64 
THROUGH WONDERLAND , 
Wrangell. The Cassiar mines are in British Columbia, and to reach them the 
Stickeen river, emptying near Wrangell, must be ascended, itself a most pic¬ 
turesque stream, and one well worth visiting if the tourist can catch one of the 
little boats that yet occasionally depart from Wrangell to ascend the rushing, 
impetuous river. Says one writer of it, in the Philadelphia Dispatch : “ The 
Stickeen is navigable for small steamers to Glenora, one hundred and fifty miles, 
flowing first in a general westerly direction, through grassy, undulating plains, 
darkened here and there with patches of evergreens ; then, curving southward, 
and receiving numerous tributaries from the north, it enters the Coast Range, and 
sweeps across it to the sea through a Yosemite valley more than a hundred miles 
long, and one to three miles wide at the bottom, and from five thousand to eight 
thousand feet deep, marvelously beautiful and inspiring from end to end. To the 
appreciative tourist, sailing up the river through the midst of it all, the canon, for 
a distance of one hundred and ten miles, is a gallery of sublime pictures,—an 
unbroken series of majestic mountains, glaciers, falls, cascades, forests, groves, 
flowery garden spots, grassy meadows in endless variety of form and composition, 
—furniture enough for a dozen Yosemites ! .while, back of the walls, and thou¬ 
sands of feet above them, innumerable peaks and spires and domes of ice and 
snow tower grandly into the sky. About fifteen miles above the mouth of the river 
you come to the first of the great glaciers, pouring down through the forest in 
a shattered ice-cascade nearly to the level of the river. Twelve miles above 
this point a noble view is opened along the Skoot river canon—a group of 
glacier-laden Alps, from ten thousand to twelve thousand feet high. Thirty- 
five miles above the mouth of the river the most striking object of all comes in 
sight ; this is the lower expansion of the great glacier, measuring about six 
miles around the * snout,’ pushed boldly forward into the middle of the valley 
among the trees, while its sources are mostly hidden. It takes its rise in the 
heart of the range, some thirty or lorty miles away. Compared with this, the 
Swiss mer de glace is a small thing. It is called the ‘ Ice Mountain.’ The 
front of the snout is three hundred feet high, but rises rapidly back for a few 
miles to a height of about one thousand feet. Seen through gaps in the trees 
growing on one of its terminal moraines, as one sails slowly along against the 
current, the marvelous beauty of the chasms and clustered pinnacles shows to 
fine advantage in the sunshine.” 
Wrangell’s log-cabin backwoods stores are good places to search for Indian 
relics, the Stickeen Indians living in the vicinity being the most prolific in the 
manufacture of these savage curios. Leaving Wrangell, a westward-trending 
strait (Sumner Strait, after Senator Sumner) of forty or fifty miles carries us 
directly out to the Pacific Ocean ; but an hour’s run finds us turning into 
another passage,—Chatham Strait,—one of the largest of the almost innumer¬ 
able channels of the inland passage, and which points squarely to the north. 
It is nearly one hundred and fifty miles long, and about five or six miles 
wide. It was named by Vancouver, about the end of last century, after the 
then Earl of Chatham, and is a most noble sheet of water. 
