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.
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