Alaska. — Muir. 29 3 
down from its lofty fountains into the head of the fiord and sends 
off its bergs. To see this one glacier is well worth a trip to Alaska. 
At the time of mj^ first visit, while I sat in my canoe, among the 
ice, sketching and watching the birth of the bergs as they plunged 
from the glorious crystal wall, two Indians, father and son, came 
paddling alongside, and with a good natured " Saghaya " in- 
quired who we were and what we were looking for in such a place, 
etc. , while they in turn gave information about the river, their 
village and the glaciers up the main Taku canon. They were 
hunting seals, and as they shot away crouching in their tiny shell 
of a canoe, with barbed spear in place among the great blue over- 
hanging bergs, they formed a picture of arctic wildness as telling 
as may be found amid the drifts and floes of Greenland. 
After leaving Juneau, where, it is claimed, you may see ' ' the 
largest quartz mill in the world," the steamer passes between 
Douglas and Admiralty islands into Lynn canal, the most sub- 
limely beautiful and spacious of all tlie mountain-walled channels 
you have yet seen. The Auk and Eagle glaciers are displayed 
on the right as you enter the canal, coming with grand effect from 
their far-i^eaching fountains and down though the forests. But 
it is on the west side of the canal near the head that the most 
striking feature of the landscape is seen — the Davidson glacier. 
It first appears as an immense ridge of ice thrust forward into the 
channel, but when you have gained a position directly in front, it 
is shown as a broad flood issuing from a noble granite gateway, 
and spreading out to right and left in a beatiful fan-shaped mass, 
three or four miles in width, the front of which is separated from 
the water by its terminal moraine. This is one of the most nota- 
ble of the large glaciers that are in the first stage of decadence, 
reaching nearly to tide water, but failing to enter it and send off 
icebergs. Excepting the Taku , all the great glaciers you have 
yet seen belong to this class. 
Shortly after passing the Davidson the northmost point of the 
trip is reached, and at the canning establishments near the mouth 
of the Chilcat river you may learn something about salmon. 
Whatever may be said of other resources of the territory — tim- 
ber, furs, minerals, etc. — it is hardly possible to exaggerate the 
importance of the fisheries. Besides cod, herring, halibut and 
other fishes that swarm over immense areas, there are probably 
more than a thousand salmon streams in Alaska, in some of 
