4 THE STIKINE RIVER IN 1898 



From Pt Highfield, at the end of Etolin island, a few miles 

 around shore from Ft Wrangell, one has a fine view of the impos- 

 ing entrance to the Stikine splendors, snow-capped mountains 

 towering above the evergreen headlands, and prolonged to west- 

 ward in that magnificent range that fronts the Alaska touristwhen 

 he emerges from Wrangell narrows. Vancouver's men reached 

 and named Pt Highfield ; yet those admirable explorers, sent to 

 the northwest coast expressly to find an unknown river, failed 

 to discover the Stikine when their boats were in its muddy out- 

 flow's they before failed to discover the Columbia and the Fraser, 

 and it was left for the American Captain Cleveland to discover 

 the Stikine in 1799. 



Crossing the flats at the broad river's mouth, where fishing 

 boats from the neighboring canneries were tending nets, and 

 skirting close to the forested slopes at the right, our steamer 

 followed along so near the banks that we breathed all the 

 fresh, earth}^ smells, the fragrance of wet wood, mosses, and 

 cedar plumes. Two miles within Pt Rothsay a little flat of in- 

 tensely green grass at a creek's mouth is landing place for the 

 canoes of those who go to visit the garnet ledge high up on the 

 steep cliff front and blast off fragments of the dark gray mica 

 slate dotted with big almandite garnets for the tourist market 

 at Ft Wrangell. 



Although the Stikine is such a swift river, its bed falling 540 

 feet between Glenora and Pt Rothsay, it is not deep save where 

 compressed in its canons. It wanders between its steep moun- 

 tain walls, cutting out islands from one densely forested bank 

 and the other, heaping driftwood on bars in midstream until 

 they form islands and their thickets change to cottonwood forests. 

 These islands are inundated each season and sometimes washed 

 away in unusual freshets, and then the debris accumulates in 

 other places and new islands divert the stream. Cottonwood 

 island, a first such forested bar, was a busy place last winter, 

 when steamers, canoes, and small boats, pushing through the 

 loose river ice of the flats, landed the Klondikers at the lower 

 end of the island, to begin their march over the solid ice that 

 extended unbroken from the further point of Cottonwood's 

 shores. Stikine City grew upon the snow ; there was wild spec- 

 ulation in town lots, and tents crowded in lines between the trees 

 and bushes, where sky-scraping business blocks were soon to 

 stand ; but the boom had burst by the time the frost was out of 

 the ground, and the vegetation of one Alaskan summer effaced 

 nearly all the traces of Stikine City's ground plan. Tales are 



