All The Islands Have Been Overswept
By The Ice-Sheet And Are But Little Changed As Yet, Save A Few Of The
Highest Summits Which Have Been Sculptured By Local Residual
Glaciers.
All have approximately the form of greatest strength with
reference to the overflow of an ice-sheet, excepting those mentioned
above, which have been more or less eroded by local residual
glaciers.
Every channel also has the form of greatest strength with
reference to ice-action. Islands, as we have seen, are still being
born in Glacier Bay and elsewhere to the northward.
I found many pleasant people aboard, but strangely ignorant on the
subject of earth-sculpture and landscape-making. Professor Niles, of
the Boston Institute of Technology, is aboard; also Mr. Russell and
Mr. Kerr of the Geological Survey, who are now on their way to Mt.
St. Elias, hoping to reach the summit; and a granddaughter of Peter
Burnett, the first governor of California.
We arrived at Wrangell in the rain at 10.30 P.M. There was a grand
rush on shore to buy curiosities and see totem poles. The shops were
jammed and mobbed, high prices paid for shabby stuff manufactured
expressly for tourist trade. Silver bracelets hammered out of dollars
and half dollars by Indian smiths are the most popular articles, then
baskets, yellow cedar toy canoes, paddles, etc. Most people who
travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the
power of the guidebook-maker, however ignorant. I inquired for my old
friends Tyeen and Shakes, who were both absent.
June 20. We left Wrangell early this morning and passed through the
Wrangell Narrows at high tide. I noticed a few bergs near Cape
Fanshawe from Wrangell Glacier. The water ten miles from Wrangell is
colored with particles derived mostly from the Stickeen River
glaciers and Le Conte Glacier. All the waters of the channels north
of Wrangell are green or yellowish from glacier erosion. We had a
good view of the glaciers all the way to Juneau, but not of their
high, cloud-veiled fountains. The stranded bergs on the moraine bar
at the mouth of Sum Dum Bay looked just as they did when I first saw
them ten years ago.
Before reaching Juneau, the Queen proceeded up the Taku Inlet that
the passengers might see the fine glacier at its head, and ventured
to within half a mile of the berg-discharging front, which is about
three quarters of a mile wide. Bergs fell but seldom, perhaps one in
half an hour. The glacier makes a rapid descent near the front. The
inlet, therefore, will not be much extended beyond its present limit
by the recession of the glacier. The grand rocks on either side of
its channel show ice-action in telling style. The Norris Glacier,
about two miles below the Taku is a good example of a glacier in the
first stage of decadence. The Taku River enters the head of the inlet
a little to the east of the glaciers, coming from beyond the main
coast range. All the tourists are delighted at seeing a grand glacier
in the flesh. The scenery is very fine here and in the channel at
Juneau. On Douglas Island there is a large mill of 240 stamps, all
run by one small water-wheel, which, however, is acted on by water at
enormous pressure. The forests around the mill are being rapidly
nibbled away. Wind is here said to be very violent at times, blowing
away people and houses and sweeping scud far up the mountain-side.
Winter snow is seldom more than a foot or two deep.
June 21. We arrived at Douglas Island at five in the afternoon and
went sight-seeing through the mill. Six hundred tons of low-grade
quartz are crushed per day. Juneau, on the mainland opposite the
Douglas Island mills, is quite a village, well supplied with stores,
churches, etc. A dance-house in which Indians are supposed to show
native dances of all sorts is perhaps the best-patronized of all the
places of amusement. A Mr. Brooks, who prints a paper here, gave us
some information on Mt. St. Elias, Mt. Wrangell, and the Cook Inlet
and Prince William Sound region. He told Russell that he would never
reach the summit of St. Elias, that it was inaccessible. He saw no
glaciers that discharged bergs into the sea at Cook Inlet, but many
in Prince William Sound.
June 22. Leaving Juneau at noon, we had a good view of the Auk
Glacier at the mouth of the channel between Douglas Island and the
mainland, and of Eagle Glacier a few miles north of the Auk on the
east side of Lynn Canal. Then the Davidson Glacier came in sight,
finely curved, striped with medial moraines, and girdled in front by
its magnificent tree-fringed terminal moraine; and besides these many
others of every size and pattern on the mountains bounding Lynn
Canal, most of them comparatively small, completing their sculpture.
The mountains on either hand and at the head of the canal are
strikingly beautiful at any time of the year. The sky to-day is
mostly clear, with just clouds enough hovering about the mountains to
show them to best advantage as they stretch onward in sustained
grandeur like two separate and distinct ranges, each mountain with
its glaciers and clouds and fine sculpture glowing bright in smooth,
graded light. Only a few of them exceed five thousand feet in height;
but as one naturally associates great height with ice-and-snow-laden
mountains and with glacial sculpture so pronounced, they seem much
higher. There are now two canneries at the head of Lynn Canal. The
Indians furnish some of the salmon at ten cents each. Everybody sits
up to see the midnight sky. At this time of the year there is no
night here, though the sun drops a degree or two below the horizon.
One may read at twelve o'clock San Francisco time.
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