2 THE STIKINE RIVER IN 1898 



tion, 125 miles from Ft Wrangell, and Telegraph Creek, 12 miles 

 beyond Glenora, are starting points on the trail that leads through 

 an open, hilly, and grassy country for 145 miles to Lake Teslin, 

 whence there are no interruptions to boat navigation to Dawson 

 City, a distance of 526 miles. Bills were introduced in the Cana- 

 dian Parliament giving rights to convert the trail into a wagon 

 road, and a great land grant was to be conferred on the builders 

 of a railway. The railway to Lake Teslin was to be completed 

 by September, and this " all-Canadian route " appealed to many, 

 and especially to British fortune-seekers. A trail from Ashcroft, 

 on the Fraser river, reaches the Stikine at Telegraph Creek, and 

 many who ventured on this longest of all the land routes toward 

 the Klondike district met with disastrous adventures in the 

 great woods. 



Ft Wrangell, Alaska, where the ocean steamers landed the all- 

 Canadian army of gold-seekers, was crowded all winter and 

 revived its prosperity of thirty years before. A "boom'" of 

 extravagant proportions was well on in March and collapsed by 

 the end of May with distressing results, when the failure of the 

 railway land grant measure resulted from the many political 

 entanglements and jealousies at the Canadian capital. Ft Wran- 

 gell real estate took on absurd values while the boom lasted. 

 The tide line was edged for a quarter of a mile with flimsy pine 

 buildings and fragmentary footwalks on stilts; tents crowded 

 upon every vacant spot and whitened the hillside. A score of 

 saloons ran wide open, despite Alaska's severe prohibition laws ; 

 the most barefaced gambling games and swindling schemes were 

 conducted on every side without concealment, and this '" boom- 

 town " of 6,000 inhabitants displayed all the worst features of 

 such lapses in civilization. Without water supply, drainage, or 

 sanitary measures of any kind, with all refuse dumped into the 

 space before the first row of water-fronting buildings, and with 

 the butcher slaughtering in the open before his shop, Ft Wran- 

 gell, in July, was more offensive, parading more filth and smells 

 to the ground space, than any Chinese city I have visited. Great 

 wharves and warehouses were built to accommodate the ocean 

 and river travel, and the restrictions and complications of Cana- 

 dian and American customs regulations in the bonding, trans- 

 shipment, and interport carrying trade were endless. The decla- 

 ration of war between the United States and Spain, even the cer- 

 tainty of it for some weeks beforehand, brought the Klondike 

 rush to an abrupt end, the adventurous and restless Americans 



