As we approached the next house, three miles ahead, we saw the
tavern-keeper keenly surveying us, and, as we afterwards learned,
taking me for a certain judge whom for some cause he wished to avoid,
he hurriedly locked his door and fled.
Half a mile farther on we
discovered him in a thicket a little way off the trail, explained our
wants, marched him back to his house, and at length obtained a little
sour bread, sour milk, and old salmon, our only lonely meal between
the Lake and Telegraph Creek.
We arrived at Telegraph Creek, the end of my two-hundred-mile walk,
about noon. After luncheon I went on down the river to Glenora in a
fine canoe owned and manned by Kitty, a stout, intelligent-looking
Indian woman, who charged her passengers a dollar for the
fifteen-mile trip. Her crew was four Indian paddlers. In the rapids
she also plied the paddle, with stout, telling strokes, and a
keen-eyed old man, probably her husband, sat high in the stern and
steered. All seemed exhilarated as we shot down through the narrow
gorge on the rushing, roaring, throttled river, paddling all the more
vigorously the faster the speed of the stream, to hold good steering
way. The canoe danced lightly amid gray surges and spray as if alive
and enthusiastically enjoying the adventure. Some of the passengers
were pretty thoroughly drenched. In unskillful hands the frail dugout
would surely have been wrecked or upset. Most of the season goods for
the Cassiar gold camps were carried from Glenora to Telegraph Creek
in canoes, the steamers not being able to overcome the rapids except
during high water. Even then they had usually to line two of the
rapids - that is, take a line ashore, make it fast to a tree on the
bank, and pull up on the capstan. The freight canoes carried about
three or four tons, for which fifteen dollars per ton was charged.
Slow progress was made by poling along the bank out of the swiftest
part of the current. In the rapids a tow line was taken ashore, only
one of the crew remaining aboard to steer. The trip took a day unless
a favoring wind was blowing, which often happened.
Next morning I set out from Glenora to climb Glenora Peak for the
general view of the great Coast Range that I failed to obtain on my
first ascent on account of the accident that befell Mr. Young when we
were within a minute or two of the top. It is hard to fail in
reaching a mountain-top that one starts for, let the cause be what it
may. This time I had no companion to care for, but the sky was
threatening. I was assured by the local weather-prophets that the day
would be rainy or snowy because the peaks in sight were muffled in
clouds that seemed to be getting ready for work. I determined to go
ahead, however, for storms of any kind are well worth while, and if
driven back I could wait and try again.
With crackers in my pocket and a light rubber coat that a kind Hebrew
passenger on the steamer Gertrude loaned me, I was ready for anything
that might offer, my hopes for the grand view rising and falling as
the clouds rose and fell. Anxiously I watched them as they trailed
their draggled skirts across the glaciers and fountain peaks as if
thoughtfully looking for the places where they could do the most
good. From Glenora there is first a terrace two hundred feet above
the river covered mostly with bushes, yellow apocynum on the open
spaces, together with carpets of dwarf manzanita, bunch-grass, and a
few of the compositae, galiums, etc. Then comes a flat stretch a mile
wide, extending to the foothills, covered with birch, spruce, fir,
and poplar, now mostly killed by fire and the ground strewn with
charred trunks. From this black forest the mountain rises in rather
steep slopes covered with a luxuriant growth of bushes, grass,
flowers, and a few trees, chiefly spruce and fir, the firs gradually
dwarfing into a beautiful chaparral, the most beautiful, I think, I
have ever seen, the flat fan-shaped plumes thickly foliaged and
imbricated by snow pressure, forming a smooth, handsome thatch which
bears cones and thrives as if this repressed condition were its very
best. It extends up to an elevation of about fifty-five hundred feet.
Only a few trees more than a foot in diameter and more than fifty
feet high are found higher than four thousand feet above the sea. A
few poplars and willows occur on moist places, gradually dwarfing
like the conifers. Alder is the most generally distributed of the
chaparral bushes, growing nearly everywhere; its crinkled stems an
inch or two thick form a troublesome tangle to the mountaineer. The
blue geranium, with leaves red and showy at this time of the year, is
perhaps the most telling of the flowering plants. It grows up to five
thousand feet or more. Larkspurs are common, with epilobium, senecio,
erigeron, and a few solidagos. The harebell appears at about four
thousand feet and extends to the summit, dwarfing in stature but
maintaining the size of its handsome bells until they seem to be
lying loose and detached on the ground as if like snow flowers they
had fallen from the sky; and, though frail and delicate-looking, none
of its companions is more enduring or rings out the praises of
beauty-loving Nature in tones more appreciable to mortals, not
forgetting even Cassiope, who also is here, and her companion,
Bryanthus, the loveliest and most widely distributed of the alpine
shrubs. Then come crowberry, and two species of huckleberry, one of
them from about six inches to a foot high with delicious berries, the
other a most lavishly prolific and contented-looking dwarf, few of
the bushes being more than two inches high, counting to the topmost
leaf, yet each bearing from ten to twenty or more large berries.
Perhaps more than half the bulk of the whole plant is fruit, the
largest and finest-flavored of all the huckleberries or blueberries I
ever tasted, spreading fine feasts for the grouse and ptarmigan and
many others of Nature's mountain people.
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