
FOREST AND STREAM. 

(Dec. 7, 1907. 







The Grayling at Caribou Crossing. 
[Written by Prof. David Starr Jordan, of the Leland 
Stanford, Jr., University in California, to be read at the 
recent Anglers’ Conference in New York City.] 
SAINT AMBROSE of blessed memory, a fisherman 
of old, and likewise fisher of men, “magnanimous, 
plaintive and intense,” once declared in his town 
of Tréves, fifteen hundred years ago, that the 
grayling was “the flower of fishes.” It is cer- 
tainly the most choice, the most unhackneyed 
of all the prizes of the angler, and wherever it 
is found it finds its group of appreciative ad- 
mirers. 
The Latin name of the grayling, Thymallus, 
comes from the fact that when fresh it has the 
odor of wild thyme, a fragrant mint common 
on the brook sides of northern England. Shakes- 
peare knew on the Avon in Stratford a “bank on 
which the wild thyme grows,” and I, too, have 
found in fragrant Warwickshire many a slope 
which well answers to Shakespeare’s description. 
But though the grayling is a sweet fish, pleasant 
to smell, as well as to look upon when it comes 
from the ripple, yet I have never been able to 
detect the fragrant odor which the ancients knew 
so well. 
The grayling is a cousin to the trout, Its 
mouth is smaller, its teeth are not so many or 
so sharp, and it has neither the strength nor 
the speed nor the voracity of the least of the 
trout. The scales are larger than on any trout, 
and there are black spots and blue spots on them 
on a gray background. From the gray color 
comes the fine old English name of grayling, as 
well as the German name of Aesch. 
The shape of the body and fin is like the trout, 
the little adipose fin is there just the same as 
in the trout. The dorsal fin is however dif- 
ferent. It is much higher than in any trout 
and with more rays. It rises up like a sail, and 
it is marked with sky blue spots, which give 
the fish a distinguished appearance when he is 
at home in his own waters. 
The grayling live in swift clear streams, not 
often in lakes. It calls for colder water than 
the trout, and so its range is further to the 
north. Indeed, it is a comparatively rare fish 
outside the arctic circle. 
The different species of grayling are all very 
much alike in looks as well as in habits. The 
common grayling of Europe is Thymallus thy- 
mallus. It ranges through northern England, 
Scandinavia and Russia. There is a species of 
grayling spread all over Siberia, but we know 
very little about this fish and are not sure what 
species it is. 
Through the Yukon region of the great North- 
west there is a grayling very abundant in the 
right waters and bearing the name of “the stand= 
ard bearer,” Thymallus signifer. In the old days 
after the great glacial ice this fish extended to 
the eastward over a much larger area, but the 
ice has melted away, and there are left three 
isolated colonies to the southeast of the main 
band. One of these colonies is called Thymallus 
ontariensis or tricolor, lives in certain streams, 
notably the Jordan and the Au Sable, in the 

sandy woods of the Southern Peninsula of Lake 
Michigan. In both these streams the grayling 
is_ growing scarce through the combined evil 
influences of the lumberman and the trout hog. 
In the Northern Peninsula, there is another iso- 
Jated little colony. Let us call its stream the 
Nameless River, and if we leave it so the thyme- 
scented fish may increase to fill other rivers 
which are not nameless. 
The remaining colony—a little changed from 
the other two through long isolation—is in Mon- 
tana at the head of the Missouri River. The 
Montana grayling is called Thymallus montanus. 
It is most plentiful in the Gallatin River, and if 
you look through the mountains till you find 

Horsethief Creek, you will be sure of at least 
one day’s good sport. It will take all day to 
find the creek, no matter from where you start. 
And this brings me to describe my best day’s 
sport with the grayling. It so happened that 
in June, 1897, I was in the city of Juneau. That 
day the Canadian surveyor, Ogilvie, since noted 
in history, had reached Juneau from up the coast 
and across the mountains with a wonderful 
story of the happenings in the Northwest Terri- 
tory of Canada on the banks of the middle 
Yukon. It seems that the Indian, Skookum Jim, 
of Caribou Crossing, with his friend Tagish 
Charley, a squaw man named Siwash George, 
and his wife, who was Skookum Jim’s sister, 
were wandering across the country, supposed 
vaguely to be in the interest of one Anderson, 
looking for gold. 
Away down the. river, beyond Lake Labarge, 
of the took 
one men sick. He had eaten too 
much blubber of some sort, and’ the wife of 
Siwash George went down to a brook to get 
him a basin of water. In the bottom of the 
basin was a streak of fine gold. They went 
down to the stream and bailed out more. Then 
Skookum Jim, as his name would indicate, 
Started out swiftly at the top of his speed, 
“touching only the high places,’ to record with 
the Dominion officials the claim of himself and 
his associates. Skookum in Chinook means swift 
—hence Skookum Chuck—a waterfall. Bonanza 
Creek, Klondike, Dawson at once became names, 
and then relatives and all the world knows their 
story. Skookum Jim, a millionaire, built him- 
self a large house of pine lumber at Caribou 
Crossing. He went to Seattle to buy a Brussels 
carpet for its floor. When the carpet came it 
was too broad by nearly a yard for Skookum 
Jim’s best room, so he had the house cut apart 
and spread until the house was large enough for 
the carpet. How Tagish Charley became one of 
the generous rich, beloved of all men, and how 
Siwash George deserted the woman who made 
his fortune for a San Francisco actress, all these 
with the spectacular career of Swiftwater Bill. 
are known to everyone alive to the gossip of 
the smart set of Caribou Crossing, Seattle and 
San Francisco. 
When Ogilvie told all this in Juneau the whole 
town responded. Juneau itself lies on the very 
frontier of adventure, and here was something 
newer and greater and only two thousand miles 
or so beyond. So the gamblers and gold seekers, 
the clerks and lawyers, resigned their positions, 
threw up their jobs in some way or another, 
made their way to the head of navigation, Dyea 
or Skagway, and there struck the White Pass 
trail. The Bright Eyes Opera Company broke 
its engagement at Juneau, and men and women 
started over the mountains to Bonanza Creek. 
And after them came a most wonderful migra- 
tion, one of those movements which, if anything 
could, lend “to the sober twilight of the present, 
the color of romance.” 
All the way southward the word went from 
Juneau. Cigarette young men, who had never 
done a man’s day’s work in their lives. 
crowded the smoking rooms in the Pullman cars, 
and pampered dogs, St. Bernard, Great Dane. 
mastiff, brought up in luxury, and bought or 
stolen to do the work of a husky or Siberian 
wolf dog, rode in the baggage cars. Along with 
the rest came young women and old women, 
dainty Mercedes, sillv. pretty and whimsical. de- 
manding the impossible, elderly graduates of the 
cheap boarding houses, with iron hand and jron 
jaw, capable of making some sort of a way any- 
where. All were loaded down with all clothing 
and provision needed for an arctic winter. Most 
knew nothing of hardship, nothing of dogs, noth- 
ing of trails over glacial mountains and through 
endless chains of rockbound lakes, each hidden 
in its cleft of rocks. They knew nothing of 
boats or rafts, or the breaking up of the ice, 
nothing of gold or men or Alaska. And the 
dogs were just as ignorant, and had not even 
seen a map of Alaska, and did not know before- 
hand that they were going there. 
From Skagway—a wild bedlam of incongruous 
elements, with its hero mayor, chief of the 
vigilantes—the trail goes up the boisterous river. 
Through the fir woods, past the mouth of 
glaciers, into a great amphitheatre like that at 
the foot af the Spliigen Pass, then in long zig- 
zags and windings past reckless splashing water- 
falls and unbridged chasms to the foot of the 
moss-covered White Pass. Then up the pass to 
its gusty Summit Lake and the long ravine-like 
chain of lakes at the head of the Yukon, which 
may keep one guessing for miles as to the way 
past or around them. 
In a sheltered depression on the summit is a 
place which should be historic. Here every band 
of pilgrims has camped for the night. Here it 
has cast away its luggage, discarded its horses, 
abandoned its dogs. Into the springy heather- 
grown basin, sheltered from the wind, we may 
find trodden into the mud harnesses, sleds, bot- 
tles, cups, plates, hats, trousers, neckties, bones 
of dog's, bones of horses, ravens, newspapers, 
playing cards, cigarette papers, shirts, collars— 
every evidence of a failing civilization. The 
dead ravens tell the tale of their premature at- 
tacks on dogs and horses, for the men have 
pistols and they are the last to go. Near this 
place some later humorist has built a house of 
empty beer bottles, set together with mortar, a 
house big enough to shelter you and me from 
the storm. Bones of men are strewn along the 
way—you can trace the trail by the soiled and 
dislocated heather—but all these bones, so far 
as I know, have had a decent burial. Some of 
them, to be sure, were buried under avalanches, 
but that was on the south side of the pass near 
the foot of the great unnamed waterfall over 
which unheeded flows the Nameless River. 
We have passed the waterfall and the river, 
and are now well down on the Yukon side. 
The little ice cold Summit Lake, where more 
than one loaded team and its teamsters went 
through the breaking ice, is said to be well 
stocked with trout. Men described them to us 
as Dolly Varden trout, Salvelinus malma. As 
the lake flows into the Yukon, and as the Dolly 
Varden is not found in the Yukon, which has 
only the great lake trout or mackinaw trout, 
Cristivomer namaycush, we developed a geologi- 
cal theory that the Yukon had stolen this lake 
from the Skagway. The theory looked not un- 
reasonable. Rivers do such things. At the head 
of the lake was a little dam of glacial drift. Cut 
through this dam and the head of the Yukon 
would flow down into the Skagway. Perhaps 
it did so in the days before this dam was made. 
But facts are facts. Let us see what kind of 
trout lives in the lake, and we will tell you its 
glacial history. My companion, Prof. Harold 
Heath, borrowed a fly and cast into the lake. 
We had one rise and landed the fish. It was the 
great lake trout and not the Dolly Varden, so 
we laid our theory on the shelf and allowed the 
Summit Lake to remain in the past as. tt 1s an 
the present, a head spring of the Yukon. 
I said that rivers do such things. At the head 
of Roanoke River, near Allegheny Springs in 
Virginia, is a valley which the Roanoke has 
stolen—fishes and all—from the Holston River, 
on the other side of the ridge. To steal a valley 
is to undermine it gradually from the other 
side until the water in the first valley turns and 
flows the other way. But the Yukon has stolen 
nothing from the Skagway, and on_ second 
thought it deserves no credit for its reticence. 
It looks cold to the north of the White Pass 
even in midsummer. Down the long rock ridges 
between the lakes goes the trail, on and on 
































































































































