10 THE STIKINE RIVER IN 1898 



stranded on bars and banks — enough fuel gone to waste to supply 

 all the river boats and the people of a great city ; and each day 

 the remorseless current cut further into some wooded bank and 

 sent other tall cottonwoods to snags and driftwood. One longed 

 to make a grand bonfire of these unsightly skeletons strewing 

 every bar ; but the two snag-boats at work on the river had too 

 much real and necessary work to do. In some stretches the 

 banks seemed to be upholding groves of elms, where the river 

 had washed away the front ranks of cottonwoods and brought 

 to view the tall elm trees that had had to struggle upward in 

 the crowded forest without lower branches, spreading out in 

 great arching crowns that had all the grace of New England 

 elms. 



There were novelties in navigation on board the Ogilvie that 

 gave great interest to the Stikine trip, as the " swift-water cap- 

 tain " sought channels and fought the stiff currents that charged 

 around bends and combed against the bows of the river boat 

 as if she were at sea. He " read the water '' by a dozen signs, 

 even the different wheezes, groans, and panting of the engine 

 declaring the depth of water to his trained ear, and the swell 

 rolling away at either side another sign telling the depth as cer- 

 tainly as a lead plummet. At each riffle he steered into the 

 midst of the foam where the current ran strongest, and in some 

 of these places, where the river raced in a narrow channel, the 

 water stood higher in midstream than at either bank, and the 

 boat rode high on the turtle-backed flood. 



Just below the dreaded Little canon the Ogilvie crept up be- 

 side the anchored coal-boat and took on more fuel. We could 

 look straight up the quarter-mile rock flume, whose sides rise 

 perpendicularly for less than 100 feet and then slope away into 

 wooded foothills, far above which towers the great sky-line of the 

 Sawback range, the continental divide. A white disk shot out 

 from a tree branch overhanging the canon's' mouth as signal to 

 our boat that the way was clear to ascend, the reverse of the 

 disk showing a black warning to any boat at the upper end that 

 it must not enter, since two boats cannot pass in that narrow 

 cut, where the broad river is compressed and turned on edge. 

 The incline of foaming water between jagged rock walls that ap- 

 proach within 60 and 100 feet of each other was running with a 

 mild current — only a little over 10 miles an hour that day — and 

 with full steam and forced draught our boat was able to climb 

 the hill of running water in thirteen minutes. In flood times 



