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Travels in Alaska
by John Muir
Contents
Preface
Part I. The Trip of 1879
I. Puget Sound and British Columbia II. Alexander Archipelago and the Home I found
in Alaska III. Wrangell Island and Alaska Summers
IV. The Stickeen River V. A Cruise in the Cassiar
VI. The Cassiar Trail VII. Glenora Peak
VIII. Exploration of the Stickeen Glaciers IX. A Canoe Voyage to Northward
X. The Discovery of Glacier Bay XI. The Country of the Chilcats
XII. The Return to Fort Wrangell XIII. Alaska Indians
Part II. The Trip of 1880
XIV. Sum Dum Bay XV. From Taku River to Taylor Bay
XVI. Glacier Bay Part III. The Trip of 1890
XVII. In Camp at Glacier Bay XVIII. My Sled-Trip on the Muir Glacier
XIX. Auroras
Glossary of Words in the Chinook Jargon
Preface
Forty years ago John Muir wrote to a friend; "I am hopelessly and
forever a mountaineer. . . . Civilization and fever, and all the
morbidness that has been hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial
eyes, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's
loveliness." How gloriously he fulfilled the promise of his early
manhood! Fame, all unbidden, wore a path to his door, but he always
remained a modest, unspoiled mountaineer. Kindred spirits, the
greatest of his time, sought him out, even in his mountain cabin, and
felt honored by his friendship. Ralph Waldo Emerson urged him to
visit Concord and rest awhile from the strain of his solitary studies
in the Sierra Nevada. But nothing could dislodge him from the glacial
problems of the high Sierra; with passionate interest he kept at his
task. "The grandeur of these forces and their glorious results," he
once wrote, "overpower me and inhabit my whole being. Waking or
sleeping, I have no rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial
writing, or follow lines of cleavage, or struggle with the
difficulties of some extraordinary rock-form."
There is a note of pathos, the echo of an unfulfilled hope, in the
record of his later visit to Concord. "It was seventeen years after
our parting on Wawona ridge that I stood beside his [Emerson's] grave
under a pine tree on the hill above Sleepy Hollow. He had gone to
higher Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in
friendly recognition." And now John Muir has followed his friend of
other days to the "higher Sierras." His earthly remains lie among
trees planted by his own hand. To the pine tree of Sleepy Hollow
answers a guardian sequoia in the sunny Alhambra Valley.
In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous
living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled
him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he
returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest
of the tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon
this book of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen
departure, John Muir expended the last months of his life. It
was begun soon after his return from Africa in 1912. His eager
leadership of the ill-fated campaign to save his beloved Hetch-Hetchy
Valley from commercial destruction seriously interrupted his
labors. Illness, also, interposed some checks as he worked with
characteristic care and thoroughness through the great mass of Alaska
notes that had accumulated under his hands for more than thirty years.
The events recorded in this volume end in the middle of the trip of
1890. Muir's notes on the remainder of the journey have not been
found, and it is idle to speculate how he would have concluded the
volume if he had lived to complete it. But no one will read the
fascinating description of the Northern Lights without feeling a
poetical appropriateness in the fact that his last work ends with a
portrayal of the auroras--one of those phenomena which elsewhere he
described as "the most glorious of all the terrestrial manifestations
of God."
Muir's manuscripts bear on every page impressive evidence of the
pains he took in his literary work, and the lofty standard he set
himself in his scientific studies. The counterfeiting of a fact or of
an experience was a thing unthinkable in connection with John Muir.
He was tireless in pursuing the meaning of a physiographical fact,
and his extraordinary physical endurance usually enabled him to trail
it to its last hiding-place. Often, when telling the tale of his
adventures in Alaska, his eyes would kindle with youthful enthusiasm,
and he would live over again the red-blooded years that yielded him
"shapeless harvests of revealed glory."
For a number of months just prior to his death he had the friendly
assistance of Mrs. Marion Randall Parsons. Her familiarity with the
manuscript, and with Mr. Muir's expressed and penciled intentions of
revision and arrangement, made her the logical person to prepare it
in final form for publication. It was a task to which she brought
devotion as well as ability. The labor involved was the greater in
order that the finished work might exhibit the last touches of Muir's
master-hand, and yet contain nothing that did not flow from his pen.
All readers of this book will feel grateful for her labor of love.
I add these prefatory lines to the work of my departed friend with
pensive misgiving, knowing that he would have deprecated any
discharge of musketry over his grave. His daughters, Mrs. Thomas Rea
Hanna and Mrs. Buel Alvin Funk, have honored me with the request to
transmit the manuscript for publication, and later to consider with
them what salvage may be made from among their father's unpublished
writings. They also wish me to express their grateful acknowledgments
to Houghton Mifflin Company, with whom John Muir has always
maintained close and friendly relations.
William Frederic Bade.
Berkeley, California, May, 1915.
Part I
The Trip of 1879
Travels in Alaska
Chapter I
Puget Sound and British Columbia
After eleven years of study and exploration in the Sierra Nevada of
California and the mountain-ranges of the Great Basin, studying in
particular their glaciers, forests, and wild life, above all their
ancient glaciers and the influence they exerted in sculpturing the
rocks over which they passed with tremendous pressure, making new
landscapes, scenery, and beauty which so mysteriously influence every
human being, and to some extent all life, I was anxious to gain some
knowledge of the regions to the northward, about Puget Sound and
Alaska. With this grand object in view I left San Francisco in May,
1879, on the steamer Dakota, without any definite plan, as with the
exception of a few of the Oregon peaks and their forests all the wild
north was new to me.
To the mountaineer a sea voyage is a grand, inspiring, restful
change. For forests and plains with their flowers and fruits we have
new scenery, new life of every sort; water hills and dales in eternal
visible motion for rock waves, types of permanence.
It was curious to note how suddenly the eager countenances of the
passengers were darkened as soon as the good ship passed through the
Golden Gate and began to heave on the waves of the open ocean. The
crowded deck was speedily deserted on account of seasickness. It
seemed strange that nearly every one afflicted should be more or less
ashamed.
Next morning a strong wind was blowing, and the sea was gray and
white, with long breaking waves, across which the Dakota was racing
half-buried in spray. Very few of the passengers were on deck to
enjoy the wild scenery. Every wave seemed to be making enthusiastic,
eager haste to the shore, with long, irised tresses streaming from
its tops, some of its outer fringes borne away in scud to refresh the
wind, all the rolling, pitching, flying water exulting in the beauty
of rainbow light. Gulls and albatrosses, strong, glad life in the
midst of the stormy beauty, skimmed the waves against the wind,
seemingly without effort, oftentimes flying nearly a mile without a
single wing-beat, gracefully swaying from side to side and tracing
the curves of the briny water hills with the finest precision, now
and then just grazing the highest.
And yonder, glistening amid the irised spray, is still more striking
revelation of warm life in the so-called howling waste,--a half-dozen
whales, their broad backs like glaciated bosses of granite heaving
aloft in near view, spouting lustily, drawing a long breath, and
plunging down home in colossal health and comfort. A merry school of
porpoises, a square mile of them, suddenly appear, tossing themselves
into the air in abounding strength and hilarity, adding foam to the
waves and making all the wilderness wilder. One cannot but feel
sympathy with and be proud of these brave neighbors, fellow citizens
in the commonwealth of the world, making a living like the rest of
us. Our good ship also seemed like a thing of life, its great iron
heart beating on through calm and storm, a truly noble spectacle. But
think of the hearts of these whales, beating warm against the sea,
day and night, through dark and light, on and on for centuries; how
the red blood must rush and gurgle in and out, bucketfuls, barrelfuls
at a beat!
The cloud colors of one of the four sunsets enjoyed on the voyage
were remarkably pure and rich in tone. There was a well-defined range
of cumuli a few degrees above the horizon, and a massive, dark-gray
rain-cloud above it, from which depended long, bent fringes
overlapping the lower cumuli and partially veiling them; and from
time to time sunbeams poured through narrow openings and painted the
exposed bosses and fringes in ripe yellow tones, which, with the
reflections on the water, made magnificent pictures. The scenery
of the ocean, however sublime in vast expanse, seems far less
beautiful to us dry-shod animals than that of the land seen only in
comparatively small patches; but when we contemplate the whole globe
as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands,
flying through space with other stars all singing and shining
together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of
The California coast-hills and cliffs look bare and uninviting as
seen from the ship, the magnificent forests keeping well back out
of sight beyond the reach of the sea winds; those of Oregon and
Washington are in some places clad with conifers nearly down to the
shore; even the little detached islets, so marked a feature to the
northward, are mostly tree-crowned. Up through the Straits of Juan
de Fuca the forests, sheltered from the ocean gales and favored
with abundant rains, flourish in marvelous luxuriance on the
glacier-sculptured mountains of the Olympic Range.
We arrived in Esquimault Harbor, three miles from Victoria, on the
evening of the fourth day, and drove to the town through a
magnificent forest of Douglas spruce,--with an undergrowth in open
spots of oak, madrone, hazel, dogwood, alder, spiraea, willow, and
wild rose,--and around many an upswelling moutonne rock, freshly
glaciated and furred with yellow mosses and lichens.
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, was in 1879 a small
old-fashioned English town on the south end of Vancouver Island. It
was said to contain about six thousand inhabitants. The government
buildings and some of the business blocks were noticeable, but the
attention of the traveler was more worthily attracted to the neat
cottage homes found here, embowered in the freshest and floweriest
climbing roses and honeysuckles conceivable. Californians may well
be proud of their home roses loading sunny verandas, climbing to
the tops of the roofs and falling over the gables in white and red
cascades. But here, with so much bland fog and dew and gentle laving
rain, a still finer development of some of the commonest garden
plants is reached. English honeysuckle seems to have found here
a most congenial home. Still more beautiful were the wild roses,
blooming in wonderful luxuriance along the woodland paths, with
corollas two and three inches wide. This rose and three species of
spiraea fairly filled the air with fragrance after showers; and how
brightly then did the red dogwood berries shine amid the green leaves
beneath trees two hundred and fifty feet high.
Strange to say, all of this exuberant forest and flower vegetation
was growing upon fresh moraine material scarcely at all moved or in
any way modified by post-glacial agents. In the town gardens and
orchards, peaches and apples fell upon glacier-polished rocks, and
the streets were graded in moraine gravel; and I observed scratched
and grooved rock bosses as unweathered and telling as those of
the High Sierra of California eight thousand feet or more above
sea-level. The Victoria Harbor is plainly glacial in origin, eroded
from the solid; and the rock islets that rise here and there in it
are unchanged to any appreciable extent by all the waves that have
broken over them since first they came to light toward the close of
the glacial period. The shores also of the harbor are strikingly
grooved and scratched and in every way as glacial in all their
characteristics as those of new-born glacial lakes. That the domain
of the sea is being slowly extended over the land by incessant
wave-action is well known; but in this freshly glaciated region the
shores have been so short a time exposed to wave-action that they are
scarcely at all wasted. The extension of the sea affected by its own
action in post-glacial times is probably less than the millionth part
of that affected by glacial action during the last glacier period.
The direction of the flow of the ice-sheet to which all the main
features of this wonderful region are due was in general southward.
From this quiet little English town I made many short excursions--up
the coast to Nanaimo, to Burrard Inlet, now the terminus of the
Canadian Pacific Railroad, to Puget Sound, up Fraser River to New
Westminster and Yale at the head of navigation, charmed everywhere
with the wild, new-born scenery. The most interesting of these and
the most difficult to leave was the Puget Sound region, famous the
world over for the wonderful forests of gigantic trees about its
shores. It is an arm and many-fingered hand of the sea, reaching
southward from the Straits of Juan de Fuca about a hundred miles into
the heart of one of the noblest coniferous forests on the face of
the globe. All its scenery is wonderful--broad river-like reaches
sweeping in beautiful curves around bays and capes and jutting
promontories, opening here and there into smooth, blue, lake-like
expanses dotted with islands and feathered with tall, spiry
evergreens, their beauty doubled on the bright mirror-water.
Sailing from Victoria, the Olympic Mountains are seen right ahead,
rising in bold relief against the sky, with jagged crests and peaks
from six to eight thousand feet high,--small residual glaciers and
ragged snow-fields beneath them in wide amphitheatres opening down
through the forest-filled valleys. These valleys mark the courses of
the Olympic glaciers at the period of their greatest extension, when
they poured their tribute into that portion of the great northern
ice-sheet that overswept Vancouver Island and filled the strait
between it and the mainland.
On the way up to Olympia, then a hopeful little town situated at the
end of one of the longest fingers of the Sound, one is often reminded
of Lake Tahoe, the scenery of the widest expanses is so lake-like in
the clearness and stillness of the water and the luxuriance of the
surrounding forests. Doubling cape after cape, passing uncounted
islands, new combinations break on the view in endless variety,
sufficient to satisfy the lover of wild beauty through a whole life.
When the clouds come down, blotting out everything, one feels as if
at sea; again lifting a little, some islet may be seen standing
alone with the tops of its trees dipping out of sight in gray misty
fringes; then the ranks of spruce and cedar bounding the water's edge
come to view; and when at length the whole sky is clear the colossal
cone of Mt. Rainier may be seen in spotless white, looking down over
the dark woods from a distance of fifty or sixty miles, but so high
and massive and so sharply outlined, it seems to be just back of a
strip of woods only a few miles wide.
Mt. Rainier, or Tahoma (the Indian name), is the noblest of the
volcanic cones extending from Lassen Butte and Mt. Shasta along
the Cascade Range to Mt. Baker. One of the most telling views of it
hereabouts is obtained near Tacoma. From a bluff back of the town it
was revealed in all its glory, laden with glaciers and snow down to
the forested foothills around its finely curved base. Up to this time
(1879) it had been ascended but once. From observations made on the
summit with a single aneroid barometer, it was estimated to be about
14,500 feet high. Mt. Baker, to the northward, is about 10,700 feet
high, a noble mountain. So also are Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and
Mt. Hood. The latter, overlooking the town of Portland, is perhaps
the best known. Rainier, about the same height as Shasta, surpasses
them all in massive icy grandeur,--the most majestic solitary
mountain I had ever yet beheld. How eagerly I gazed and longed to
climb it and study its history only the mountaineer may know, but I
was compelled to turn away and bide my time.
The species forming the bulk of the woods here is the Douglas spruce
(Pseudotsuga douglasii), one of the greatest of the western giants.
A specimen that I measured near Olympia was about three hundred feet
in height and twelve feet in diameter four feet above the ground. It
is a widely distributed tree, extending northward through British
Columbia, southward through Oregon and California, and eastward to
the Rocky Mountains. The timber is used for shipbuilding, spars,
piles, and the framework of houses, bridges, etc. In the California
lumber markets it is known as "Oregon pine." In Utah, where it is
common on the Wahsatch Mountains, it is called "red pine." In
California, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, it forms, in
company with the yellow pine, sugar pine, and incense cedar, a pretty
well-defined belt at a height of from three to six thousand feet
above the sea; but it is only in Oregon and Washington, especially
in this Puget Sound region, that it reaches its very grandest
development,--tall, straight, and strong, growing down close to
tidewater.
All the towns of the Sound had a hopeful, thrifty aspect. Port
Townsend, picturesquely located on a grassy bluff, was the port of
clearance for vessels sailing to foreign parts. Seattle was famed
for its coal-mines, and claimed to be the coming town of the North
Pacific Coast. So also did its rival, Tacoma, which had been selected
as the terminus of the much-talked-of Northern Pacific Railway.
Several coal-veins of astonishing thickness were discovered the
winter before on the Carbon River, to the east of Tacoma, one of them
said to be no less than twenty-one feet, another twenty feet, another
fourteen, with many smaller ones, the aggregate thickness of all the
veins being upwards of a hundred feet. Large deposits of magnetic
iron ore and brown hematite, together with limestone, had been
discovered in advantageous proximity to the coal, making a bright
outlook for the Sound region in general in connection with its
railroad hopes, its unrivaled timber resources, and its far-reaching
geographical relations.
After spending a few weeks in the Puget Sound with a friend from San
Francisco, we engaged passage on the little mail steamer California,
at Portland, Oregon, for Alaska. The sail down the broad lower
reaches of the Columbia and across its foamy bar, around Cape
Flattery, and up the Juan de Fuca Strait, was delightful; and after
calling again at Victoria and Port Townsend we got fairly off for
icy Alaska.
Chapter II
Alexander Archipelago and the Home I found in Alaska
To the lover of pure wildness Alaska is one of the most wonderful
countries in the world. No excursion that I know of may be made into
any other American wilderness where so marvelous an abundance of
noble, newborn scenery is so charmingly brought to view as on the
trip through the Alexander Archipelago to Fort Wrangell and Sitka.
Gazing from the deck of the steamer, one is borne smoothly over calm
blue waters, through the midst of countless forest-clad islands. The
ordinary discomforts of a sea voyage are not felt, for nearly all the
whole long way is on inland waters that are about as waveless as
rivers and lakes. So numerous are the islands that they seem to have
been sown broadcast; long tapering vistas between the largest of them
open in every direction.
Day after day in the fine weather we enjoyed, we seemed to float in
true fairyland, each succeeding view seeming more and more beautiful,
the one we chanced to have before us the most surprisingly beautiful
of all. Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so
hopelessly beyond description. To sketch picturesque bits, definitely
bounded, is comparatively easy--a lake in the woods, a glacier
meadow, or a cascade in its dell; or even a grand master view of
height to height above the forests. These may be attempted, and more
or less telling pictures made of them; but in these coast landscapes
there is such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness, such a multitude
of features without apparent redundance, their lines graduating
delicately into one another in endless succession, while the whole is
so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all pen-work seems hopelessly
unavailing. Tracing shining ways through fiord and sound, past
forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure
headlands, it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very
paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed.
Some idea of the wealth of this scenery may be gained from the fact
that the coast-line of Alaska is about twenty-six thousand miles
long, more than twice as long as all the rest of the United States.
The islands of the Alexander Archipelago, with the straits, channels,
canals, sounds, passages, and fiords, form an intricate web of land
and water embroidery sixty or seventy miles wide, fringing the lofty
icy chain of coast mountains from Puget Sound to Cook Inlet; and,
with infinite variety, the general pattern is harmonious throughout
its whole extent of nearly a thousand miles. Here you glide into a
narrow channel hemmed in by mountain walls, forested down to the
water's edge, where there is no distant view, and your attention is
concentrated on the objects close about you--the crowded spires of
the spruces and hemlocks rising higher and higher on the steep green
slopes; stripes of paler green where winter avalanches have cleared
away the trees, allowing grasses and willows to spring up; zigzags
of cascades appearing and disappearing among the bushes and trees;
short, steep glens with brawling streams hidden beneath alder and
dogwood, seen only where they emerge on the brown algae of the shore;
and retreating hollows, with lingering snow-banks marking the
fountains of ancient glaciers. The steamer is often so near the shore
that you may distinctly see the cones clustered on the tops of the
trees, and the ferns and bushes at their feet.
But new scenes are brought to view with magical rapidity. Rounding
some bossy cape, the eye is called away into far-reaching vistas,
bounded on either hand by headlands in charming array, one dipping
the distance. The tranquil channel stretching river-like between,
may be stirred here and there by the silvery plashing of upspringing
salmon, or by flocks of white gulls floating like water-lilies among
the sun spangles; while mellow, tempered sunshine is streaming over
all, blending sky, land, and water in pale, misty blue. Then, while
you are dreamily gazing into the depths of this leafy ocean lane, the
little steamer, seeming hardly larger than a duck, turning into some
passage not visible until the moment of entering it, glides into a
wide expanse--a sound filled with islands, sprinkled and clustered in
forms and compositions such as nature alone can invent; some of them
so small the trees growing on them seem like single handfuls culled
from the neighboring woods and set in the water to keep them fresh,
while here and there at wide intervals you may notice bare rocks just
above the water, mere dots punctuating grand, outswelling sentences
of islands.
The variety we find, both as to the contours and the collocation of
the islands, is due chiefly to differences in the structure and
when the main ice-sheet began to break up into separate glaciers.
Moreover, the mountains of the larger islands nourished local
glaciers, some of them of considerable size, which sculptured their
summits and sides, forming in some cases wide cirques with canyons or
valleys leading down from them into the channels and sounds. These
causes have produced much of the bewildering variety of which nature
is so fond, but none the less will the studious observer see the
underlying harmony--the general trend of the islands in the direction
of the flow of the main ice-mantle from the mountains of the Coast
Range, more or less varied by subordinate foothill ridges and
mountains. Furthermore, all the islands, great and small, as well as
the headlands and promontories of the mainland, are seen to have a
rounded, over-rubbed appearance produced by the over-sweeping
ice-flood during the period of greatest glacial abundance.
The canals, channels, straits, passages, sounds, etc., are
subordinate to the same glacial conditions in their forms, trends,
and extent as those which determined the forms, trends, and
distribution of the land-masses, their basins being the parts of the
pre-glacial margin of the continent, eroded to varying depths below
sea-level, and into which, of course, the ocean waters flowed as the
ice was melted out of them. Had the general glacial denudation been
sea-level wherever the rocks and glacial conditions are similar. In
general, the island-bound channels are like rivers, not only in
separate reaches as seen from the deck of a vessel, but continuously
so for hundreds of miles in the case of the longest of them. The
tide-currents, the fresh driftwood, the inflowing streams, and the
luxuriant foliage of the out-leaning trees on the shores make this
resemblance all the more complete. The largest islands look like part
of the mainland in any view to be had of them from the ship, but far
the greater number are small, and appreciable as islands, scores of
them being less than a mile long. These the eye easily takes in and
revels in their beauty with ever fresh delight. In their relations
to each other the individual members of a group have evidently been
derived from the same general rock-mass, yet they never seem broken
or abridged in any way as to their contour lines, however abruptly
they may dip their sides. Viewed one by one, they seem detached
beauties, like extracts from a poem, while, from the completeness of
their lines and the way that their trees are arranged, each seems a
finished stanza in itself. Contemplating the arrangement of the trees
on these small islands, a distinct impression is produced of their
having been sorted and harmonized as to size like a well-balanced
bouquet. On some of the smaller tufted islets a group of tapering
spruces is planted in the middle, and two smaller groups that
evidently correspond with each other are planted on the ends at about
equal distances from the central group; or the whole appears as one
group with marked fringing trees that match each other spreading
around the sides, like flowers leaning outward against the rim of
a vase. These harmonious tree relations are so constant that they
none was just like this one, rejoicing in triumphant strength and
Tumtum: Mind, heart. Wawa: Talk (noun or verb).