ALASKA. 
21 
cloak of scrubby willows and rank grasses. The banks, wherever they are 
lifted above the reddish current, are continually undermined and washed away 
by the flood, and so sudden and precipitate are these landslides at times that 
traders and natives have barely escaped with their lives. For 100 miles up, 
through an intricate labyrinth of tides, blind and misleading channels, sloughs, 
and swamps, we pass through the same dreary, desolate region, until the higher 
ground is first reached at Kusilvak, and until the bluffs at Andreievsky and at 
Chatinakh give evidence of the fact that all the land in Alaska is not under 
water. It is watered, however, here, there, and everywhere, and impresses one 
with the idea of a vast inland sea, which impression holds good even as far up 
the river as 700 or 800 miles, where there are many points, even far in the 
interior, at which this river spans a breadth of 20 miles from shore to shore. 
As we advance toward its source we are not surprised, when we view the character 
of the country through which it rolls, at the vast quantity of water in its chan¬ 
nel. It would seem as though the land itself, drained by the river on either 
side within Alaska, were a sponge, into which all rain and moisture from the 
heavens and melting snow are absorbed, never finding their release by evapora¬ 
tion, but conserved to drain, by myriads and myriads of rivulets, the great 
watery highway of the Yukon. I noticed a striking evidence of the peculiar 
nonconductive properties of the tundra mosses, or swale, last summer in pass¬ 
ing through many of the thousand and one lakes and lakelets peculiar to that 
region, where the ice had bound up the moss and overhanging water growth at 
the edges of the lakes. In the breaking up and thawing out of summer that ice 
failed to melt, and the renewed growth of the season of vegetation, reaching 
out in turn from this icy border, will again prevent thawing, and so on until 
shallow pools and flats are changed into fixed masses of ice hidden from view. 
The Yukon is formed by the junction of the Lewis and Pelly 
rivers. Mr. Wilson, in his “Guide to the Yukon Gold Fields,” 
published at Seattle, 1895, gives the length of the Yukon as 2,044 
miles, and says that it is navigable the entire distance for Hat- 
bottom boats with a capacity of from 400 to 500 tons. 
The White River, a portion of whose waters flows through 
Alaskan territory, empties into the Yukon on British territory. 
Forty Mile Creek, Birch and Beaver cteeks join the river between 
Fort Yukon and Dawson, a British town. The following descrip¬ 
tion of the topography of the Yukon River below Fort Yukon 
(966 miles from mouth) is quoted by Mr. Petroft from the 
