VANCOUVER AND BEYOND 227 



locks with positive conviction " Helo ! dry land ! Hiyou salmon ; 

 maybe they walk over them ! " 



Thought and talk here ran on salmon and gold and gold and 

 salmon, and very little else was discussed ; the wealth so huge a 

 run of fish was to put into the cannery owners' pockets, and 

 those far greater riches to be thawed and scraped out of the 

 frozen ground in the lately discovered gold regions of the arctic 

 Klondyke. 



Boats from Seattle and Victoria for Alaska were crowded with 

 sanguine miners anxious to have their share of the golden 

 harvest already being gathered by those hardy pioneers who had 

 crossed the mountains and the Arctic wastes, packing on their 

 backs their food and all worldly goods long before Dawson as a 

 " city " was thought of. The boats stopped at Wrangel, a 

 heaven-abandoned spot, described to me by a fellow passenger 

 as consisting of two cesspools and an open drain, and Juneau 

 with Douglass Island opposite home of the famous Treadwell 

 gold mines. 



Here, in the Lynn Channel, in a most comfortable Treadwell 

 launch, we tried our hands at halibut fishing, our non-success 

 with the fish being amply made up for by an excellent Treadwell 

 lunch. There was plenty of snow and ice on the hills around, 

 and a good deal of floating ice, which made it very cold for the 

 fingers holding the long deep-sea lines, which we hoped would 

 attach themselves to one of the 175-lb. monsters said to be 

 about in these seas. The captain's son, a little boy and keen 

 fisherman, alone had a pull, so suddenly and so forcibly that he 

 was only saved from joining the fish by the strength of the back 

 end of his trousers, which luckily held under a very severe 

 strain. 



Scagway, the terminus of the journey by sea to the gold 

 regions of the interior, had for some time been groaning under 

 the rule of an American outlaw and his band of ruffians, ably 

 assisted by the United States Marshal, who preyed on those 

 going to the gold fields and on those coming out, frequently 

 adding murder to robbery. However, on the day but one before our 

 arrival the leader, Soapy Smith by name, had been killed by the 

 outraged citizens, whose patience had at last come to an end, 

 shot by the leader of the townspeople at an open-air meeting 

 which Smith had tried to break up, but not before the latter had 



