284 BEGINS CATALOGUE OF CANADIAN BIRDS 



mountain at Dawson, a thousand feet above the city, I found the 

 stumps averaged over a foot in diameter and this condition was 

 observed in all parts of the country where I travelled, showing 

 that the real cause of the frozen ground was the moss, and ob- 

 lique rays of the sun from a low altitude. I saw immense bones 

 in various places which were the remains of the mastodon that 

 formerly occupied the country and, always, these bones would 

 be found in the bed rock of a creek, showing that the animals 

 had lived in a period long before the present one. I saw how it 

 was that these cattle actually lived on what I found covered the 

 most of the country, a shrubby birch tree that they seemed to 

 have eaten as the cattle of the east, at the present day, eat the 

 branches of the maple tree, which, in the early days, was called 

 browsing; that is, the mastodon lived in the winter on browse. 

 Geologists state that a continental glacier never existed there, as 

 the snow-fall was so light that a few days of spring took 

 off the snow and, hence, its depth was never great and the cattle 

 could live out most of the time. 



To sum up, I found that, wherever the soil was opened up and 

 the moss taken off, the sun thawed the soil sufficiently to produce 

 most wonderful crops. On the islands in the Klondike, I saw the 

 largest cabbage, lettuce and various roots that I had ever seen 

 anywhere, and the growth was so great that it was incompre- 

 hensible to me. In talking with the residents, I found that all 

 the nonsense I had heard in the east about the Klondike was, 

 literally, "travellers' tales," to make the people think that there 

 were such enormous difficulties to be overcome to reach Dawson 

 and to contend with while you were there. 



On my return to Ottawa, I wrote out my report, which was 

 published, and copies sent to Dawson. The people there were so 

 pleased and well satisfied with the information that I had given 

 them and the favorable report I had made to the Government, 

 that, when they held an exhibition of the products of the Klondike 

 the next autumn, the five daily neswpapers, that then existed at 

 Dawson, took my report and interleaved it with the photographs 

 of the products that were exhibited, and these caused such a sensa- 

 tion, that a gentleman in New York, much interested in Alaska, 



