The Largest Of The Booths Near The Bank Of
The River Was About Forty Feet Square.
Beds made of spruce and pine
boughs were spread all around the walls, on which some of the Indians
lay asleep; some were braiding ropes, others sitting and lounging,
gossiping and courting, while a little baby was swinging in a
hammock.
All seemed to be light-hearted and jolly, with work enough
and wit enough to maintain health and comfort. In the winter they are
said to dwell in substantial huts in the woods, where game,
especially caribou, is abundant. They are pale copper-colored, have
small feet and hands, are not at all negroish in lips or cheeks like
some of the coast tribes, nor so thickset, short-necked, or
heavy-featured in general.
One of the most striking of the geological features of this region
are immense gravel deposits displayed in sections on the walls of the
river gorges. About two miles above the North Fork confluence there
is a bluff of basalt three hundred and fifty feet high, and above
this a bed of gravel four hundred feet thick, while beneath the
basalt there is another bed at least fifty feet thick.
From "Ward's," seventeen miles beyond Telegraph, and about fourteen
hundred feet above sea-level, the trail ascends a gravel ridge to a
pine-and-fir-covered plateau twenty-one hundred feet above the sea.
Thence for three miles the trail leads through a forest of short,
closely planted trees to the second North Fork of the Stickeen, where
a still greater deposit of stratified gravel is displayed, a section
at least six hundred feet thick resting on a red jaspery formation.
Nine hundred feet above the river there is a slightly dimpled plateau
diversified with aspen and willow groves and mossy meadows. At
"Wilson's," one and a half miles from the river, the ground is
carpeted with dwarf manzanita and the blessed Linnaea borealis, and
forested with small pines, spruces, and aspens, the tallest fifty to
sixty feet high.
From Wilson's to "Caribou," fourteen miles, no water was visible,
though the nearly level, mossy ground is swampy-looking. At "Caribou
Camp," two miles from the river, I saw two fine dogs, a Newfoundland
and a spaniel. Their owner told me that he paid only twenty dollars
for the team and was offered one hundred dollars for one of them a
short time afterwards. The Newfoundland, he said, caught salmon on
the ripples, and could be sent back for miles to fetch horses. The
fine jet-black curly spaniel helped to carry the dishes from the
table to the kitchen, went for water when ordered, took the pail and
set it down at the stream-side, but could not be taught to dip it
full. But their principal work was hauling camp-supplies on sleds up
the river in winter. These two were said to be able to haul a load of
a thousand pounds when the ice was in fairly good condition. They
were fed on dried fish and oatmeal boiled together.
The timber hereabouts is mostly willow or poplar on the low ground,
with here and there pine, birch, and spruce about fifty feet high.
None seen much exceeded a foot in diameter. Thousand-acre patches
have been destroyed by fire. Some of the green trees had been burned
off at the root, the raised roots, packed in dry moss, being readily
attacked from beneath. A range of mountains about five thousand to
six thousand feet high trending nearly north and south for sixty
miles is forested to the summit. Only a few cliff-faces and one of
the highest points patched with snow are treeless. No part of this
range as far as I could see is deeply sculptured, though the general
denudation of the country must have been enormous as the gravel-beds
show.
At the top of a smooth, flowery pass about four thousand feet above
the sea, beautiful Dease Lake comes suddenly in sight, shining like a
broad tranquil river between densely forested hills and mountains. It
is about twenty-seven miles long, one to two miles wide, and its
waters, tributary to the Mackenzie, flow into the Arctic Ocean by a
very long, roundabout, romantic way, the exploration of which in 1789
from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Ocean must have been a glorious
task for the heroic Scotchman, Alexander Mackenzie, whose name it
bears.
Dease Creek, a fine rushing stream about forty miles long and forty
or fifty feet wide, enters the lake from the west, drawing its
sources from grassy mountain-ridges. Thibert Creek, about the same
size, and McDames and Defot Creeks, with their many branches, head
together in the same general range of mountains or on moor-like
tablelands on the divide between the Mackenzie and Yukon and
Stickeen. All these Mackenzie streams had proved rich in gold. The
wing-dams, flumes, and sluice-boxes on the lower five or ten miles of
their courses showed wonderful industry, and the quantity of glacial
and perhaps pre-glacial gravel displayed was enormous. Some of the
beds were not unlike those of the so-called Dead Rivers of
California. Several ancient drift-filled channels on Thibert Creek,
blue at bed rock, were exposed and had been worked. A considerable
portion of the gold, though mostly coarse, had no doubt come from
considerable distances, as boulders included in some of the deposits
show. The deepest beds, though known to be rich, had not yet been
worked to any great depth on account of expense. Diggings that yield
less than five dollars a day to the man were considered worthless.
Only three of the claims on Defot Creek, eighteen miles from the
mouth of Thibert Creek, were then said to pay. One of the nuggets
from this creek weighed forty pounds.
While wandering about the banks of these gold-besprinkled streams,
looking at the plants and mines and miners, I was so fortunate as to
meet an interesting French Canadian, an old coureur de bois, who
after a few minutes' conversation invited me to accompany him to his
gold-mine on the head of Defot Creek, near the summit of a smooth,
grassy mountain-ridge which he assured me commanded extensive views
of the region at the heads of Stickeen, Taku, Yukon, and Mackenzie
tributaries.
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