Nov. 37, 1897.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
423 
boulder waiting for what migM happen and what we could 
not flee from 
Billy bad loosened a tiny rock, it in turn loosened otbers 
and the b'g boulder followed— we bad Just space enough to 
■clear" as it went by. This incident, common enouiih in 
mountain chmbing. took all the "starch" out nf the other 
boys, and they shook like the mountain aspen after it was all 
over— it might so easily have landed us over the cliffs you 
know. 
"I'm going back, it's too risky," said Bluie. "So'm I " 
said Billy. "Well, fellows," I remarked, "you know we 
started for the tip top, and i'm going up there just to look at 
the world. You can go back if you want to, and J'll go on 
alone. Kind of a habit with me to get what I start for, you 
know, and I reckon I'll stand upon the peak if any white 
man can do the trick." "Better come back," they coun- 
seled. "Nope." 
That settle d it. They started back, and I waited until 
they should be far enough away to be out of the reach of 
any rocks that I might .start, and then I climbed on. It was 
certainly a rough and not a little dangerous climb. In some ■ 
places 1 clung with my hands alone for a few fteb; in others 
I risked my weight against the roofs of ttie pine mos?, the 
hold the moss had on the smooth rock; it was just like cross- 
ing a steep house roof, by clintrioe with the friction of your 
weight against the shingles, only if I had started to slide I 
probably would have been going yet. 
All this went by though,'^ and I reached the crest of the 
peak. It was a mass of broken rock, as thougb some mighty 
force had shook the mountain and left it a brokm heap of 
rock. Od the highfst point I sat down and looked around- 
studied ihe world below me. 
A d02!'=n little glaciers were in sight, and the steep sides of 
the mountain looked very much flittened. On each side a 
deep valley wound away into the heart of the range, and a 
tiny ribbon of silver wound its length among the blue 
shadows of the pines that peopled the valleys. Bnowbanks 
piled up against the rocky c'iffs everywhere, but always on 
the north side, whfre they hid from the tun. Far to the 
east, the baM outlines of the Cascades formpd a saw-edged 
horiZ(m. seemingly on my own level. Mt Racier stood up 
into the sky just as cold, just as white, just as huge as it did 
from salt water level. Such a beautiful jewel 'set in the 
chain of giant mountaius, and as prominent as a flashioT 
diamond against the dull sheen of ffold. Mt. Baker, Stt 
Helen, Adams, Hoed and the Three Sisters, all reared their 
snowy bulk at different points, and seemed to be still many 
feet higher than my 10,000ft resting-place. 
Mountains, mountains everywhere, in seameii and serried 
ranks, ranges that ran amuck when the world was young 
and hardened there to wail the crack of doom. Far to the 
west the blue waters of the Pacifl : sparkled in the sunlio-ht 
and flashed with a sheen of reflected beams. ° 
At my very feet seemingly, the many bays and inlets of 
Paget Sound were spread out like a child's playground— a 
map in flat relief, I could see a queer little place that looked 
as if some one had rubbed out some of the blue color that I 
knew was timber on my map, then 1 found two or three 
more and there was a dirty, smoky looking cloud just over 
each pldce— then I knew that 1 saw Seattle, Tacoma, Port 
Townsend and Olympia. each a busy city.— yet each only a 
place rubbed out of the blue. 
How quf er the world is— viewed from the land of peaks 
and glaciers, the country of the silence. I sat there a long 
time, far up in the air— above the country of the elk, above 
the level where the clouds play tag with the treetops. above 
the lice of the eagle's fl ght, right in the lantlof solitude, the 
country of the silence— and as I sat there the world spread 
out before me, flat, yet curving away in every direction, even 
showing the rounding in the jagged range of the cascades 
that came from out the north and disappeared into the south 
Iha<l many thouerhts, and it seemed that men were verv 
small— very small when one looks at them from this country 
Of the silence. 
I saw a ship on the water and it was only a tiny speck 
with a big cloud of black smoke— as big as your hand 
trailing along behind. I saw a dirty spot in the air and it 
traveled from the rubbed-out place on my map that 1 knew 
was Tacoma to the rubbed-out place that was Seattle, and 1 
knew it was 10:30 A. M. in Seattle, and that the eastern 
mail had finished its race across the map— the train was in 
on time. I read the doings of men whom I could not see on 
my map because they were too small, and I could only read 
the sign they made in the air, it said : "Busy, busy, busy." 
The sun was in the south when I stood up and looked for 
a way down again, A marmot— they live m the silent coun- 
try—whistled and scuttled away among the rocks as he saw 
this new intruder in his domain. The eagle he ever watched 
for, but not for this queer man who could not fly, and he 
was astonished and said so from the shadow of nis burrow. 
Down I clambered, straight toward the black lake in the 
crater 1,000ft. bflow, simply because I could go in no other 
direction. 1 saw our camp there among the boulders by the 
lake and saw Billy go across the moss to the glacier— he 
looked like an ant on a sandpile. 
Soon I had to uncoil my rope and loop it over a point of 
rock and slide down, then loop it again. Wtien I came to 
the last shelf I was still 30ff. abDve the big snowbank against 
the foot of the clilT, standing on a smootb'ledge with nothing 
in sight to loop the rope ar. und— not a blessed thing to hilch 
on to so I could go on down. 1 couldn't get back, either 
and I couldn't go sideways, because the shelf fell away into 
a smooth cliff. I was out of sight and hearing of camp, and 
those bare cliffs leave no trail— especially when one travels 
with a rope. I didn't just exactly see how I was going to 
reach camp in time for dinner, sol lit my pipe and sat down 
and let my feet hang over, so they would get used to it if I 
had to jump. 
I smoked, and then walked the length of that bit of a rocky 
shelf, thinking, perhaps. I wouldn't look much bigger to a 
man over in Seattle than he did to me, and I couldn't see 
him at all on the map. I concluded I'd have to depend on 
myself to get down, or stay until my wings grew, and about 
then is when I saw a very little crevice— not very big— but 
I thought the prospecting pick might get a grip in the°e and 
I could loop the rope over it so I could slide to the snowbank 
below. 
I got into camp all right after a few more slides and tum- 
bles on (,he snowbanks and slippery places on the mossy side 
hiU— you cannot travel there without a prospectino' pick 
very handy, and I left mine jambed into the crack in the 
rocks, 80 or 40ft. above the snowbank, because I couldn't 
reach back and get it after I got off that measly little shelf 
Maybe some of the people who are to follow us on this old 
world will find it and call it a relic of prehistoric man, who 
must have had wingi to get up there in the country of the 
silence. El Commakcho, 
■ THE CHESTNUT RIDGE. 
And Along Its Foot.— IX. 
About Nov. 1, before or after, in former years always we 
had a period of several days of delightful weather with 
peculiarities of its own of such a character as to entitle it 
to be regarded as a distinct season, "Indian Summer." 
Happening about All Saints' Day, the pious inhabitants of 
Canada called it the "Summer of All Saints." Usually it 
was preceded by a brief period of cold, blustering weather, 
which was known as "Squaw Winter." We still have re- 
turns of Indian summer, though I think not so regularly 
as in former years, or so distinctively pronounced. The 
causes of this peculiar "spell of weather" being on the de- 
cline, a waning effect must naturally ensue. 
In a little volume of essays, "Country Days," by my old 
friend James M. Swauk, now of Philadelphia, if not 
formerly an inhabitant of the Chestnut Ridge, at least a 
dweller "along its foot," in speaking of this sweet summer' 
of All Saints, remarks: "The characteristics of Indian sum- 
mer, when it appears in all its glory, are a mild and genial 
temperature, gentle southwestern breezes, unusual bright- 
ness of the sun, extreme brilliancy of the moon, a clear 
blue sky, sometimes half hidden by a veil of gray smoke; 
dawns redder than scarlet, and sunsets laden with golden 
fleeces, forests all aglow with the fire of richly-tinted 
leaves, a holy stillness throughout all of nature's walks, 
and an intuitive sense in every devout soul of God's good- 
ness to his ungrateful children." These are the days of 
which Bryant sings: 
"When the sound of droppinf; nuts is heard. 
Though all the leaves are still. 
And twinble in the sranky light 
The waters of the rJIl." 
Mr. Swauk adduces two theories, assigned by different 
writer.'?, to account for the occurrence of this season. One 
is to the effect that in the month of September the water 
in the higher latitudes begins to congeal, and in doing so 
a vast amount of latent heat is dispersed through the 
atmosphere. There are at the same time two sets of warm 
air currents flowing— one from the torrid zone northward, 
and the other from the polar regions southward. 
"These two currents meet about midway in the temper- 
ate zone, near the 45th parallel of north latitude, and in 
the co'lision the warm, condensed current in some meas- 
ure descends. This affords a solution, in some measure, 
of the warmth, as well as of the calmness, the softness and 
the dryness of the air of Indian summer." The other 
theory is that the first severe frosts of autumn put a sudden 
check to the immense vegetable perspiration that has 
been going on all summer, and this preserves the heat of 
the atmosphere by diminishing the radiation of heat that 
takes place more slowly in dry than in moist air. 
"There is a sudden and universal diminution of the 
moisture that was given out from the leaves of trees and 
other plants before the frost had destroyed them; for the 
evaporation caused by the drying of fallen leaves and 
herbage is comparatively slight, and ceases after a few 
hours' exposure to the sun. The atmosphere being dry, 
and the radiation of heat proportionally small in quantity, 
all these circumstances, if no unusual atmospheric disturb- 
ances occur Irom any other hidden cause, unite in produc- 
ing a sudden and universal accumulation of heat." As 
Mr. Swauk observes, these explanations do not account 
for the other characteristics of Indian summer— the smoky 
condition of the atmosphere and the redness of the sky at 
this season. 
The cause is, no doubt, found in the decay of the forest 
leaves. All the phenomena seem to indicate this. Vege- 
table decay, we are told, is but a species of slow combus- 
tion; and the same chemical changes are brought about, 
whether the process of combustion is a rapid or a tardy 
one. This will account for the slight haziness of the 
atmosphere and the warm air of Indian summer. As the 
forests are being cleared away, the partial or the entire 
failure of Indian summer must eventually come about. 
All the fruition of the year seemed to gather itself up in 
this delightful season. Then the corn was cut and husked, 
and often the yellow ears lay in great heaps in the fields, 
interspersed with the golden pumpkins; the cider mills 
were busy in the orchards; the sound of the flail was 
heard in the barns; the cheerful voice of chanticleer was 
borne afar on the quiet air; the thistle-down, "the ghost 
of flowers," floated lightly through the narrow valleys; the 
beating of the pheasants echoed from the hillsides; the 
occasional crack of the sportsman's gun was heard in the 
woodland, where the squirrels were frisking and barking. 
Indian summer was the breathing spell of the year. The 
forces of nature that had brought to maturity the promises 
of spring, seemed to be lying in calm restfulness after their 
labors. There was an unwonted dreaminess, a languor of 
spirit in keeping with the soft haziness of the atmosphere 
that lay upon the landscape. It was a time for reflection 
and thougbtfulness. What man could sit down in this 
calm season among these rural sights and sounds, and not 
experience a feeling of gratitude that he was permitted so 
much as to live. "There were times," says Micah Clarke, 
"as I rose up with my mind full of the noble poetry and 
glanced over the fair slope of the countryside, with the 
gleaming sea beyond it, and the purple outline of the Isle 
of Wight upon the horizon, when it would be borne in 
upon nie that the Being who created all this was not the 
possession of one sect or another, or of this nation or that, 
but was the kindly Father of every one of the little chil- 
dren whom he had let loose on this fair playground." 
Somehow this seems a finer theology than we sometimes 
hear from the pulpit. 
For all its balmy airs, its bright skies, its softened land- 
scape, the Indian summer is not a period of exhilaration. 
It arouses none of the feelings of buoyancy that character- 
ize the month of May and early June. Then all nature is 
full of promise. Bud and blossom and leaf, the purling of 
bropks and the songs of birds, all join in a mrmm coi'de, to 
which the heart cheerfully responds. But Indian summer 
has a rather depressing influence upon the mind. It is 
suggestive of somber reflections as we walk among the 
fallen leaves and the dry grass, and feel that the end of 
the year is near at hand. Tne flight of ticne is a common 
theme of the preacher and the novelist, and the recur- 
rence of stated periods is always impressive. The anni- 
versary that the youth hails with pleasure, to the elderly 
person becomes a sad reminder of departed years and the 
chilly monitor of the approaching end. 
The Indian summer was doubtless so called because it 
was the season when the Indian women gathered their 
harvests of maize. It is a great mistake to imagine that 
the Indian depended mainly on the product of the chase 
for his support. He resorted to the woods for his supply 
of flesh provisions and in case of failure of other food; but 
the primitive red man was first of all an agriculturist. He 
raised immense crops of com; and the reader of our early 
annals will recall more than one instance when the early 
white settlers were saved from starvation by the timely 
supply of corn from the stores of the Indians. On Nov. 
16, 1620, only four or five days after the landing at Ply- 
mouth, the first expedition of the Pilgrims into the coun- 
try under the command of the redoubtable Captain 
Standish, came upon a hidden store of corn, "a fine, great, 
new basketful of very fair corn of this year," of which 
they took as much as they could carry; and down in Vir- 
ginia Captain Smith received from old Powhatan 200 or 
300 bushels of corn for a handful or so of glass beads— a 
characteristic beginning of the prosperous Indian trade 
which followed. 
In the first year of the occupation by the French of the 
small plain where Pittsburg now stands, the Indians who 
hved about Fort Duquesne raised over 2,000 bushels of corn. 
The attack on Kittonning began in the cornfields below the 
town. In the year 1779, General Sullivan invaded the 
country of the Iroquois in western New York, and des- 
troyed 160,000 bushels of corn. They sometimes laid up 
stores sufficient to last for two or three years. The raising 
of the corn was almost exclusively the work of the women- 
and we seem to see them in the mild Indian summer sun- 
shine, moving among the towering stalks, and stripping 
them of their golden stores. 
"Cantantowwit! God of the red man's summer! All hail 
to thee for thy gift of this most lovely of the seasons ! Well 
may the untutored Indian ascribe to thee every blessing 
which he enjoys, and worship thee as the guardian of the 
spirits of his dusky ancestors. And deaf, indeed, Cantan- 
towwit, must be the ear of the Christian pale-face, who does 
not hear m the whisperings of thy gentle breezes the 'still, 
small voice' of a God of love, which says as plainly as the 
langtiage of inspiration itself, 'My peace I give unto you. 
Blind, indeed, must be his inward vision if he discern not 
the prompting to high and Ixolv resolves, which comes to 
him from the leaves of russet and brown, and scarlet and 
orange, and silver and green, that mark everywhere the 
presence of the 'varied God'." 
To these beautiful sentiments of my friend Swauk, I beg 
to append these lines of Mrs. Sigourney: 
"When the groves 
In fleeting colors wrote their own decay. 
And leaves fell eddj iug on the sharpen 'd blast 
That sang their dirge; when o'er their rustling bed 
The red deer sprang, or fled the shrill-voiced quail, 
Heavy of wing and fearful; when, with heart 
Foreboding or depress'd, the white man mark'd 
The signs of coming winter, then began 
The Indian's joyous season. Then the haze, 
Soft and illusive as a fairy dream, 
Lapp'd all the landscape in its silvery f old. " 
„ „ T. J. Chapman. 
Pittsburg, Pa. 
THE INDIANS OF ALASKA. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
When I was coming down on one of the Alaskan steamers 
last month a passenger, who for seven years had been an ex- 
plorer in our northernmost domain, related to me a tale of 
woe concerning the Indians of the far North, which, if true 
amounts to a most serious charge of criminal neglect on the 
part of a civilized government. So startling were «ome of 
the matters told that if I had not later seen and read an ac- 
count of similar import in a Pacific Coast periodical I would 
not at this time relate it. From these accounts it appears 
that the Eskimos have been and are so far deprived of their 
natural base of supplies by the extermination of the fur- 
bearing animals, the whales and fishes, as to be in a state of 
starvation, while to add to these horrors disease is rapidly 
depleting the race and tending to an early closing of their 
chapter of life. 
I presume that every one is fairly familiar with the inter- 
national controversy concerning the fur seals, and hence no 
doubt realizes that the early extinction of these animals is a 
possioility, while in some high quarters it has been urged 
that the killing off of the remnant of the seals would be an 
easy solution of the matter which is a^itating our country 
and other nations. Likewise most of your readers have no 
doubt placidly come to the conclusion that tne extermina- 
tion of the whale by modern use of artillery is an early and 
indifferent possibility. Still, I imagine that few realize what 
the destruction of the seal and whale means to the helpless 
people in the far North. 
Twenty-five years ago the northern Alaska Indians wei-e 
living in comparative comfort, for the sea yielded a substan- 
tial supply of quite all that sufficed for their simple mode of 
life. Owing to the peculiar and rigid climatic conditions 
that exist in their land, agriculture is not a profitable follow- 
ing as a means of livelihood, hence these people obtained 
their food and raiment, the materials for building their 
habitations, their boats, spears, bows and arrows, and dog 
sledges and harness from the fauna of that region, Skins 
fur, ligaments, muscular and adipose tissue were the sim 
qua Twn of their existence. At the time of the Seward pur- 
chase, these northern regions fairly teemed with food and 
fur-bearing animals. So rich a field attracted the cupidity 
of the white man, whose religion is the attainment of the 
almighty dollar, and whose avarice knows no compassion 
for any suffering that may stand in the way of the idol of 
greed. 
Great moneyed corporations were formed for the purpose 
of trespassing on these rich natural preserves, by whose 
operations a hundred or so men have become rich. One 
company, with its headquarters at San Francisco, has prac- 
tically annihilated the whale, one the fur seal, while another 
combination is industriously devastating the waters of the 
salmon. For the millions of dollars paid for this portion of for- 
mer Rusfcian America by our Government, whereby a small 
revenue has been received — small in comparison with the 
per capita benefits obtained by our people— a few men have 
been enabled to pocket enormous sums of money, while as a 
resultant fact a face of people has been reduced to privation 
if air accounts are true. ' 
When this nation acquired Alaska it became the protector 
of the simple people innabiting the territory. The lives of 
these Indians came into our keeping as wards of the nation 
As guardians of this trust, our Government has appomted 
