THROUGH WONDERLAND. 
95 
rivers,—and all large glaciers, at least, do this,—there is seen a milky sedi¬ 
ment floating in the water, which these “mills of the gods” grind from the 
mountain flanks in their slow but rasping course down their sides. Wher¬ 
ever they find calcareous strata to abrade, the water is almost milklike in 
hue for miles around. The glacier of the Grand Plateau is the last one facing 
the Pacific itself, as we move northward; but, where little bays cut back through 
the flat lands at the foot of the range, they may reach the glaciers which exist 
everywhere on the mountain sides. 
Off the Bay of Yakutat,—a name given it by the resident T’linkit tribes,— 
we have our best view- of imperial St. Elias, the crowning peak of this 
noble range, and the highest mountain in all North America,—nearly 20,000 feet 
above the sea-level, and all of this vast height seemingly springing from the 
very sea itself. No good picture has ever been given of it, and no words have 
ever fully described it. All of the superlatives of our language have clothed so 
many lesser peaks that they fall flat and mentally tasteless in the presence of 
this Alpine Titan, rearing his crest among the clouds as if defying description. 
This want of words has been felt by so many who have visited the grand scen¬ 
ery of Alaska, who saw that, in illustrating a fjord here or a glacier there, they 
have but duplicated the word-painting of some other writer describing a puny 
antagonist, compared with their subject, that I will give it in the words of one 
who expresses the idea more closely than I. It is from the pen of a correspond¬ 
ent in the Kansas City Journal, under date of September 14, 1885. 
“ The difficult thing for the tourist to do in regard to Alaska is to describe 
what is seen for the general reader. Everything is on such an immense and 
massive scale that words are diminutives for expression, rather than—as travelers 
have been credited with using them-—for exaggerated descriptions. For 
example, people cross the continent to sail for an hour or two among the 
Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence, and word-painting has been exhausted 
in exaltation of their beauties. But here is a thousand miles of islands, ranging 
in size from an acre to the proportions of a State, covered with evergreen forests 
of tropical luxuriance, yet so arctic in their character as to be new to the eye, 
and in regard to which botanical nomenclature but confuses and dissatisfies. 
And in all this vast extent of mountain scenery, with summits ranging from one 
thousand to fifteen thousand feet in height, there is not enough level land 
visible to aggregate one prairie county in Western Missouri or Kansas. Day 
after day there is a continuous and unbroken chain of mountain scenery. I 
can not better impress the character of the landscape, as seen from a vessel’s 
deck, than to ask the reader to imagine the parks, valleys, canons, gorges and 
depressions of the Rocky Mountains to be filled with water to the base of the 
snowy range, and then take a sail through them from Santa Fe to the northern 
line of Montana. Just about what could be seen on such an imaginary voyage 
is actually passed through in the sail now completed by our party of enthusi¬ 
astic tourists for the past ten days. You may divide the scenery into parts by 
the days, and just as it was successively passed through, and any one of the 
