last summer in pass- 

 ing through many of the thousand and one lakes and lakelets peculiar to that 

 region, where the ice had bound up the moss and overhanging water growth at 

 the edges of the lakes. In the breaking up and thawing out of summer that ice 

 failed to melt, and the renewed growth of the season of vegetation, reaching 

 out in turn from this icy border, will again prevent thawing, and so on until 

 shallow pools and flats are changed into fixed masses of ice hidden from view. 



The Yukon is formed by the junction of the Lewis and Pelly 

 rivers. Mr. Wilson, in his "Guide to the Yukon Gold Fields," 

 published at Seattle, 1895, gives the length of the Yukon as 2,044 

 miles, and says that it is navigable the entire distance for tlat- 

 bottom boats with a capacity of from 400 to 500 tons. 



The White River, a portion of whose waters flows through 

 Alaskan territory, empties into the Yukon on British territory. 

 Forty Mile Creek, Birch and Beaver creeks join the river between 

 Fort Yukon and Dawson, a British town. The following descrip- 

 tion of the topography of the Yukon River below Fort Yukon 

 (966 miles from mouth) is quoted by Mr. Petroff from the 



