416 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



current, which runs at an average rate of eight miles an hour, are 

 continually caving down, undermined, and washed away. So sudden 

 and precipitate are these landslides, sometimes, that they have almost 

 destroyed whole trading expeditions of the Russians and natives, who 

 barely had time to escape with their lives as the earthy avalanches 

 rolled down upon the river's edge and into its resistless current. 



Above the delta large spruce and fir-trees, aspens, poplars, and 

 plats of alders and willows grow abundantly on the banks ; but 

 they do not extend far back from the river on either side into any por- 

 tions of the country, which is low and marshy, and which embraces 

 so large a proportion of the entire landscape. Small larch-trees are 

 also interspersed. The river is filled with a multitude of long, nar- 

 row islands, all timbered as the banks are, and which are connected 

 one with the other by sand and gravel bars, that are always dry and 

 fully exposed at low-water stages. Immense piles of bleached and 

 splintered drift-logs are raised on the upper ends of these islands, 

 having lodged there at intervals when high water was booming 

 down. 



Between Anvik and Paimoot are many lofty clay cliffs, entirely 

 made up of clean, pure earth of different bright colors red, yellow, 

 straw-colored, and white, with many intermediate shades. The 

 Yukon runs down from its remote sources at the Stickeen divide 

 in British Columbia, down through a wild, semi- wooded country, a 

 succession of lakes and lakelets, through a region almost devoid of 

 human life. That extensive area, wherein we find such scant or ut- 

 ter absence of population, is, south of the Yukon, very densely tim- 

 bered with spruce-trees on the mountains, and with poplars, birch, 

 willow, along the courses of the stream and margins of the lakes. 

 Its immediate recesses only are occasionally penetrated by roving 

 parties of Indian hunters, who now and then leave the great river 

 and the Tannanah for that purpose. It is a silent, gloomy wilder- 

 ness. To the northward of the Yukon this variety in timber still 

 continues ; indeed, it reaches as far into the Arctic Circle and tow- 

 ard the ocean there as the seaward slopes of those low and rolling 

 mountains extend, which rise in irregular ridges trending northeast 

 and southwest. These hills are between one hundred and one hun- 

 dred and fifty miles from the banks of the Kvichpak. Beyond this 

 divide and water-shed of the northern tributaries of the Yukon a 

 forest seldom appears in any case whatsoever, except where a low, 

 straggling spur of hills stretches itself down to the shores of an 



