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Title: Alaska Days with John Muir
Author: Samuel Hall Young
Release Date: December 17, 2009 [eBook #30697]
[Most recently updated: October 24, 2021]
Language: English
Produced by: Greg Bergquist, Chris Curnow, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALASKA DAYS WITH JOHN MUIR ***
Transcriber’s Note
The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully preserved.
ALASKA DAYS WITH JOHN MUIR
[Illustration: JOHN MUIR WITH ALASKA SPRUCE CONES]
ALASKA DAYS WITH JOHN MUIR
by
S. HALL YOUNG
Illustrated
[Illustration]
New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh
Copyright, 1915, by
Fleming H. Revell Company
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 125 N. Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
CONTENTS
I THE MOUNTAIN 11
II THE RESCUE 37
III THE VOYAGE 59
IV THE DISCOVERY 95
V THE LOST GLACIER 125
VI THE DOG AND THE MAN 163
VII THE MAN IN PERSPECTIVE 201
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
John Muir with Alaska Spruce Cones _Title_
Fort Wrangell 12
The Mountain 24
One of the Marvelous Array of Lakes 40
Glacier--Stickeen Valley 54
Chilcat Woman Weaving a Blanket 82
Muir Glacier 114
Davidson Glacier 128
Taku Glacier 150
The Front of Muir Glacier 168
Glacial Crevasses 186
John Muir in Later Life 200
Map 70
(Voyages of Muir and Young)
THE MOUNTAIN
THUNDER BAY
Deep calm from God enfolds the land;
Light on the mountain top I stand;
How peaceful all, but ah, how grand!
Low lies the bay beneath my feet;
The bergs sail out, a white-winged fleet,
To where the sky and ocean meet.
Their glacier mother sleeps between
Her granite walls. The mountains lean
Above her, trailing skirts of green.
Each ancient brow is raised to heaven:
The snow streams always, tempest-driven,
Like hoary locks, o'er chasms riven
By throes of Earth. But, still as sleep,
No storm disturbs the quiet deep
Where mirrored forms their silence keep.
A heaven of light beneath the sea!
A dream of worlds from shadow free!
A pictured, bright eternity!
The azure domes above, below
(A crystal casket), hold and show,
As precious jewels, gems of snow,
Dark emerald islets, amethyst
Of far horizon, pearls of mist
In pendant clouds, clear icebergs, kissed
By wavelets,--sparkling diamonds rare
Quick flashing through the ambient air.
A ring of mountains, graven fair
In lines of grace, encircles all,
Save where the purple splendors fall
On sky and ocean's bridal-hall.
The yellow river, broad and fleet,
Winds through its velvet meadows sweet--
A chain of gold for jewels meet.
Pours over all the sun's broad ray;
Power, beauty, peace, in one array!
My God, I thank Thee for this day.
I
THE MOUNTAIN
In the summer of 1879 I was stationed at Fort Wrangell in southeastern
Alaska, whence I had come the year before, a green young student fresh
from college and seminary--very green and very fresh--to do what I could
towards establishing the white man's civilization among the Thlinget
Indians. I had very many things to learn and many more to unlearn.
Thither came by the monthly mail steamboat in July to aid and counsel me
in my work three men of national reputation--Dr. Henry Kendall of New
York; Dr. Aaron L. Lindsley of Portland, Oregon, and Dr. Sheldon Jackson
of Denver and the West. Their wives accompanied them and they were to
spend a month with us.
Standing a little apart from them as the steamboat drew to the dock, his
peering blue eyes already eagerly scanning the islands and mountains,
was a lean, sinewy man of forty, with waving, reddish-brown hair and
beard, and shoulders slightly stooped. He wore a Scotch cap and a long,
gray tweed ulster, which I have always since associated with him, and
which seemed the same garment, unsoiled and unchanged, that he wore
later on his northern trips. He was introduced as Professor Muir, the
Naturalist. A hearty grip of the hand, and we seemed to coalesce at once
in a friendship which, to me at least, has been one of the very best
things I have known in a life full of blessings. From the first he was
the strongest and most attractive of these four fine personalities to
me, and I began to recognize him as my Master who was to lead me into
enchanting regions of beauty and mystery, which without his aid must
forever have remained unseen by the eyes of my soul. I sat at his feet;
and at the feet of his spirit I still sit, a student, absorbed,
surrendered, as this "priest of Nature's inmost shrine" unfolds to me
the secrets of his "mountains of God."
[Illustration: FORT WRANGELL
Near the mouth of the Stickeen--the starting point of the expeditions]
Minor excursions culminated in the chartering of the little steamer
_Cassiar_, on which our party, augmented by two or three friends,
steamed between the tremendous glaciers and through the columned canyons
of the swift Stickeen River through the narrow strip of Alaska's
cup-handle to Glenora, in British Columbia, one hundred and fifty miles
from the river's mouth. Our captain was Nat. Lane, a grandson of the
famous Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon. Stocky, broad-shouldered,
muscular, given somewhat to strange oaths and strong liquids, and eying
askance our group as we struck the bargain, he was withal a genial,
good-natured man, and a splendid river pilot.
Dropping down from Telegraph Creek (so named because it was a principal
station of the great projected trans-American and trans-Siberian line of
the Western Union, that bubble pricked by Cyrus Field's cable), we tied
up at Glenora about noon of a cloudless day.
"Amuse yourselves," said Captain Lane at lunch. "Here we stay till two
o'clock to-morrow morning. This gale, blowing from the sea, makes safe
steering through the Canyon impossible, unless we take the morning's
calm."
I saw Muir's eyes light up with a peculiar meaning as he glanced
quickly at me across the table. He knew the leading strings I was in;
how those well-meaning D.D.s and their motherly wives thought they had a
special mission to suppress all my self-destructive proclivities toward
dangerous adventure, and especially to protect me from "that wild Muir"
and his hare-brained schemes of mountain climbing.
"Where is it?" I asked, as we met behind the pilot house a moment later.
He pointed to a little group of jagged peaks rising right up from where
we stood--a pulpit in the center of a vast rotunda of magnificent
mountains. "One of the finest viewpoints in the world," he said.
"How far to the highest point?"
"About ten miles."
"How high?"
"Seven or eight thousand feet."
That was enough. I caught the D.D.s with guile. There were Stickeen
Indians there catching salmon, and among them Chief Shakes, who our
interpreter said was "The youngest but the headest Chief of all." Last
night's palaver had whetted the appetites of both sides for more. On the
part of the Indians, a talk with these "Great White Chiefs from
Washington" offered unlimited possibilities for material favor; and to
the good divines the "simple faith and childlike docility" of these
children of the forest were a constant delight. And then how well their
high-flown compliments and flowery metaphors would sound in article and
speech to the wondering East! So I sent Stickeen Johnny, the
interpreter, to call the natives to another _hyou wawa_ (big talk) and,
note-book in hand, the doctors "went gayly to the fray." I set the
speeches a-going, and then slipped out to join the impatient Muir.
"Take off your coat," he commanded, "and here's your supper."
Pocketing two hardtacks apiece we were off, keeping in shelter of house
and bush till out of sight of the council-house and the flower-picking
ladies. Then we broke out. What a matchless climate! What sweet,
lung-filling air! Sunshine that had no weakness in it--as if we were
springing plants. Our sinews like steel springs, muscles like India
rubber, feet soled with iron to grip the rocks. Ten miles? Eight
thousand feet? Why, I felt equal to forty miles and the Matterhorn!
"Eh, mon!" said Muir, lapsing into the broad Scotch he was so fond of
using when enjoying himself, "ye'll see the sicht o' yer life the day.
Ye'll get that'll be o' mair use till ye than a' the gowd o' Cassiar."
From the first, it was a hard climb. Fallen timber at the mountain's
foot covered with thick brush swallowed us up and plucked us back.
Beyond, on the steeper slopes, grew dwarf evergreens, five or six feet
high--the same fir that towers a hundred feet with a diameter of three
or four on the river banks, but here stunted by icy mountain winds. The
curious blasting of the branches on the side next to the mountain gave
them the appearance of long-armed, humpbacked, hairy gnomes, bristling
with anger, stretching forbidding arms downwards to bar our passage to
their sacred heights. Sometimes an inviting vista through the branches
would lure us in, when it would narrow, and at its upper angle we would
find a solid phalanx of these grumpy dwarfs. Then we had to attack
boldly, scrambling over the obstinate, elastic arms and against the
clusters of stiff needles, till we gained the upper side and found
another green slope.
Muir led, of course, picking with sure instinct the easiest way. Three
hours of steady work brought us suddenly beyond the timber-line, and the
real joy of the day began. Nowhere else have I see anything approaching
the luxuriance and variety of delicate blossoms shown by these high,
mountain pastures of the North. "You scarce could see the grass for
flowers." Everything that was marvelous in form, fair in color, or sweet
in fragrance seemed to be represented there, from daisies and campanulas
to Muir's favorite, the cassiope, with its exquisite little pink-white
bells shaped like lilies-of-the-valley and its subtle perfume. Muir at
once went wild when we reached this fairyland. From cluster to cluster
of flowers he ran, falling on his knees, babbling in unknown tongues,
prattling a curious mixture of scientific lingo and baby talk,
worshiping his little blue-and-pink goddesses.
"Ah! my blue-eyed darlin', little did I think to see you here. How did
you stray away from Shasta?"
"Well, well! Who'd 'a' thought that you'd have left that niche in the
Merced mountains to come here!"
"And who might you be, now, with your wonder look? Is it possible that
you can be (two Latin polysyllables)? You're lost, my dear; you belong
in Tennessee."
"Ah! I thought I'd find you, my homely little sweetheart," and so on
unceasingly.
So absorbed was he in this amatory botany that he seemed to forget my
existence. While I, as glad as he, tagged along, running up and down
with him, asking now and then a question, learning something of plant
life, but far more of that spiritual insight into Nature's lore which is
granted only to those who love and woo her in her great outdoor palaces.
But how I anathematized my short-sighted foolishness for having as a
student at old Wooster shirked botany for the "more important" studies
of language and metaphysics. For here was a man whose natural science
had a thorough technical basis, while the superstructure was built of
"lively stones," and was itself a living temple of love!
With all his boyish enthusiasm, Muir was a most painstaking student; and
any unsolved question lay upon his mind like a personal grievance until
it was settled to his full understanding. One plant after another, with
its sand-covered roots, went into his pockets, his handkerchief and the
"full" of his shirt, until he was bulbing and sprouting all over, and
could carry no more. He was taking them to the boat to analyze and
compare at leisure. Then he began to requisition my receptacles. I stood
it while he stuffed my pockets, but rebelled when he tried to poke the
prickly, scratchy things inside my shirt. I had not yet attained that
sublime indifference to physical comfort, that Nirvana of passivity,
that Muir had found.
Hours had passed in this entrancing work and we were progressing upwards
but slowly. We were on the southeastern slope of the mountain, and the
sun was still staring at us from a cloudless sky. Suddenly we were in
the shadow as we worked around a spur of rock. Muir looked up, startled.
Then he jammed home his last handful of plants, and hastened up to
where I stood.
"Man!" he said, "I was forgetting. We'll have to hurry now or we'll miss
it, we'll miss it."
"Miss what?" I asked.
"The jewel of the day," he answered; "the sight of the sunset from the
top."
Then Muir began to _slide_ up that mountain. I had been with mountain
climbers before, but never one like him. A deer-lope over the smoother
slopes, a sure instinct for the easiest way into a rocky fortress, an
instant and unerring attack, a serpent-glide up the steep; eye, hand and
foot all connected dynamically; with no appearance of weight to his
body--as though he had Stockton's negative gravity machine strapped on
his back.
Fifteen years of enthusiastic study among the Sierras had given him the
same pre-eminence over the ordinary climber as the Big Horn of the
Rockies shows over the Cotswold. It was only by exerting myself to the
limit of my strength that I was able to keep near him. His example was
at the same time my inspiration and despair. I longed for him to stop
and rest, but would not have suggested it for the world. I would at
least be game, and furnish no hint as to how tired I was, no matter how
chokingly my heart thumped. Muir's spirit was in me, and my "chief end,"
just then, was to win that peak with him. The impending calamity of
being beaten by the sun was not to be contemplated without horror. The
loss of a fortune would be as nothing to that!
[Illustration: THE MOUNTAIN
He pointed to a little group of jagged peaks rising right up from where
we stood--a pulpit in the center of a vast rotunda of magnificent
mountains]
We were now beyond the flower garden of the gods, in a land of rocks
and cliffs, with patches of short grass, caribou moss and lichens
between. Along a narrowing arm of the mountain, a deep canyon flumed a
rushing torrent of icy water from a small glacier on our right. Then
came moraine matter, rounded pebbles and boulders, and beyond them the
glacier. Once a giant, it is nothing but a baby now, but the ice is
still blue and clear, and the crevasses many and deep. And that day it
had to be crossed, which was a ticklish task. A misstep or slip might
land us at once fairly into the heart of the glacier, there to be
preserved in cold storage for the wonderment of future generations. But
glaciers were Muir's special pets, his intimate companions, with whom he
held sweet communion. Their voices were plain language to his ears,
their work, as God's landscape gardeners, of the wisest and best that
Nature could offer.
No Swiss guide was ever wiser in the habits of glaciers than Muir, or
proved to be a better pilot across their deathly crevasses. Half a mile
of careful walking and jumping and we were on the ground again, at the
base of the great cliff of metamorphic slate that crowned the summit.
Muir's aneroid barometer showed a height of about seven thousand feet,
and the wall of rock towered threateningly above us, leaning out in
places, a thousand feet or so above the glacier. But the earth-fires
that had melted and heaved it, the ice mass that chiseled and shaped it,
the wind and rain that corroded and crumbled it, had left plenty of
bricks out of that battlement, had covered its face with knobs and
horns, had ploughed ledges and cleaved fissures and fastened crags and
pinnacles upon it, so that, while its surface was full of man-traps and
blind ways, the human spider might still find some hold for his claws.
The shadows were dark upon us, but the lofty, icy peaks of the main
range still lay bathed in the golden rays of the setting sun. There was
no time to be lost. A quick glance to the right and left, and Muir, who
had steered his course wisely across the glacier, attacked the cliff,
simply saying, "We must climb cautiously here."
Now came the most wonderful display of his mountain-craft. Had I been
alone at the feet of these crags I should have said, "It can't be done,"
and have turned back down the mountain. But Muir was my "control," as
the Spiritists say, and I never thought of doing anything else but
following him. He thought he could climb up there and that settled it.
He would do what he thought he could. And such climbing! There was never
an instant when both feet and hands were not in play, and often elbows,
knees, thighs, upper arms, and even chin must grip and hold. Clambering
up a steep slope, crawling under an overhanging rock, spreading out like
a flying squirrel and edging along an inch-wide projection while fingers
clasped knobs above the head, bending about sharp angles, pulling up
smooth rock-faces by sheer strength of arm and chinning over the edge,
leaping fissures, sliding flat around a dangerous rock-breast, testing
crumbly spurs before risking his weight, always going up, up, no
hesitation, no pause--that was Muir! My task was the lighter one; he did
the head-work, I had but to imitate. The thin fragment of projecting
slate that stood the weight of his one hundred and fifty pounds would
surely sustain my hundred and thirty. As far as possible I did as he
did, took his hand-holds, and stepped in his steps.
But I was handicapped in a way that Muir was ignorant of, and I would
not tell him for fear of his veto upon my climbing. My legs were all
right--hard and sinewy; my body light and supple, my wind good, my
nerves steady (heights did not make me dizzy); but my arms--there lay
the trouble. Ten years before I had been fond of breaking colts--till
the colts broke me. On successive summers in West Virginia, two colts
had fallen with me and dislocated first my left shoulder, then my right.
Since that both arms had been out of joint more than once. My left was
especially weak. It would not sustain my weight, and I had to favor it
constantly. Now and again, as I pulled myself up some difficult reach I
could feel the head of the humerus move from its socket.
Muir climbed so fast that his movements were almost like flying, legs
and arms moving with perfect precision and unfailing judgment. I must
keep close behind him or I would fail to see his points of vantage. But
the pace was a killing one for me. As we neared the summit my strength
began to fail, my breath to come in gasps, my muscles to twitch. The
overwhelming fear of losing sight of my guide, of being left behind and
failing to see that sunset, grew upon me, and I hurled myself blindly at
every fresh obstacle, determined to keep up. At length we climbed upon a
little shelf, a foot or two wide, that corkscrewed to the left. Here we
paused a moment to take breath and look around us. We had ascended the
cliff some nine hundred and fifty feet from the glacier, and were within
forty or fifty feet of the top.
Among the much-prized gifts of this good world one of the very richest
was given to me in that hour. It is securely locked in the safe of my
memory and nobody can rob me of it--an imperishable treasure. Standing
out on the rounded neck of the cliff and facing the southwest, we could
see on three sides of us. The view was much the finest of all my
experience. We seemed to stand on a high rostrum in the center of the
greatest amphitheater in the world. The sky was cloudless, the level sun
flooding all the landscape with golden light. From the base of the
mountain on which we stood stretched the rolling upland. Striking boldly
across our front was the deep valley of the Stickeen, a line of foliage,
light green cottonwoods and darker alders, sprinkled with black fir and
spruce, through which the river gleamed with a silvery sheen, now
spreading wide among its islands, now foaming white through narrow
canyons. Beyond, among the undulating hills, was a marvelous array of
lakes. There must have been thirty or forty of them, from the pond of an
acre to the wide sheet two or three miles across. The strangely
elongated and rounded hills had the appearance of giants in bed, wrapped
in many-colored blankets, while the lakes were their deep, blue eyes,
lashed with dark evergreens, gazing steadfastly heavenward. Look long at
these recumbent forms and you will see the heaving of their breasts.
The whole landscape was alert, expectant of glory. Around this great
camp of prostrate Cyclops there stood an unbroken semicircle of mighty
peaks in solemn grandeur, some hoary-headed, some with locks of brown,
but all wearing white glacier collars. The taller peaks seemed almost
sharp enough to be the helmets and spears of watchful sentinels. And
the colors! Great stretches of crimson fireweed, acres and acres of
them, smaller patches of dark blue lupins, and hills of shaded yellow,
red, and brown, the many-shaded green of the woods, the amethyst and
purple of the far horizon--who can tell it? We did not stand there more
than two or three minutes, but the whole wonderful scene is deeply
etched on the tablet of my memory, a photogravure never to be effaced.
THE RESCUE
THE MOUNTAIN'S FAITH
At eventide, upon a dreary sea,
I watched a mountain rear its hoary head
To look with steady gaze in the near heaven.
The earth was cold and still. No sound was heard
But the dream-voices of the sleeping sea.
The mountain drew its gray cloud-mantle close,
Like Roman senator, erect and old,
Raising aloft an earnest brow and calm,
With upward look intent of steadfast faith.
The sky was dim; no glory-light shone forth
To crown the mountain's faith; which faltered not,
But, ever hopeful, waited patiently.
At morn I looked again. Expectance sat
Of immanent glory on the mountain's brow.
And, in a moment, lo! the glory _came!_
An angel's hand rolled back a crimson cloud.
Deep, rose-red light of wondrous tone and power--
A crown of matchless splendor--graced its head,
Majestic, kingly, pure as Heaven, yet warm
With earthward love. A motion, like a heart
With rich blood beating, seemed to sway and pulse,
With might of ecstasy, the granite peak.
A poem grand it was of Love Divine--
An anthem, sweet and strong, of praise to God--
A victory-peal from barren fields of death.
Its gaze was heavenward still, but earthward too--
For Love seeks not her own, and joy is full,
Only when freest given. The sun shone forth,
And now the mountain doffed its ruby crown
For one of diamonds. Still the light streamed down;
No longer chill and bleak, the morning glowed
With warmth and light, and clouds of fiery hue
Mantled the crystal glacier's chilly stream,
And all the landscape throbbed with sudden joy.
II
THE RESCUE
Muir was the first to awake from his trance. Like Schiller's king in
"The Diver," "Nothing could slake his wild thirst of desire."
"The sunset," he cried; "we must have the whole horizon."
Then he started running along the ledge like a mountain goat, working to
get around the vertical cliff above us to find an ascent on the other
side. He was soon out of sight, although I followed as fast as I could.
I heard him shout something, but could not make out his words. I know
now he was warning me of a dangerous place. Then I came to a sharp-cut
fissure which lay across my path--a gash in the rock, as if one of the
Cyclops had struck it with his axe. It sloped very steeply for some
twelve feet below, opening on the face of the precipice above the
glacier, and was filled to within about four feet of the surface with
flat, slaty gravel. It was only four or five feet across, and I could
easily have leaped it had I not been so tired. But a rock the size of my
head projected from the slippery stream of gravel. In my haste to
overtake Muir I did not stop to make sure this stone was part of the
cliff, but stepped with springing force upon it to cross the fissure.
Instantly the stone melted away beneath my feet, and I shot with it down
towards the precipice. With my peril sharp upon me I cried out as I
whirled on my face, and struck out both hands to grasp the rock on
either side.
Falling forward hard, my hands struck the walls of the chasm, my arms
were twisted behind me, and instantly both shoulders were dislocated.
With my paralyzed arms flopping helplessly above my head, I slid swiftly
down the narrow chasm. Instinctively I flattened down on the sliding
gravel, digging my chin and toes into it to check my descent; but not
until my feet hung out over the edge of the cliff did I feel that I had
stopped. Even then I dared not breathe or stir, so precarious was my
hold on that treacherous shale. Every moment I seemed to be slipping
inch by inch to the point when all would give way and I would go
whirling down to the glacier.
After the first wild moment of panic when I felt myself falling, I do
not remember any sense of fear. But I know what it is to have a thousand
thoughts flash through the brain in a single instant--an anguished
thought of my young wife at Wrangell, with her immanent motherhood; an
indignant thought of the insurance companies that refused me policies on
my life; a thought of wonder as to what would become of my poor flocks
of Indians among the islands; recollections of events far and near in
time, important and trivial; but each thought printed upon my memory by
the instantaneous photography of deadly peril. I had no hope of escape
at all. The gravel was rattling past me and piling up against my head.
The jar of a little rock, and all would be over. The situation was too
desperate for actual fear. Dull wonder as to how long I would be in the
air, and the hope that death would be instant--that was all. Then came
the wish that Muir would come before I fell, and take a message to my
wife.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE MARVELOUS ARRAY OF LAKES]
Suddenly I heard his voice right above me. "My God!" he cried. Then he
added, "Grab that rock, man, just by your right hand."
I gurgled from my throat, not daring to inflate my lungs, "My arms are
out."
There was a pause. Then his voice rang again, cheery, confident,
unexcited, "Hold fast; I'm going to get you out of this. I can't get to
you on this side; the rock is sheer. I'll have to leave you now and
cross the rift high up and come down to you on the other side by which
we came. Keep cool."
Then I heard him going away, whistling "The Blue Bells of Scotland,"
singing snatches of Scotch songs, calling to me, his voice now receding,
as the rocks intervened, then sounding louder as he came out on the face
of the cliff. But in me hope surged at full tide. I entertained no more
thoughts of last messages. I did not see how he could possibly do it,
but he was John Muir, and I had seen his wonderful rock-work. So I
determined not to fall and made myself as flat and heavy as possible,
not daring to twitch a muscle or wink an eyelid, for I still felt myself
slipping, slipping down the greasy slate. And now a new peril
threatened. A chill ran through me of cold and nervousness, and I slid
an inch. I suppressed the growing shivers with all my will. I would keep
perfectly quiet till Muir came back. The sickening pain in my shoulders
increased till it was torture, and I could not ease it.
It seemed like hours, but it was really only about ten minutes before he
got back to me. By that time I hung so far over the edge of the
precipice that it seemed impossible that I could last another second.
Now I heard Muir's voice, low and steady, close to me, and it seemed a
little below.
"Hold steady," he said. "I'll have to swing you out over the cliff."
Then I felt a careful hand on my back, fumbling with the waistband of my
pants, my vest and shirt, gathering all in a firm grip. I could see only
with one eye and that looked upon but a foot or two of gravel on the
other side.
"Now!" he said, and I slid out of the cleft with a rattling shower of
stones and gravel. My head swung down, my impotent arms dangling, and I
stared straight at the glacier, a thousand feet below. Then my feet came
against the cliff.
"Work downwards with your feet."
I obeyed. He drew me close to him by crooking his arm and as my head
came up past his level he caught me by my collar with his teeth! My
feet struck the little two-inch shelf on which he was standing, and I
could see Muir, flattened against the face of the rock and facing it,
his right hand stretched up and clasping a little spur, his left holding
me with an iron grip, his head bent sideways, as my weight drew it. I
felt as alert and cool as he.
"I've got to let go of you," he hissed through his clenched teeth. "I
need both hands here. Climb upward with your feet."
How he did it, I know not. The miracle grows as I ponder it. The wall
was almost perpendicular and smooth. My weight on his jaws dragged him
outwards. And yet, holding me by his teeth as a panther her cub and
clinging like a squirrel to a tree, he climbed with me straight up ten
or twelve feet, with only the help of my iron-shod feet scrambling on
the rock. It was utterly impossible, yet he did it!
When he landed me on the little shelf along which we had come, my nerve
gave way and I trembled all over. I sank down exhausted, Muir only less
tired, but supporting me.
The sun had set; the air was icy cold and we had no coats. We would soon
chill through. Muir's task of rescue had only begun and no time was to
be lost. In a minute he was up again, examining my shoulders. The right
one had an upward dislocation, the ball of the humerus resting on the
process of the scapula, the rim of the cup. I told him how, and he soon
snapped the bone into its socket. But the left was a harder proposition.
The luxation was downward and forward, and the strong, nervous reaction
of the muscles had pulled the head of the bone deep into my armpit.
There was no room to work on that narrow ledge. All that could be done
was to make a rude sling with one of my suspenders and our
handkerchiefs, so as to both support the elbow and keep the arm from
swinging.
Then came the task to get down that terrible wall to the glacier, by the
only practicable way down the mountain that Muir, after a careful
search, could find. Again I am at loss to know how he accomplished it.
For an unencumbered man to descend it in the deepening dusk was a most
difficult task; but to get a tottery, nerve-shaken, pain-wracked cripple
down was a feat of positive wonder. My right arm, though in place, was
almost helpless. I could only move my forearm; the muscles of the upper
part simply refusing to obey my will. Muir would let himself down to a
lower shelf, brace himself, and I would get my right hand against him,
crawl my fingers over his shoulder until the arm hung in front of him,
and falling against him, would be eased down to his standing ground.
Sometimes he would pack me a short distance on his back. Again, taking
me by the wrist, he would swing me down to a lower shelf, before
descending himself. My right shoulder came out three times that night,
and had to be reset.
It was dark when we reached the base; there was no moon and it was very
cold. The glacier provided an operating table, and I lay on the ice for
an hour while Muir, having slit the sleeve of my shirt to the collar,
tugged and twisted at my left arm in a vain attempt to set it. But the
ball was too deep in its false socket, and all his pulling only bruised
and made it swell. So he had to do up the arm again, and tie it tight to
my body. It must have been near midnight when we left the foot of the
cliff and started down the mountain. We had ten hard miles to go, and no
supper, for the hardtack had disappeared ere we were half-way up the
mountain. Muir dared not take me across the glacier in the dark; I was
too weak to jump the crevasses. So we skirted it and came, after a mile,
to the head of a great slide of gravel, the fine moraine matter of the
receding glacier. Muir sat down on the gravel; I sat against him with my
feet on either side and my arm over his shoulder. Then he began to hitch
and kick, and presently we were sliding at great speed in a cloud of
dust. A full half-mile we flew, and were almost buried when we reached
the bottom of the slide. It was the easiest part of our trip.
Now we found ourselves in the canyon, down which tumbled the glacial
stream, and far beneath the ridge along which we had ascended. The
sides of the canyon were sheer cliffs.
"We'll try it," said Muir. "Sometimes these canyons are passable."
But the way grew rougher as we descended. The rapids became falls and we
often had to retrace our steps to find a way around them. After we
reached the timber-line, some four miles from the summit, the going was
still harder, for we had a thicket of alders and willows to fight. Here
Muir offered to make a fire and leave me while he went forward for
assistance, but I refused. "No," I said, "I'm going to make it to the
boat."
All that night this man of steel and lightning worked, never resting a
minute, doing the work of three men, helping me along the slopes, easing
me down the rocks, pulling me up cliffs, dashing water on me when I grew
faint with the pain; and always cheery, full of talk and anecdote,
cracking jokes with me, infusing me with his own indomitable spirit. He
was eyes, hands, feet, and heart to me--my caretaker, in whom I trusted
absolutely. My eyes brim with tears even now when I think of his utter
self-abandon as he ministered to my infirmities.
About four o'clock in the morning we came to a fall that we could not
compass, sheer a hundred feet or more. So we had to attack the steep
walls of the canyon. After a hard struggle we were on the mountain
ridges again, traversing the flower pastures, creeping through openings
in the brush, scrambling over the dwarf fir, then down through the
fallen timber. It was half-past seven o'clock when we descended the last
slope and found the path to Glenora. Here we met a straggling party of
whites and Indians just starting out to search the mountain for us.
As I was coming wearily up the teetering gang-plank, feeling as if I
couldn't keep up another minute, Dr. Kendall stepped upon its end,
barring my passage, bent his bushy white brows upon me from his six feet
of height, and began to scold:
"See here, young man; give an account of yourself. Do you know you've
kept us waiting----"
Just then Captain Lane jumped forward to help me, digging the old Doctor
of Divinity with his elbow in the stomach and nearly knocking him off
the boat.
"Oh, hell!" he roared. "Can't you see the man's hurt?"
Mrs. Kendall was a very tall, thin, severe-looking old lady, with face
lined with grief by the loss of her children. She never smiled. She had
not gone to bed at all that night, but walked the deck and would not let
her husband or the others sleep. Soon after daylight she began to lash
the men with the whip of her tongue for their "cowardice and inhumanity"
in not starting at once to search for me.
"Mr. Young is undoubtedly lying mangled at the foot of a cliff, or else
one of those terrible bears has wounded him; and you are lolling around
here instead of starting to his rescue. For shame!"
When they objected that they did not know where we had gone, she
snapped: "Go everywhere until you find him."
Her fierce energy started the men we met. When I came on board she at
once took charge and issued her orders, which everybody jumped to obey.
She had blankets spread on the floor of the cabin and laid me on them.
She obtained some whisky from the captain, some water, porridge and
coffee from the steward. She was sitting on the floor with my head in
her lap, feeding me coffee with a spoon, when Dr. Kendall came in and
began on me again:
"Suppose you had fallen down that precipice, what would your poor wife
have done? What would have become of your Indians and your new church?"
Then Mrs. Kendall turned and thrust her spoon like a sword at him.
"Henry Kendall," she blazed, "shut right up and leave this room. Have
you no sense? Go instantly, I say!" And the good Doctor went.
My recollections of that day are not very clear. The shoulder was in a
bad condition--swollen, bruised, very painful. I had to be strengthened
with food and rest, and Muir called from his sleep of exhaustion, so
that with four other men he could pull and twist that poor arm of mine
for an hour. They got it into its socket, but scarcely had Muir got to
sleep again before the strong, nervous twitching of the shoulder
dislocated it a second time and seemingly placed it in a worse condition
than before. Captain Lane was now summoned, and with Muir to direct,
they worked for two or three hours. Whisky was poured down my throat to
relax my stubborn, pain-convulsed muscles. Then they went at it with two
men pulling at the towel knotted about my wrist, two others pulling
against them, foot braced to foot, Muir manipulating my shoulder with
his sinewy hands, and the stocky Captain, strong and compact as a bear,
with his heel against the yarn ball in my armpit, takes me by the elbow
and says, "I'll set it or pull the arm off!"
[Illustration: GLACIER--STICKEEN VALLEY
Muir, fresh and enthusiastic as ever, was the pilot of the party across
the moraine and upon the great ice mountain]
Well, he almost does the latter. I am conscious of a frightful strain,
a spasm of anguish in my side as his heel slips from the ball and kicks
in two of my ribs, a snap as the head of the bone slips into the
cup--then kindly oblivion.
I was awakened about five o'clock in the afternoon by the return of the
whole party from an excursion to the Great Glacier at the Boundary Line.
Muir, fresh and enthusiastic as ever, had been the pilot across the
moraine and upon the great ice mountain; and I, wrapped like a mummy in
linen strips, was able to join in his laughter as he told of the big
D.D.'s heroics, when, in the middle of an acre of alder brush, he asked
indignantly, in response to the hurry-up calls: "Do you think I'm going
to leave my wife in this forest?"
One overpowering regret--one only--abides in my heart as I think back
upon that golden day with John Muir. He could, and did, go back to
Glenora on the return trip of the _Cassiar_, ascend the mountain again,
see the sunset from its top, make charming sketches, stay all night and
see the sunrise, filling his cup of joy so full that he could pour out
entrancing descriptions for days. While I--well, with entreating arms
about one's neck and pleading, tearful eyes looking into one's own, what
could one do but promise to climb no more? But my lifelong lamentation
over a treasure forever lost, is this: "I never saw the sunset from that
peak."
THE VOYAGE
TOW-A-ATT
You are a child, old Friend--a child!
As light of heart, as free, as wild;
As credulous of fairy tale;
As simple in your faith, as frail
In reason; jealous, petulant;
As crude in manner; ignorant,
Yet wise in love; as rough, as mild--
You are a child!
You are a man, old Friend--a man!
Ah, sure in richer tide ne'er ran
The blood of earth's nobility,
Than through your veins; intrepid, free;
In counsel, prudent; proud and tall;
Of passions full, yet ruling all;
No stauncher friend since time began;
You are a MAN!
III
THE VOYAGE
The summer and fall of 1879 Muir always referred to as the most
interesting period of his adventurous life. From about the tenth of July
to the twentieth of November he was in southeastern Alaska. Very little
of this time did he spend indoors. Until steamboat navigation of the
Stickeen River was closed by the forming ice, he made frequent trips to
the Great Glacier--thirty miles up the river, to the Hot Springs, the
Mud Glacier and the interior lakes, ranges, forests and flower pastures.
Always upon his return (for my house was his home the most of that time)
he would be full to intoxication of what he had seen, and dinners would
grow cold and lamps burn out while he held us entranced with his
impassioned stories. Although his books are all masterpieces of lucid
and glowing English, Muir was one of those rare souls who talk better
than they write; and he made the trees, the animals, and especially the
glaciers, live before us. Somehow a glacier never seemed cold when John
Muir was talking about it.
On September nineteenth a little stranger whose expected advent was
keeping me at home arrived in the person of our first-born daughter. For
two or three weeks preceding and following this event Muir was busy
writing his summer notes and finishing his pencil sketches, and also
studying the flora of the islands. It was a season of constant rains
when the _saanah_, the southeast rain-wind, blew a gale. But these
stormy days and nights, which kept ordinary people indoors, always
lured him out into the woods or up the mountains.
One wild night, dark as Erebus, the rain dashing in sheets and the wind
blowing a hurricane, Muir came from his room into ours about ten o'clock
with his long, gray overcoat and his Scotch cap on.
"Where now?" I asked.
"Oh, to the top of the mountain," he replied. "It is a rare chance to
study this fine storm."
My expostulations were in vain. He rejected with scorn the proffered
lantern: "It would spoil the effect." I retired at my usual time, for I
had long since learned not to worry about Muir. At two o'clock in the
morning there came a hammering at the front door. I opened it and there
stood a group of our Indians, rain-soaked and trembling--Chief
Tow-a-att, Moses, Aaron, Matthew, Thomas.
"Why, men," I cried, "what's wrong? What brings you here?"
"We want you play (pray)," answered Matthew.
I brought them into the house, and, putting on my clothes and lighting
the lamp, I set about to find out the trouble. It was not easy. They
were greatly excited and frightened.
"We scare. All Stickeen scare; plenty cly. We want you play God; plenty
play."
By dint of much questioning I gathered at last that the whole tribe were
frightened by a mysterious light waving and flickering from the top of
the little mountain that overlooked Wrangell; and they wished me to pray
to the white man's God and avert dire calamity.
"Some miner has camped there," I ventured.
An eager chorus protested; it was not like the light of a camp-fire in
the least; it waved in the air like the wings of a spirit. Besides,
there was no gold on the top of a hill like that; and no human being
would be so foolish as to camp up there on such a night, when there were
plenty of comfortable houses at the foot of the hill. It was a spirit, a
malignant spirit.
Suddenly the true explanation flashed into my brain, and I shocked my
Indians by bursting into a roar of laughter. In imagination I could see
him so plainly--John Muir, wet but happy, feeding his fire with spruce
sticks, studying and enjoying the storm! But I explained to my natives,
who ever afterwards eyed Muir askance, as a mysterious being whose ways
and motives were beyond all conjecture.
"Why does this strange man go into the wet woods and up the mountains on
stormy nights?" they asked. "Why does he wander alone on barren peaks
or on dangerous ice-mountains? There is no gold up there and he never
takes a gun with him or a pick. _Icta mamook_--what make? Why--why?"
The first week in October saw the culmination of plans long and eagerly
discussed. Almost the whole of the Alexandrian Archipelago, that great
group of eleven hundred wooded islands that forms the southeastern
cup-handle of Alaska, was at that time a _terra incognita_. The only
seaman's chart of the region in existence was that made by the great
English navigator, Vancouver, in 1807. It was a wonderful chart,
considering what an absurd little sailing vessel he had in which to
explore those intricate waters with their treacherous winds and tides.
But Vancouver's chart was hastily made, after all, in a land of fog and
rain and snow. He had not the modern surveyor's instruments, boats or
other helps. And, besides, this region was changing more rapidly than,
perhaps, any other part of the globe. Volcanic islands were being born
out of the depths of the ocean; landslides were filling up channels
between the islands; tides and rivers were opening new passages and
closing old ones; and, more than all, those mightiest tools of the great
Engineer, the glaciers, were furrowing valleys, dumping millions of tons
of silt into the sea, forming islands, promontories and isthmuses, and
by their recession letting the sea into deep and long fiords, forming
great bays, inlets and passages, many of which did not exist in
Vancouver's time. In certain localities the living glacier stream was
breaking off bergs so fast that the resultant bays were lengthening a
mile or more each year. Where Vancouver saw only a great crystal wall
across the sea, we were to paddle for days up a long and sinuous fiord;
and where he saw one glacier, we were to find a dozen.
My mission in the proposed voyage of discovery was to locate and visit
the tribes and villages of Thlingets to the north and west of Wrangell,
to take their census, confer with their chiefs and report upon their
condition, with a view to establishing schools and churches among them.
The most of these tribes had never had a visit from a missionary, and I
felt the eager zeal an Eliot or a Martin at the prospect of telling them
for the first time the Good News. Muir's mission was to find and study
the forests, mountains and glaciers. I also was eager to see these and
learn about them, and Muir was glad to study the natives with me--so
our plans fitted into each other well.
"We are going to write some history, my boy," Muir would say to me.
"Think of the honor! We have been chosen to put some interesting people
and some of Nature's grandest scenes on the page of human record and on
the map. Hurry! We are daily losing the most important news of all the
world."
In many respects we were most congenial companions. We both loved the
same poets and could repeat, verse about, many poems of Tennyson, Keats,
Shelley and Burns. He took with him a volume of Thoreau, and I one of
Emerson, and we enjoyed them together. I had my printed Bible with me,
and he had his in his head--the result of a Scotch father's discipline.
Our studies supplemented each other and our tastes were similar. We had
both lived clean lives and our conversation together was sweet and
high, while we both had a sense of humor and a large fund of stories.
But Muir's knowledge of Nature and his insight into her plans and
methods were so far beyond mine that, while I was organizer and
commander of the expedition, he was my teacher and guide into the inner
recesses and meanings of the islands, bays and mountains we explored
together.
Our ship for this voyage of discovery, while not so large as
Vancouver's, was much more shapely and manageable--a _kladushu etlan_
(six fathom) red-cedar canoe. It belonged to our captain, old Chief
Tow-a-att, a chief who had lately embraced Christianity with his whole
heart--one of the simplest, most faithful, dignified and brave souls I
ever knew. He fully expected to meet a martyr's death among his heathen
enemies of the northern islands; yet he did not shrink from the voyage
on that account.
His crew numbered three. First in importance was Kadishan, also a chief
of the Stickeens, chosen because of his powers of oratory, his kinship
with Chief Shathitch of the Chilcat tribe, and his friendly relations
with other chiefs. He was a born courtier, learned in Indian lore, songs
and customs, and able to instruct me in the proper Thlinget etiquette to
suit all occasions. The other two were sturdy young men--Stickeen John,
our interpreter, and Sitka Charley. They were to act as cooks,
camp-makers, oarsmen, hunters and general utility men.
We stowed our baggage, which was not burdensome, in one end of the
canoe, taking a simple store of provisions--flour, beans, bacon, sugar,
salt and a little dried fruit. We were to depend upon our guns,
fishhooks, spears and clamsticks for other diet. As a preliminary to our
palaver with the natives we followed the old Hudson Bay custom, then
firmly established in the North. We took materials for a
_potlatch_,--leaf-tobacco, rice and sugar. Our Indian crew laid in their
own stock of provisions, chiefly dried salmon and seal-grease, while our
table was to be separate, set out with the white man's viands.
We did not get off without trouble. Kadishan's mother, who looked but
little older than himself, strongly objected to my taking her son on so
perilous a voyage and so late in the fall, and when her scoldings and
entreaties did not avail she said: "If anything happens to my son, I
will take your baby as mine in payment."
[Illustration: VOYAGES OF MUIR AND YOUNG 1879 and 1880 IN SOUTHEASTERN
ALASKA]
One sunny October day we set our prow to the unknown northwest. Our
hearts beat high with anticipation. Every passage between the islands
was a corridor leading into a new and more enchanting room of Nature's
great gallery. The lapping waves whispered enticing secrets, while the
seabirds screaming overhead and the eagles shrilling from the sky
promised wonderful adventures.
The voyage naturally divides itself into the human interest and the
study of nature; yet the two constantly blended throughout the whole
voyage. I can only select a few instances from that trip of six weeks
whose every hour was new and strange.
Our captain, taciturn and self-reliant, commanded Muir's admiration from
the first. His paddle was sure in the stern, his knowledge of the wind
and tide unfailing. Whenever we landed the crew would begin to dispute
concerning the best place to make camp. But old Tow-a-att, with the mast
in his hand, would march straight as an arrow to the likeliest spot of
all, stick down his mast as a tent-pole and begin to set up the tent,
the others invariably acquiescing in his decision as the best possible
choice.
At our first meal Muir's sense of humor cost us one-third of a roll of
butter. We invited our captain to take dinner with us. I got out the
bread and other viands, and set the two-pound roll of butter beside the
bread and placed both by Tow-a-att. He glanced at the roll of butter and
at the three who were to eat, measured with his eye one-third of the
roll, cut it off with his hunting knife and began to cut it into squares
and eat it with great gusto. I was about to interfere and show him the
use we made of butter, but Muir stopped me with a wink. The old chief
calmly devoured his third of the roll, and rubbing his stomach with
great satisfaction pronounced it "_hyas klosh_ (very good) glease."
Of necessity we had chosen the rainiest season of the year in that
dampest climate of North America, where there are two hundred and
twenty-five rainy days out of the three hundred and sixty-five. During
our voyage it did not rain every day, but the periods of sunshine were
so rare as to make us hail them with joyous acclamation.
We steered our course due westward for forty miles, then through a
sinuous, island-studded passage called Rocky Strait, stopping one day to
lay in a supply of venison before sailing on to the village of the Kake
Indians. My habit throughout the voyage, when coming to a native town,
was to find where the head chief lived, feed him with rice and regale
him with tobacco, and then induce him to call all his chiefs and head
men together for a council. When they were all assembled I would give
small presents of tobacco to each, and then open the floodgate of talk,
proclaiming my mission and telling them in simplest terms the Great New
Story. Muir would generally follow me, unfolding in turn some of the
wonders of God's handiwork and the beauty of clean, pure living; and
then in turn, beginning with the head chief, each Indian would make his
speech. We were received with joy everywhere, and if there was suspicion
at first old Tow-a-att's tearful pleadings and Kadishan's oratory
speedily brought about peace and unity.
These palavers often lasted a whole day and far into the night, and
usually ended with our being feasted in turn by the chief in whose house
we had held the council. I took the census of each village, getting the
heads of the families to count their relatives with the aid of
beans,--the large brown beans representing men, the large white ones,
women, and the small Boston beans, children. In this manner the first
census of southeastern Alaska was taken.
Before starting on the voyage, we heard that there was a Harvard
graduate, bearing an honored New England name, living among the Kake
Indians on Kouyou Island. On arriving at the chief town of that tribe we
inquired for the white man and were told that he was camping with the
family of a sub-chief at the mouth of a salmon stream. We set off to
find him. As we neared the shore we saw a circular group of natives
around a fire on the beach, sitting on their heels in the stoical Indian
way. We landed and came up to them. Not one of them deigned to rise or
show any excitement at our coming. The eight or nine men who formed the
group were all dressed in colored four-dollar blankets, with the
exception of one, who had on a ragged fragment of a filthy, two-dollar,
Hudson Bay blanket. The back of this man was towards us, and after
speaking to the chief, Muir and I crossed to the other side of the fire,
and saw his face. It was the white man, and the ragged blanket was all
the clothing he had upon him! An effort to open conversation with him
proved futile. He answered only with grunts and mumbled monosyllables.
Thus the most filthy, degraded, hopelessly lost savage that we found in
this whole voyage was a college graduate of great New England stock!
"Lift a stone to mountain height and let it fall," said Muir, "and it
will sink the deeper into the mud."
At Angoon, one of the towns of the Hootz-noo tribe, occurred an incident
of another type. We found this village hilariously drunk. There was a
very stringent prohibition law over Alaska at that time, which
absolutely forbade the importation of any spirituous liquors into the
Territory. But the law was deficient in one vital respect--it did not
prohibit the importation of molasses; and a soldier during the military
occupancy of the Territory had instructed the natives in the art of
making rum. The method was simple. A five-gallon oil can was taken and
partly filled with molasses as a base; into that alcohol was placed (if
it were obtainable), dried apples, berries, potatoes, flour, anything
that would rot and ferment; then, to give it the proper tang, ginger,
cayenne pepper and mustard were added. This mixture was then set in a
warm place to ferment. Another oil can was cut up into long strips, the
solder melted out and used to make a pipe, with two or three turns
through cool water,--forming the worm, and the still. Talk about your
forty-rod whiskey--I have seen this "hooch," as it was called because
these same Hootz-noo natives first made it, kill at more than forty
rods, for it generally made the natives _fighting_ drunk.
Through the large company of screaming, dancing and singing natives we
made our way to the chief's house. By some miracle this majestic-looking
savage was sober. Perhaps he felt it incumbent upon him as host not to
partake himself of the luxuries with which he regaled his guests. He
took us hospitably into his great community house of split cedar planks
with carved totem poles for corner posts, and called his young men to
take care of our canoe and to bring wood for a fire that he might feast
us. The wife of this chief was one of the finest looking Indian women I
have ever met,--tall, straight, lithe and dignified. But, crawling about
on the floor on all fours, was the most piteous travesty of the human
form I have ever seen. It was an idiot boy, sixteen years of age. He had
neither the comeliness of a beast nor the intellect of a man. His name
was _Hootz-too_ (Bear Heart), and indeed all his motions were those of a
bear rather than of a human being. Crossing the floor with the swinging
gait of a bear, he would crouch back on his haunches and resume his
constant occupation of sucking his wrist, into which he had thus formed
a livid hole. When disturbed at this horrid task he would strike with
the claw-like fingers of the other hand, snarling and grunting. Yet the
beautiful chieftainess was his mother, and she _loved_ him. For sixteen
years she had cared for this monster, feeding him with her choicest
food, putting him to sleep always in her arms, taking him with her and
guarding him day and night. When, a short time before our visit, the
medicine men, accusing him of causing the illness of some of the head
men of the village, proclaimed him a witch, and the whole tribe came to
take and torture him to death, she fought them like a lioness, not
counting her own life dear unto her, and saved her boy.
When I said to her thoughtlessly, "Oh, would you not be relieved at the
death of this poor idiot boy?" she saw in my words a threat, and I shall
never forget the pathetic, hunted look with which she said:
"Oh, no, it must not be; he shall not die. Is he not my son,
_uh-yeet-kutsku_ (my dear little son)?"
If our voyage had yielded me nothing but this wonderful instance of
mother-love, I should have counted myself richly repaid.
One more human story before I come to Muir's part. It was during the
latter half of the voyage, and after our discovery of Glacier Bay. The
climax of the trip, so far as the missionary interests were concerned,
was our visit to the Chilcat and Chilcoot natives on Lynn Canal, the
most northern tribes of the Alexandrian Archipelago. Here reigned the
proudest and worst old savage of Alaska, Chief Shathitch. His wealth
was very great in Indian treasures, and he was reputed to have cached
away in different places several houses full of blankets, guns, boxes of
beads, ancient carved pipes, spears, knives and other valued heirlooms.
He was said to have stored away over one hundred of the elegant Chilcat
blankets woven by hand from the hair of the mountain goat. His tribe was
rich and unscrupulous. Its members were the middle-men between the
whites and the Indians of the Interior. They did not allow these Indians
to come to the coast, but took over the mountains articles purchased
from the whites--guns, ammunition, blankets, knives and so forth--and
bartered them for furs. It was said that they claimed to be the
manufacturers of these wares and so charged for them what prices they
pleased. They had these Indians of the Interior in a bondage of fear,
and would not allow them to trade directly with the white men. Thus they
carried out literally the story told of Hudson Bay traffic,--piling
beaver skins to the height of a ten-dollar Hudson Bay musket as the
_price_ of the musket. They were the most quarrelsome and warlike of the
tribes of Alaska, and their villages were full of slaves procured by
forays upon the coasts of Vancouver Island, Puget Sound, and as far
south as the mouth of the Columbia River. I was eager to visit these
large and untaught tribes, and establish a mission among them.
[Illustration: CHILCAT WOMAN WEAVING A BLANKET
Chief Shathitch was said to have over one hundred of the elegant Chilcat
blankets, woven by hand, from the hair of the mountain goat]
About the first of November we came in sight of the long, low-built
village of Yin-des-tuk-ki. As we paddled up the winding channel of the
Chilcat River we saw great excitement in the town. We had hoisted the
American flag, as was our custom, and had put on our best apparel for
the occasion. When we got within long musket-shot of the village we saw
the native men come rushing from their houses with their guns in their
hands and mass in front of the largest house upon the beach. Then we
were greeted by what seemed rather too warm a reception--a shower of
bullets falling unpleasantly around us. Instinctively Muir and I ceased
to paddle, but Tow-a-att commanded, "_Ut-ha, ut-ha!_--pull, pull!" and
slowly, amid the dropping bullets, we zigzagged our way up the channel
towards the village. As we drew near the shore a line of runners
extended down the beach to us, keeping within shouting distance of each
other. Then came the questions like bullets--"_Gusu-wa-eh?_--Who are
you? Whence do you come? What is your business here?" And Stickeen John
shouted back the reply:
"A great preacher-chief and a great ice-chief have come to bring you a
good message."
The answer was shouted back along the line, and then returned a message
of greeting and welcome. We were to be the guests of the chief of
Yin-des-tuk-ki, old Don-na-wuk (Silver Eye), so called because he was in
the habit of wearing on all state occasions a huge pair of silver-bowed
spectacles which a Russian officer had given him. He confessed he could
not see through them, but thought they lent dignity to his countenance.
We paddled slowly up to the village, and Muir and I, watching with
interest, saw the warriors all disappear. As our prow touched the sand,
however, here they came, forty or fifty of them, without their guns this
time, but charging down upon us with war-cries, "_Hoo-hooh, hoo-hooh_,"
as if they were going to take us prisoners. Dashing into the water they
ranged themselves along each side of the canoe; then lifting up our
canoe with us in it they rushed with excited cries up the bank to the
chief's house and set us down at his door. It was the Thlinget way of
paying us honor as great guests.
Then we were solemnly ushered into the presence of Don-na-wuk. His house
was large, covering about fifty by sixty feet of ground. The interior
was built in the usual fashion of a chief's house--carved corner posts,
a square of gravel in the center of the room for the fire surrounded by
great hewn cedar planks set on edge; a platform of some six feet in
width running clear around the room; then other planks on edge and a
high platform, where the chieftain's household goods were stowed and
where the family took their repose. A brisk fire was burning in the
middle of the room; and after a short palaver, with gifts of tobacco and
rice to the chief, it was announced that he would pay us the
distinguished honor of feasting us first.
It was a never-to-be-forgotten banquet. We were seated on the lower
platform with our feet towards the fire, and before Muir and me were
placed huge washbowls of blue Hudson Bay ware. Before each of our native
attendants was placed a great carved wooden trough, holding about as
much as the washbowls. We had learned enough Indian etiquette to know
that at each course our respective vessels were to be filled full of
food, and we were expected to carry off what we could not devour. It was
indeed a "feast of fat things." The first course was what, for the
Indian, takes the place of bread among the whites,--dried salmon. It
was served, a whole washbowlful for each of us, with a dressing of
seal-grease. Muir and I adroitly manoeuvred so as to get our salmon
and seal-grease served separately; for our stomachs had not been
sufficiently trained to endure that rancid grease. This course finished,
what was left was dumped into receptacles in our canoe and guarded from
the dogs by young men especially appointed for that purpose. Our
washbowls were cleansed and the second course brought on. This consisted
of the back fat of the deer, great, long hunks of it, served with a
gravy of seal-grease. The third course was little Russian potatoes about
the size of walnuts, dished out to us, a washbowlful, with a dressing of
seal-grease. The final course was the only berry then in season, the
long fleshy apple of the wild rose mellowed with frost, served to us in
the usual quantity with the invariable sauce of seal-grease.
"Mon, mon!" said Muir aside to me, "I'm fashed we'll be floppin' aboot
i' the sea, whiles, wi' flippers an' forked tails."
When we had partaken of as much of this feast of fat things as our
civilized stomachs would stand, it was suddenly announced that we were
about to receive a visit from the great chief of the Chilcats and the
Chilcoots, old Chief Shathitch (Hard-to-Kill). In order to properly
receive His Majesty, Muir and I and our two chiefs were each given a
whole bale of Hudson Bay blankets for a couch. Shathitch made us wait a
long time, doubtless to impress us with his dignity as supreme chief.
The heat of the fire after the wind and cold of the day made us very
drowsy. We fought off sleep, however, and at last in came stalking the
biggest chief of all Alaska, clothed in his robe of state, which was an
elegant chinchilla blanket; and upon its yellow surface, as the chief
slowly turned about to show us what was written thereon, we were
astonished to see printed in black letters these words, "To Chief
Shathitch, from his friend, William H. Seward!" We learned afterwards
that Seward, in his voyage of investigation, had penetrated to this
far-off town, had been received in royal state by the old chief and on
his return to the States had sent back this token of his appreciation of
the chief's hospitality. Whether Seward was regaled with viands similar
to those offered to us, history does not relate.
To me the inspiring part of that voyage came next day, when I preached
from early morning until midnight, only occasionally relieved by Muir
and by the responsive speeches of the natives.
"More, more; tell us more," they would cry. "It is a good talk; we never
heard this story before." And when I would inquire, "Of what do you wish
me now to talk?" they would always say, "Tell us more of the Man from
Heaven who died for us."
Runners had been sent to the Chilcoot village on the eastern arm of Lynn
Canal, and twenty-five miles up the Chilcat River to Shathitch's town of
Klukwan; and as the day wore away the crowd of Indians had increased so
greatly that there was no room for them in the large house. I heard a
scrambling upon the roof, and looking up I saw a row of black heads
around the great smoke-hole in the center of the roof. After a little a
ripping, tearing sound came from the sides of the building. They were
prying off the planks in order that those outside might hear. When my
voice faltered with long talking Tow-a-att and Kadishan took up the
story, telling what they had learned of the white man's religion; or
Muir told the eager natives wonderful things about what the great one
God, whose name is Love, was doing for them. The all-day meeting was
only interrupted for an hour or two in the afternoon, when we walked
with the chiefs across the narrow isthmus between Pyramid Harbor and the
eastern arm of Lynn Canal, and I selected the harbor, farm and townsite
now occupied by Haines mission and town and Fort William H. Seward. This
was the beginning of the large missions of Haines and Klukwan.
THE DISCOVERY
MOONLIGHT IN GLACIER BAY
To heaven swells a mighty psalm of praise;
Its music-sheets are glaciers, vast and white.
Sky-piercing peaks the voiceless chorus raise,
To fill with ecstasy the wond'ring night.
Complete, with every part in sweet accord,
Th' adoring breezes waft it up, on wings
Of beauty-incense, giving to the Lord
The purest sacrifice glad Nature brings.
The list'ning stars with rapture beat and glow;
The moon forgets her high, eternal calm
To shout her gladness to the sea below,
Whose waves are silver tongues to join the psalm.
Those everlasting snow-fields are not cold;
This icy solitude no barren waste.
The crystal masses burn with love untold;
The glacier-table spreads a royal feast.
Fairweather! Crillon! Warders at Heaven's gate!
Hoar-headed priests of Nature's inmost shrine!
Strong seraph forms in robes immaculate!
Draw me from earth; enlighten, change, refine;
Till I, one little note in this great song,
Who seem a blot upon th' unsullied white,
No discord make--a note high, pure and strong--
Set in the silent music of the night.
IV
THE DISCOVERY
The nature-study part of the voyage was woven in with the missionary
trip as intimately as warp with woof. No island, rock, forest, mountain
or glacier which we passed, near or far, was neglected. We went so at
our own sweet will, without any set time or schedule, that we were
constantly finding objects and points of surprise and interest. When we
landed, the algæ, which sometimes filled the little harbors, the
limpets and lichens of the rocks, the fucus pods that snapped beneath
our feet, the grasses of the beach, the moss and shrubbery among the
trees, and, more than all, the majestic forests, claimed attention and
study. Muir was one of the most expert foresters this country has ever
produced. He was never at a loss. The luxuriant vegetation of this wet
coast filled him with admiration, and he never took a walk from camp
but he had a whole volume of things to tell me, and he was constantly
bringing in trophies of which he was prouder than any hunter of his
antlers. Now it was a bunch of ferns as high as his head; now a cluster
of minute and wonderfully beautiful moss blossoms; now a curious
fungous growth; now a spruce branch heavy with cones; and again he
would call me into the forest to see a strange and grotesque moss
formation on a dead stump, looking like a tree standing upon its head.
Thus, although his objective was the glaciers, his thorough knowledge
of botany and his interest in that study made every camp just the place
he wished to be. He always claimed that there was more of pure ethics
and even of moral evil and good to be learned in the wilderness than
from any book or in any abode of man. He was fond of quoting
Wordsworth's stanza:
"One impulse from a vernal wood
Will teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."
Muir was a devout theist. The Fatherhood of God and the Unity of God,
the immanence of God in nature and His management of all the affairs of
the universe, was his constantly reiterated belief. He saw design in
many things which the ordinary naturalist overlooks, such as the
symmetry of an island, the balancing branches of a tree, the harmony of
colors in a group of flowers, the completion of a fully rounded
landscape. In his view, the Creator of it all saw every beautiful and
sublime thing from every viewpoint, and had thus formed it, not merely
for His own delight, but for the delectation and instruction of His
human children.
"Look at that, now," he would say, when, on turning a point, a wonderful
vista of island-studded sea between mountains, with one of Alaska's
matchless sunsets at the end, would wheel into sight. "Why, it looks as
if these giants of God's great army had just now marched into their
stations; every one placed just right, just right! What landscape
gardening! What a scheme of things! And to think that He should plan to
bring us feckless creatures here at the right moment, and then flash
such glories at us! Man, we're not worthy of such honor!"
Thus Muir was always discovering to me things which I would never have
seen myself and opening up to me new avenues of knowledge, delight and
adoration. There was something so intimate in his theism that it
purified, elevated and broadened mine, even when I could not agree with
him. His constant exclamation when a fine landscape would burst upon our
view, or a shaft of light would pierce the clouds and glorify a
mountain, was, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow!"
Two or three great adventures stand out prominently in this wonderful
voyage of discovery. Two weeks from home brought us to Icy Straits and
the homes of the Hoonah tribe. Here the knowledge of the way on the part
of our crew ended. We put into the large Hoonah village on Chichagof
Island. After the usual preaching and census-taking, we took aboard a
sub-chief of the Hoonahs, who was a noted seal hunter and, therefore,
able to guide us among the ice-floes of the mysterious Glacier Bay of
which we had heard. Vancouver's chart gave us no intimation of any inlet
whatever; but the natives told of vast masses of floating ice, of a
constant noise of thunder when they crashed from the glaciers into the
sea; and also of fearsome bays and passages full of evil spirits which
made them very perilous to navigate.
In one bay there was said to be a giant devil-fish with arms as long as
a tree, lurking in malignant patience, awaiting the passage that way of
an unwary canoe, when up would flash those terrible arms with their
thousand suckers and, seizing their prey, would drag down the men to the
bottom of the sea, there to be mangled and devoured by the horrid beak.
Another deep fiord was the abode of _Koosta-kah_, the Otter-man, the
mischievous Puck of Indian lore, who was waiting for voyagers to land
and camp, when he would seize their sleeping forms and transport them a
dozen miles in a moment, or cradle them on the tops of the highest
trees. Again there was a most rapacious and ferocious killer-whale in a
piece of swift water, whose delight it was to take into his great,
tooth-rimmed jaws whole canoes with their crews of men, mangling them
and gulping them down as a single mouthful. Many were these stories of
fear told us at the Hoonah village the night before we started to
explore the icy bay, and our credulous Stickeens gave us rather broad
hints that it was time to turn back.
"There are no natives up in that region; there is nothing to hunt;
there is no gold there; why do you persist in this _cultus coly_
(aimless journey)? You are likely to meet death and nothing else if you
go into that dangerous region."
All these stories made us the more eager to explore the wonders beyond,
and we hastened away from Hoonah with our guide aboard. A day's sail
brought us to a little, heavily wooded island near the mouth of Glacier
Bay. This we named Pleasant Island.
As we broke camp in the morning our guide said: "We must take on board a
supply of dry wood here, as there is none beyond."
Leaving this last green island we steered northwest into the great bay,
the country of ice and bare rocks. Muir's excitement was increasing
every moment, and as the majestic arena opened before us and the Muir,
Geicke, Pacific and other great glaciers (all nameless as yet) began to
appear, he could hardly contain himself. He was impatient of any delay,
and was constantly calling to the crew to redouble their efforts and get
close to these wonders. Now the marks of recent glaciation showed
plainly. Here was a conical island of gray granite, whose rounded top
and symmetrical shoulders were worn smooth as a Scotch monument by
grinding glaciers. Here was a great mountain slashed sheer across its
face, showing sharp edge and flat surface as if a slab of mountain size
had been sawed from it. Yonder again loomed a granite range whose huge
breasts were rounded and polished by the resistless sweep of that great
ice mass which Vancouver saw filling the bay.
Soon the icebergs were charging down upon us with the receding tide and
dressing up in compact phalanx when the tide arose. First would come
the advance guard of smaller bergs, with here and there a house-like
mass of cobalt blue with streaks of white and deeper recesses of
ultra-marine; here we passed an eight-sided, solid figure of
bottle-green ice; there towered an antlered formation like the horns of
a stag. Now we must use all caution and give the larger icebergs a wide
berth. They are treacherous creatures, these icebergs. You may be
paddling along by a peaceful looking berg, sleeping on the water as mild
and harmless as a lamb; when suddenly he will take a notion to turn
over, and up under your canoe will come a spear of ice, impaling it and
lifting it and its occupants skyward; then, turning over, down will go
canoe and men to the depths.
Our progress up the sixty miles of Glacier Bay was very slow. Three
nights we camped on the bare granite rock before we reached the limit of
the bay. All vegetation had disappeared; hardly a bunch of grass was
seen. The only signs of former life were the sodden and splintered
spruce and fir stumps that projected here and there from the bases of
huge gravel heaps, the moraine matter of the mighty ice mass that had
engulfed them. They told the story of great forests which had once
covered this whole region, until the great sea of ice of the second
glacial period overwhelmed and ground them down, and buried them deep
under its moraine matter. When we landed there were no level spots on
which to pitch our tent and no sandy beaches or gravel beds in which to
sink our tent-poles. I learned from Muir the gentle art of sleeping on a
rock, curled like a squirrel around a boulder.
We passed by Muir Glacier on the other side of the bay, seeking to
attain the extreme end of the great fiord. We estimated the distance by
the tide and our rate of rowing, tracing the shore-line and islands as
we went along and getting the points of the compass from our little
pocket instrument.
Rain was falling almost constantly during the week we spent in Glacier
Bay. Now and then the clouds would lift, showing the twin peaks of La
Perouse and the majestic summits of Mts. Fairweather and Crillon. These
mighty summits, twelve thousand, fifteen thousand and sixteen thousand
feet high, respectively, pierced the sky directly above us; sometimes
they seemed to be hanging over us threateningly. Only once did the sky
completely clear; and then was preached to us the wonderful Sermon of
Glacier Bay.
Early that morning we quitted our camp on a barren rock, steering
towards Mt. Fairweather. A night of sleepless discomfort had ushered in
a bleak gray morning. Our Indians were sullen and silent, their scowling
looks resenting our relentless purpose to attain to the head of the bay.
The air was damp and raw, chilling us to the marrow. The forbidding
granite mountains, showing here and there through the fog, seemed
suddenly to push out threatening fists and shoulders at us. All night
long the ice-guns had bombarded us from four or five directions, when
the great masses of ice from living glaciers toppled into the sea,
crashing and grinding with the noise of thunder. The granite walls
hurled back the sound in reiterated peals, multiplying its volume a
hundredfold.
There was no Love apparent on that bleak, gray morning: Power was there
in appalling force. Visions of those evergreen forests that had once
clung trustingly to these mountain walls, but had been swept, one and
all, by the relentless forces of the ice and buried deep under mountains
of moraine matter, but added to the present desolation. We could not
enjoy; we could only endure. Death from overturning icebergs, from
charging tides, from mountain avalanche, threatened us.
Suddenly I heard Muir catch his breath with a fervent ejaculation. "God,
Almighty!" he said. Following his gaze towards Mt. Crillon, I saw the
summit highest of all crowned with glory indeed. It was not sunlight;
there was no appearance of shining; it was as if the Great Artist with
one sweep of His brush had laid upon the king-peak of all a crown of the
most brilliant of all colors--as if a pigment, perfectly made and
thickly spread, too delicate for crimson, too intense for pink, had
leaped in a moment upon the mountain top; "An awful rose of dawn." The
summit nearest Heaven had caught a glimpse of its glory! It was a rose
blooming in ice-fields, a love-song in the midst of a stern epic, a drop
from the heart of Christ upon the icy desolation and barren affections
of a sin-frozen world. It warmed and thrilled us in an instant. We who
had been dull and apathetic a moment before, shivering in our wet
blankets, were glowing and exultant now. Even the Indians ceased their
paddling, gazing with faces of awe upon the wonder. Now, as we watched
that kingly peak, we saw the color leap to one and another and another
of the snowy summits around it. The monarch had a whole family of royal
princes about him to share his glory. Their radiant heads, ruby crowned,
were above the clouds, which seemed to form their silken garments.
As we looked in ecstatic silence we saw the light creep down the
mountains. It was changing now. The glowing crimson was suffused with
soft, creamy light. If it was less divine, it was more warmly human.
Heaven was coming down to man. The dark recesses of the mountains began
to lighten. They stood forth as at the word of command from the Master
of all; and as the changing mellow light moved downward that wonderful
colosseum appeared clearly with its battlements and peaks and columns,
until the whole majestic landscape was revealed.
Now we saw the design and purpose of it all. Now the text of this great
sermon was emblazoned across the landscape--"_God is Love_"; and we
understood that these relentless forces that had pushed the molten
mountains heavenward, cooled them into granite peaks, covered them with
snow and ice, dumped the moraine matter into the sea, filling up the
sea, preparing the world for a stronger and better race of men (who
knows?), were all a part of that great "All things" that "work together
for good."
Our minds cleared with the landscape; our courage rose; our Indians
dipped their paddles silently, steering without fear amidst the
dangerous masses of ice. But there was no profanity in Muir's
exclamation, "We have met with God!" A lifelong devoutness of gratitude
filled us, to think that we were guided into this most wonderful room of
God's great gallery, on perhaps the only day in the year when the skies
were cleared and the sunrise, the atmospheric conditions and the point
of view all prepared for the matchless spectacle. The discomforts of the
voyage, the toil, the cold and rain of the past weeks were a small price
to pay for one glimpse of its surpassing loveliness. Again and again
Muir would break out, after a long silence of blissful memory, with
exclamations:
"We saw it; we saw it! He sent us to His most glorious exhibition.
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow!"
Two or three inspiring days followed. Muir must climb the most
accessible of the mountains. My weak shoulders forbade me to ascend more
than two or three thousand feet, but Muir went more than twice as high.
Upon two or three of the glaciers he climbed, although the speed of
these icy streams was so great and their "frozen cataracts" were so
frequent, that it was difficult to ascend them.
I began to understand Muir's whole new theory, which theory made Tyndall
pronounce him the greatest authority on glacial action the world had
seen. He pointed out to me the mechanical laws that governed those
slow-moving, resistless streams; how they carved their own valleys; how
the lower valley and glacier were often the resultant in size and
velocity of the two or three glaciers that now formed the branches of
the main glaciers; how the harder strata of rock resisted and turned the
masses of ice; how the steely ploughshares were often inserted into
softer leads and a whole mountain split apart as by a wedge.
Muir would explore all day long, often rising hours before daylight and
disappearing among the mountains, not coming to camp until after night
had fallen. Again and again the Indians said that he was lost; but I had
no fears for him. When he would return to camp he was so full of his
discoveries and of the new facts garnered that he would talk until long
into the night, almost forgetting to eat.
Returning down the bay, we passed the largest glacier of all, which was
to bear Muir's name. It was then fully a mile and a half in width, and
the perpendicular face of it towered from four to seven hundred feet
above the surface of the water. The ice masses were breaking off so fast
that we were forced to put off far from the face of the glacier. The
great waves threatened constantly to dash us against the sharp points of
the icebergs. We wished to land and scale the glacier from the eastern
side. We rowed our canoe about half a mile from the edge of the glacier,
but, attempting to land, were forced hastily to put off again. A great
wave, formed by the masses of ice breaking off into the water,
threatened to dash our loaded canoe against the boulders on the beach.
Rowing further away, we tried it again and again, with the same result.
As soon as we neared the shore another huge wave would threaten
destruction. We were fully a mile and a half from the edge of the
glacier before we found it safe to land.
[Illustration: MUIR GLACIER
Returning down Glacier Bay, we visited the largest glacier of all, which
was to bear Muir's name]
Muir spent a whole day alone on the glacier, walking over twenty miles
across what he called the glacial lake between two mountains. A cold,
penetrating, mist-like rain was falling, and dark clouds swept up the
bay and clung about the shoulders of the mountains. When night
approached and Muir had not returned, I set the Indians to digging out
from the bases of the gravel hills the frazzled stumps and logs that
remained of the buried forests. These were full of resin and burned
brightly. I made a great fire and cooked a good supper of venison,
beans, biscuit and coffee. When pitchy darkness gathered, and still Muir
did not come, Tow-a-att made some torches of fat spruce, and taking with
him Charley, laden with more wood, he went up the beach a mile and a
half, climbed the base of the mountain and kindled a beacon which
flashed its cheering rays far over the glacier.
Muir came stumbling into camp with these two Indians a little before
midnight, very tired but very happy. "Ah!" he sighed, "I'm glad to be in
camp. The glacier almost got me this time. If it had not been for the
beacon and old Tow-a-att, I might have had to spend the night on the
ice. The crevasses were so many and so bewildering in their mazy,
crisscross windings that I was actually going farther into the glacier
when I caught the flash of light."
I brought him to the tent and placed the hot viands before him. He
attacked them ravenously, but presently was talking again:
"Man, man; you ought to have been with me. You'll never make up what you
have lost to-day. I've been wandering through a thousand rooms of God's
crystal temple. I've been a thousand feet down in the crevasses, with
matchless domes and sculptured figures and carved ice-work all about me.
Solomon's marble and ivory palaces were nothing to it. Such purity, such
color, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feast my
soul, and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What
a great death that would be!"
Again and again I would have to remind Muir that he was eating his
supper, but it was more than an hour before I could get him to finish
the meal, and two or three hours longer before he stopped talking and
went to sleep. I wish I had taken down his descriptions. What splendid
reading they would make!
But scurries of snow warned us that winter was coming, and, much to the
relief of our natives, we turned the prow of our canoe towards Chatham
Strait again. Landing our Hoonah guide at his village, we took our route
northward again up Lynn Canal. The beautiful Davison Glacier with its
great snowy fan drew our gaze and excited our admiration for two days;
then the visit to the Chilcats and the return trip commenced. Bowling
down the canal before a strong north wind, we entered Stevens Passage,
and visited the two villages of the Auk Indians, a squalid, miserable
tribe. We camped at the site of what is now Juneau, the capital of
Alaska, and no dream of the millions of gold that were to be taken from
those mountains disturbed us. If we had known, I do not think that we
would have halted a day or staked a claim. Our treasures were richer
than gold and securely laid up in the vaults of our memories.
An excursion into Taku Bay, that miniature of Glacier Bay, with its then
three living glaciers; a visit to two villages of the Taku Indians; past
Ft. Snettisham, up whose arms we pushed, mapping them; then to Sumdum.
Here the two arms of Holkham Bay, filled with ice, enticed us to
exploration, but the constant rains of the fall had made the ice of the
glaciers more viscid and the glacier streams more rapid; hence the vast
array of icebergs charging down upon us like an army, spreading out in
loose formation and then gathering into a barrier when the tide turned,
made exploration to the end of the bay impossible. Muir would not give
up his quest of the mother glacier until the Indians frankly refused to
go any further; and old Tow-a-att called our interpreter, Johnny, as for
a counsel of state, and carefully set forth to Muir that if he persisted
in his purpose of pushing forward up the bay he would have the blood of
the whole party on his hands.
Said the old chief: "My life is of no account, and it does not matter
whether I live or die; but you shall not sacrifice the life of my
minister."
I laughed at Muir's discomfiture and gave the word to retreat. This one
defeat of a victorious expedition so weighed upon Muir's mind that it
brought him back from the California coast next year and from the arms
of his bride to discover and climb upon that glacier.
On down now through Prince Frederick Sound, past the beautiful Norris
Glacier, then into Le Conte Bay with its living glacier and icebergs,
across the Stickeen flats, and so joyfully home again, Muir to take the
November steamboat back to his sunland.
I have made many voyages in that great Alexandrian Archipelago since,
traveling by canoe over fifteen thousand miles--not one of them a dull
one--through its intricate passages; but none compared, in the number
and intensity of its thrills, in the variety and excitement of its
incidents and in its lasting impressions of beauty and grandeur, with
this first voyage when we groped our way northward with only Vancouver's
old chart as our guide.
THE LOST GLACIER
NIGHT IN A CANOE
A dreary world! The constant rain
Beats back to earth blithe fancy's wings;
And life--a sodden garment--clings
About a body numb with pain.
Imagination ceased with light;
Of Nature's psalm no echo lingers.
The death-cold mist, with ghostly fingers,
Shrouds world and soul in rayless night.
An inky sea, a sullen crew,
A frail canoe's uncertain motion;
A whispered talk of wind and ocean,
As plotting secret crimes to do!
The vampire-night sucks all my blood;
Warm home and love seem lost for aye;
From cloud to cloud I steal away,
Like guilty soul o'er Stygian flood.
Peace, morbid heart! From paddle blade
See the black water flash in light;
And bars of moonbeams streaming white,
Have pearls of ebon raindrops made.
From darkest sea of deep despair
Gleams Hope, awaked by Action's blow;
And Faith's clear ray, though clouds hang low,
Slants up to heights serene and fair.
V
THE LOST GLACIER
John Muir was married in the spring of 1880 to Miss Strentzel, the
daughter of a Polish physician who had come out in the great stampede of
1849 to California, but had found his gold in oranges, lemons and
apricots on a great fruit ranch at Martinez, California. A brief letter
from Muir told of his marriage, with just one note in it, the depth of
joy and peace of which I could fathom, knowing him so well. Then no word
of him until the monthly mailboat came in September. As I stood on the
wharf with the rest of the Wrangell population, as was the custom of our
isolation, watching the boat come in, I was overjoyed to see John Muir
on deck, in that same old, long, gray ulster and Scotch cap. He waved
and shouted at me before the boat touched the wharf.
Springing ashore he said, "When can you be ready?"
"Aren't you a little fast?" I replied. "What does this mean? Where's
your wife?"
"Man," he exclaimed, "have you forgotten? Don't you know we lost a
glacier last fall? Do you think I could sleep soundly in my bed this
winter with that hanging on my conscience? My wife could not come, so I
have come alone and you've got to go with me to find the lost. Get your
canoe and crew and let us be off."
The ten months since Muir had left me had not been spent in idleness at
Wrangell. I had made two long voyages of discovery and missionary work
on my own account,--one in the spring, of four hundred fifty miles
around Prince of Wales Island, visiting the five towns of Hydah Indians
and the three villages of the Hanega tribe of Thlingets. Another in the
summer down the coast to the Cape Fox and Tongass tribes of Thlingets,
and across Dixon entrance to Ft. Simpson, where there was a mission
among the Tsimpheans, and on fifteen miles further to the famous mission
of Father Duncan at Metlakahtla. I had written accounts of these trips
to Muir; but for him the greatest interest was in the glaciers and
mountains of the mainland.
Our preparations were soon made. Alas! we could not have our noble old
captain, Tow-a-att, this time. On the tenth of January, 1880,--the
darkest day of my life,--this "noblest Roman of them all" fell dead at
my feet with a bullet through his forehead, shot by a member of that
same Hootz-noo tribe where he had preached the gospel of peace so simply
and eloquently a few months before. The Hootz-noos, maddened by the
fiery liquor that bore their name, came to Wrangell, and a preliminary
skirmish led to an attack at daylight of that winter day upon the
Stickeen village. Old Tow-a-att had stood for peace, and rather than
have any bloodshed had offered all his blankets as a peace offering,
although in no physical fear himself; but when the Hootz-noos,
encouraged by the seeming cowardice of the Stickeens, broke into their
houses, and the Christianized tribe, provoked beyond endurance, came out
with their guns, Tow-a-att came forth armed only with his old carved
spear, the emblem of his position as chief, to see if he could not call
his tribe back again. At my instance, as I stood with my hand on his
shoulder, he lifted up his voice to recall his people to their houses,
when, in an instant, the volley commenced on both sides, and this
Christian man, one of the simplest and grandest souls I ever knew, fell
dead at my feet, and the tribe was tumbled back into barbarism; and the
white man, who had taught the Indians the art of making rum, and the
white man's government, which had afforded no safeguard against such
scenes, were responsible.
[Illustration: DAVIDSON GLACIER
The beautiful Davidson Glacier, with its great snow-white fan, drew our
gaze and excited our admiration for two days]
Muir mourned with me the fate of this old chief; but another of my men,
Lot Tyeen, was ready with a swift canoe. Joe, his son-in-law, and Billy
Dickinson, a half-breed boy of seventeen who acted as interpreter,
formed the crew. When we were about to embark I suddenly thought of my
little dog Stickeen and made the resolve to take him along. My wife and
Muir both protested and I almost yielded to their persuasion. I shudder
now to think what the world would have lost had their arguments
prevailed! That little, long-haired, brisk, beautiful, but very
independent dog, in co-ordination with Muir's genius, was to give to the
world one of its greatest dog-classics. Muir's story of "Stickeen" ranks
with "Rab and His Friends," "Bob, Son of Battle," and far above "The
Call of the Wild." Indeed, in subtle analysis of dog character, as well
as beauty of description, I think it outranks all of them. All over the
world men, women and children are reading with laughter, thrills and
tears this exquisite little story.
I have told Muir that in his book he did not do justice to my puppy's
beauty. I think that he was the handsomest dog I have ever known. His
markings were very much like those of an American Shepherd dog--black,
white and tan; although he was not half the size of one; but his hair
was so silky and so long, his tail so heavily fringed and beautifully
curved, his eyes so deep and expressive and his shape so perfect in its
graceful contours, that I have never seen another dog quite like him;
otherwise Muir's description of him is perfect.
When Stickeen was only a round ball of silky fur as big as one's fist,
he was given as a wedding present to my bride, two years before this
voyage. I carried him in my overcoat pocket to and from the steamer as
we sailed from Sitka to Wrangell. Soon after we arrived a solemn
delegation of Stickeen Indians came to call on the bride; but as soon as
they saw the puppy they were solemn no longer. His gravely humorous
antics were irresistible. It was Moses who named him Stickeen after
their tribe--an exceptional honor. Thereafter the whole tribe adopted
and protected him, and woe to the Indian dog which molested him. Once
when I was passing the house of this same Lot Tyeen, one of his large
hunting dogs dashed out at Stickeen and began to worry him. Lot rescued
the little fellow, delivered him to me and walked into his house. Soon
he came out with his gun, and before I knew what he was about he had
shot the offending Indian dog--a valuable hunting animal.
Stickeen lacked the obtrusively affectionate manner of many of his
species, did not like to be fussed over, would even growl when our
babies enmeshed their hands in his long hair; and yet, to a degree I
have never known in another dog, he attracted the attention of
everybody and won all hearts.
As instances: Dr. Kendall, "The Grand Old Man" of our Church, during his
visit of 1879 used to break away from solemn counsels with the other
D.D.s and the carpenters to run after and shout at Stickeen. And Mrs.
McFarland, the Mother of Protestant missions in Alaska, often begged us
to give her the dog; and, when later he was stolen from her care by an
unscrupulous tourist and so forever lost to us, she could hardly
afterwards speak of him without tears.
Stickeen was a born aristocrat, dainty and scrupulously clean. From
puppyhood he never cared to play with the Indian dogs, and I was often
amused to see the dignified but decided way in which he repulsed all
attempts at familiarity on the part of the Indian children. He admitted
to his friendship only a few of the natives, choosing those who had
adopted the white man's dress and mode of living, and were devoid of the
rank native odors. His likes and dislikes were very strong and always
evident from the moment of his meeting with a stranger. There was
something almost uncanny about the accuracy of his judgment when "sizing
up" a man.
It was Stickeen himself who really decided the question whether we
should take him with us on this trip. He listened to the discussion, pro
and con, as he stood with me on the wharf, turning his sharp, expressive
eyes and sensitive ears up to me or down to Muir in the canoe. When the
argument seemed to be going against the dog he suddenly turned,
deliberately walked down the gang-plank to the canoe, picked his steps
carefully to the bow, where my seat with Muir was arranged, and curled
himself down on my coat. The discussion ended abruptly in a general
laugh, and Stickeen went along.
Then the acute little fellow set about, in the wisest possible way, to
conquer Muir. He was not obtrusive, never "butted in"; never offended by
a too affectionate tongue. He listened silently to discussions on his
merits, those first days; but when Muir's comparisons of the brilliant
dogs of his acquaintance with Stickeen grew too "odious" Stickeen would
rise, yawn openly and retire to a distance, not slinkingly, but with
tail up, and lie down again out of earshot of such calumnies. When we
landed after a day's journey Stickeen was always the first ashore,
exploring for field mice and squirrels; but when we would start to the
woods, the mountains or the glaciers the dog would join us, coming
mysteriously from the forest. When our paths separated, Stickeen,
looking to me for permission, would follow Muir, trotting at first
behind him, but gradually ranging alongside.
After a few days Muir changed his tone, saying, "There's more in that
wee beastie than I thought"; and before a week passed Stickeen's victory
was complete; he slept at Muir's feet, went with him on all his rambles;
and even among dangerous crevasses or far up the steep slopes of granite
mountains the little dog's splendid tail would be seen ahead of Muir,
waving cheery signals to his new-found human companion.
Our canoe was light and easily propelled. Our outfit was very simple,
for this was to be a quick voyage and there were not to be so many
missionary visits this time. It was principally a voyage of discovery;
we were in search of the glacier that we had lost. Perched in the high
stern sat our captain, Lot Tyeen, massive and capable, handling his
broad steering paddle with power and skill. In front of him Joe and
Billy pulled oars, Joe, a strong young man, our cook, hunter and best
oarsman; Billy, a lad of seventeen, our interpreter and Joe's assistant.
Towards the bow, just behind the mast, sat Muir and I, each with a
paddle in his hands. Stickeen slumbered at our feet or gazed into our
faces when our conversation interested him. When we began to discuss a
landing place he would climb the high bow and brace himself on the top
of the beak, an animated figure-head, ready to jump into the water when
we were about to camp.
Our route was different from that of '79. Now we struck through Wrangell
Narrows, that tortuous and narrow passage between Mitkof and Kupreanof
Islands, past Norris Glacier with its far-flung shaft of ice appearing
above the forests as if suspended in air; past the bold Pt. Windham with
its bluff of three thousand feet frowning upon the waters of Prince
Frederick Sound; across Port Houghton, whose deep fiord had no ice in it
and, therefore, was not worthy of an extended visit. We made all haste,
for Muir was, as the Indians said, "always hungry for ice," and this was
more especially his expedition. He was the commander now, as I had been
the year before. He had set for himself the limit of a month and must
return by the October boat. Often we ran until late at night against the
protests of our Indians, whose life of infinite leisure was not
accustomed to such rude interruption. They could not understand Muir at
all, nor in the least comprehend his object in visiting icy bays where
there was no chance of finding gold and nothing to hunt.
The vision rises before me, as my mind harks back to this second trip of
seven hundred miles, of cold, rainy nights, when, urged by Muir to make
one more point, the natives passed the last favorable camping place and
we blindly groped for hours in pitchy darkness, trying to find a
friendly beach. The intensely phosphorescent water flashed about us, the
only relief to the inky blackness of the night. Occasionally a salmon or
a big halibut, disturbed by our canoe, went streaming like a meteor
through the water, throwing off coruscations of light. As we neared the
shore, the waves breaking upon the rocks furnished us the only
illumination. Sometimes their black tops with waving seaweed, surrounded
by phosphorescent breakers, would have the appearance of mouths set
with gleaming teeth rushing at us out of the dark as if to devour us.
Then would come the landing on a sandy beach, the march through the
seaweed up to the wet woods, a fusillade of exploding fucus pods
accompanying us as if the outraged fairies were bombarding us with tiny
guns. Then would ensue a tedious groping with the lantern for a camping
place and for some dry, fat spruce wood from which to coax a fire; then
the big camp-fire, the bean-pot and coffee-pot, the cheerful song and
story, and the deep, dreamless sleep that only the weary voyageur or
hunter can know.
Four or five days sufficed to bring us to our first objective--Sumdum or
Holkham Bay, with its three wonderful arms. Here we were to find the
lost glacier. This deep fiord has two great prongs. Neither of them
figured in Vancouver's chart, and so far as records go we were the first
to enter and follow to its end the longest of these, Endicott Arm. We
entered the bay at night, caught again by the darkness, and groped our
way uncertainly. We probably would have spent most of the night trying
to find a landing place had not the gleam of a fire greeted us, flashing
through the trees, disappearing as an island intervened, and again
opening up with its fair ray as we pushed on. An hour's steady paddling
brought us to the camp of some Cassiar miners--my friends. They were
here at the foot of a glacier stream, from the bed of which they had
been sluicing gold. Just now they were in hard luck, as the constant
rains had swelled the glacial stream, burst through their wing-dams,
swept away their sluice-boxes and destroyed the work of the summer.
Strong men of the wilderness as they were, they were not discouraged,
but were discussing plans for prospecting new places and trying it again
here next summer. Hot coffee and fried venison emphasized their welcome,
and we in return could give them a little news from the outside world,
from which they had been shut off completely for months.
Muir called us before daylight the next morning. He had been up since
two or three o'clock, "studying the night effects," he said, listening
to the roaring and crunching of the charging ice as it came out of
Endicott Arm, spreading out like the skirmish line of an army and
grinding against the rocky point just below us. He had even attempted a
moonlight climb up the sloping face of a high promontory with Stickeen
as his companion, but was unable to get to the top, owing to the
smoothness of the granite rock. It was newly glaciated--this whole
region--and the hard rubbing ice-tools had polished the granite like a
monument. A hasty meal and we were off.
"We'll find it this time," said Muir.
A miner crawled out of his blankets and came to see us start. "If it's
scenery you're after," he said, "ten miles up the bay there's the nicest
canyon you ever saw. It has no name that I know of, but it is sure some
scenery."
The long, straight fiord stretched southeast into the heart of the
granite range, its funnel shape producing tremendous tides. When the
tide was ebbing that charging phalanx of ice was irresistible, storming
down the canyon with race-horse speed; no canoe could stem that current.
We waited until the turn, then getting inside the outer fleet of
icebergs we paddled up with the flood tide. Mile after mile we raced
past those smooth mountain shoulders; higher and higher they towered,
and the ice, closing in upon us, threatened a trap. The only way to
navigate safely that dangerous fiord was to keep ahead of the charging
ice. As we came up towards the end of the bay the narrowing walls of the
fiord compressed the ice until it crowded dangerously around us. Our
captain, Lot, had taken the precaution to put a false bow and stern on
his canoe, cunningly fashioned out of curved branches of trees and
hollowed with his hand-adz to fit the ends of the canoe. These were
lashed to the bow and stern by thongs of deer sinew. They were needed.
It was like penetrating an arctic ice-floe. Sometimes we would have to
skirt the granite rock and with our poles shove out the ice-cakes to
secure a passage. It was fully thirty miles to the head of the bay, but
we made it in half a day, so strong was the current of the rising tide.
I shall never forget the view that burst upon us as we rounded the last
point. The face of the glacier where it discharged its icebergs was very
narrow in comparison with the giants of Glacier Bay, but the ice cliff
was higher than even the face of Muir Glacier. The narrow canyon of hard
granite had compressed the ice of the great glacier until it had the
appearance of a frozen torrent broken into innumerable crevasses, the
great masses of ice tumbling over one another and bulging out for a few
moments before they came crashing and splashing down into the deep water
of the bay. The fiord was simply a cleft in high mountains, and the
depth of the water could only be conjectured. It must have been hundreds
of feet, perhaps thousands, from the surface of the water to the bottom
of that fissure. Smooth, polished, shining breasts of bright gray
granite crowded above the glacier on every side, seeming to overhang the
ice and the bay. Struggling clumps of evergreens clung to the mountain
sides below the glacier, and up, away up, dizzily to the sky towered the
walls of the canyon. Hundreds of other Alaskan glaciers excel this in
masses of ice and in grandeur of front, but none that I have seen
condense beauty and grandeur to finer results.
"What a plucky little giant!" was Muir's exclamation as we stood on a
rock-mound in front of this glacier. "To think of his shouldering his
way through the mountain range like this! Samson, pushing down the
pillars of the temple at Gaza, was nothing to this fellow. Hear him roar
and laugh!"
Without consulting me Muir named this "Young Glacier," and right proud
was I to see that name on the charts for the next ten years or more, for
we mapped Endicott Arm and the other arm of Sumdum Bay as we had Glacier
Bay; but later maps have a different name. Some ambitious young ensign
on a surveying vessel, perhaps, stole my glacier, and later charts give
it the name of Dawes. I have not found in the Alaskan statute books any
penalty attached to the crime of stealing a glacier, but certainly it
ought to be ranked as a felony of the first magnitude, the grandest of
grand larcenies.
A couple of days and nights spent in the vicinity of Young Glacier were
a period of unmixed pleasure. Muir spent all of these days and part of
the nights climbing the pinnacled mountains to this and that viewpoint,
crossing the deep, narrow and dangerous glacier five thousand feet above
the level of the sea, exploring its tributaries and their side canyons,
making sketches in his note-book for future elaboration. Stickeen by
this time constantly followed Muir, exciting my jealousy by his plainly
expressed preference. Because of my bad shoulder the higher and steeper
ascents of this very rugged region were impossible to me, and I must
content myself with two thousand feet and even lesser climbs. My
favorite perch was on the summit of a sugar-loaf rock which formed the
point of a promontory jutting into the bay directly in front of my
glacier, and distant from its face less than a quarter of a mile. It was
a granite fragment which had evidently been broken off from the
mountain; indeed, there was a niche five thousand feet above into which
it would exactly fit. The sturdy evergreens struggled half-way up its
sides, but the top was bare.
On this splendid pillar I spent many hours. Generally I could see Muir,
fortunate in having sound arms and legs, scaling the high rock-faces,
now coming out on a jutting spur, now spread like a spider against the
mountain wall. Here he would be botanizing in a patch of green that
relieved the gray of the granite, there he was dodging in and out of the
blue crevasses of the upper glacial falls. Darting before him or
creeping behind was a little black speck which I made out to be
Stickeen, climbing steeps up which a fox would hardly venture.
Occasionally I would see him dancing about at the base of a cliff too
steep for him, up which Muir was climbing, and his piercing howls of
protest at being left behind would come echoing down to me.
But chiefly I was engrossed in the great drama which was being acted
before me by the glacier itself. It was the battle of gravity with
flinty hardness and strong cohesion. The stage setting was perfect; the
great hall formed by encircling mountains; the side curtains of
dark-green forest, fold on fold; the gray and brown top-curtains of the
mountain heights stretching clear across the glacier, relieved by vivid
moss and flower patches of yellow, magenta, violet and crimson. But the
face of the glacier was so high and rugged and the ice so pure that it
showed a variety of blue and purple tints I have never seen
surpassed--baby-blue, sky-blue, sapphire, turquoise, cobalt, indigo,
peacock, ultra-marine, shading at the top into lilac and amethyst. The
base of the glacier-face, next to the dark-green water of the bay,
resembled a great mass of vitriol, while the top, where it swept out of
the canyon, had the curves and tints and delicate lines of the iris.
[Illustration: TAKU GLACIER
There followed an excursion into Taku Bay, that miniature of Glacier
Bay, with its three living glaciers]
But the glacier front was not still; in form and color it was changing
every minute. The descent was so steep that the glacial rapids above the
bay must have flowed forward eighty or a hundred feet a day. The ice
cliff, towering a thousand feet over the water, would present a slight
incline from the perpendicular inwards toward the canyon, the face being
white from powdered ice, the result of the grinding descent of the ice
masses. Here and there would be little cascades of this fine ice
spraying out as they fell, with glints of prismatic colors when the
sunlight struck them. As I gazed I could see the whole upper part of the
cliff slowly moving forward until the ice-face was vertical. Then, foot
by foot it would be pushed out until the upper edge overhung the water.
Now the outer part, denuded of the ice powder, would present a face of
delicate blue with darker shades where the mountain peaks cast their
shadows. Suddenly from top to bottom of the ice cliff two deep lines of
prussian blue appeared. They were crevasses made by the ice current
flowing more rapidly in the center of the stream. Fascinated, I watched
this great pyramid of blue-veined onyx lean forward until it became a
tower of Pisa, with fragments falling thick and fast from its upper apex
and from the cliffs out of which it had been split. Breathless and
anxious, I awaited the final catastrophe, and its long delay became
almost a greater strain than I could bear. I jumped up and down and
waved my arms and shouted at the glacier to "hurry up."
Suddenly the climax came in a surprising way. The great tower of crystal
shot up into the air two hundred feet or more, impelled by the pressure
of a hundred fathoms of water, and then, toppling over, came crashing
into the water with a roar as of rending mountains. Its weight of
thousands of tons, falling from such a height, splashed great sheets of
water high into the air, and a rainbow of wondrous brilliance flashed
and vanished. A mighty wave swept majestically down the bay, rocking the
massive bergs like corks, and, breaking against my granite pillar,
tossed its spray half-way up to my lofty perch. Muir's shout of
applause and Stickeen's sharp bark came faintly to my ears when the deep
rumbling of the newly formed icebergs had subsided.
That night I waited supper long for Muir. It was a good supper--a
mulligan stew of mallard duck, with biscuits and coffee. Stickeen romped
into camp about ten o'clock and his new master soon followed.
"Ah!" sighed Muir between sips of coffee, "what a Lord's mercy it is
that we lost this glacier last fall, when we were pressed for time, to
find it again in these glorious days that have flashed out of the mists
for our special delectation. This has been a day of days. I have found
four new varieties of moss, and have learned many new and wonderful
facts about world-shaping. And then, the wonder and glory! Why, all the
values of beauty and sublimity--form, color, motion and sound--have
been present to-day at their very best. My friend, we are the richest
men in all the world to-night."
Charging down the canyon with the charging ice on our return, we kept to
the right-hand shore, on the watch for the mouth of the canyon of "some
scenery." We had not been able to discover it from the other side as we
ascended the fiord. We were almost swept past the mouth of it by the
force of the current. Paddling into an eddy, we were suddenly halted as
if by a strong hand pushed against the bow, for the current was flowing
like a cataract out of the narrow mouth of this side canyon. A rocky
shelf afforded us a landing place. We hastily unloaded the canoe and
pulled it up upon the beach out of reach of the floating ice, and there
we had to wait until the next morning before we could penetrate the
depths of this great canyon.
We shot through the mouth of the canyon at dangerous speed. Indeed, we
could not do otherwise; we were helpless in the grasp of the torrent. At
certain stages the surging tide forms an actual fall, for the entrance
is so narrow that the water heaps up and pours over. We took the
beginning of the flood tide, and so escaped that danger; but our speed
must have been, at the narrows, twenty miles an hour. Then, suddenly,
the bay widened out, the water ceased to swirl and boil and the current
became gentle.
When we could lay aside our paddles and look up, one of the most
glorious views of the whole world "smote us in the face," and Muir's
chant arose, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow."
Before entering this bay I had expressed a wish to see Yosemite Valley.
Now Muir said: "There is your Yosemite; only this one is on much the
grander scale. Yonder towers El Capitan, grown to twice his natural
size; there are the Sentinel, and the majestic Dome; and see all the
falls. Those three have some resemblance to Yosemite Falls, Nevada and
Bridal Veil; but the mountain breasts from which they leap are much
higher than in Yosemite, and the sheer drop much greater. And there are
so many more of these and they fall into the sea. We'll call this
Yosemite Bay--a bigger Yosemite, as Alaska is bigger than California."
Two very beautiful glaciers lay at the head of this canyon. They did not
descend to the water, but the narrow strip of moraine matter without
vegetation upon it between the glaciers and the bay showed that it had
not been long since they were glaciers of the first class, sending out a
stream of icebergs to join those from the Young Glacier. These glaciers
stretched away miles and miles, like two great antennæ, from the head of
the bay to the top of the mountain range. But the most striking features
of this scene were the wonderfully rounded and polished granite breasts
of these great heights. In one stretch of about a mile on either side of
the narrow bay parallel mouldings, like massive cornices of gray
granite, five or six thousand feet high, overhung the water. These had
been fluted and rounded and polished by the glacier stream, until they
seemed like the upper walls and Corinthian capitals of a great temple.
The power of the ice stream could be seen in the striated shoulders of
these cliffs. What awful force that tool of steel-like ice must have
possessed, driven by millions of tons of weight, to mould and shape and
scoop out these flinty rock faces, as the carpenter's forming plane
flutes a board!
When we were half-way up this wonderful bay the sun burst through a rift
of cloud. "Look, look!" exclaimed Muir. "Nature is turning on the
colored lights in her great show house."
Instantly this severe, bare hall of polished rock was transformed into a
fairy palace. A score of cascades, the most of them invisible before,
leapt into view, falling from the dizzy mountain heights and spraying
into misty veils as they descended; and from all of them flashed
rainbows of marvelous distinctness and brilliance, waving and dancing--a
very riot of color. The tinkling water falling into the bay waked a
thousand echoes, weird, musical and sweet, a riot of sound. It was an
enchanted palace, and we left it with reluctance, remaining only six
hours and going out at the turn of the flood tide to escape the
dangerous rapids. Had there not been any so many things to see beyond,
and so little time in which to see them, I doubt if Muir would have quit
Yosemite Bay for days.
THE DOG AND THE MAN
MY FRIENDS
Two friends I have, and close akin are they.
For both are free
And wild and proud, full of the ecstasy
Of life untrammeled; living, day by day,
A law unto themselves; yet breaking none
Of Nature's perfect code.
And far afield, remote from man's abode,
They roam the wilds together, two as one.
Yet, one's a dog--a wisp of silky hair,
Two sharp black eyes,
A face alert, mysterious and wise,
A shadowy tail, a body lithe and fair.
And one's a man--of Nature's work the best,
A heart of gold,
A mind stored full of treasures new and old,
Of men the greatest, strongest, tenderest.
They love each other--these two friends of mine--
Yet both agree
In this--with that pure love that's half divine
They both love me.
VI
THE DOG AND THE MAN
There is no time to tell of all the bays we explored; of Holkham Bay,
Port Snettisham, Tahkou Harbor; all of which we rudely put on the map,
or at least extended the arms beyond what was previously known. Through
Gastineau Channel, now famous for some of the greatest quartz mines and
mills in the world, we pushed, camping on the site of what is now
Juneau, the capital city of Alaska.
An interesting bit of history is to be recorded here. Pushing across the
flats at the head of the bay at high tide the next morning (for the
narrow, grass-covered flat between Gastineau Channel and Stevens
Passage can only be crossed with canoes at flood tide), we met two old
gold prospectors whom I had frequently seen at Wrangell--Joe Harris and
Joe Juneau. Exchanging greetings and news, they told us they were out
from Sitka on a leisurely hunting and prospecting trip. Asking us about
our last camping place, Harris said to Juneau, "Suppose we camp there
and try the gravel of that creek."
These men found placer gold and rock "float" at our camp and made quite
a clean-up that fall, returning to Sitka with a "gold-poke" sufficiently
plethoric to start a stampede to the new diggings. Both placer and
quartz locations were made and a brisk "camp" was built the next summer.
This town was first called Harrisburg for one of the prospectors, and
afterwards Juneau for the other. The great Treadwell gold quartz mine
was located three miles from Juneau in 1881, and others subsequently.
The territorial capital was later removed from Sitka to Juneau, and the
city has grown in size and importance, until it is one of the great
mining and commercial centers of the Northwest.
Through Stevens Passage we paddled, stopping to preach to the Auk
Indians; then down Chatham Strait and into Icy Strait, where the crystal
masses of Muir and Pacific glaciers flashed a greeting from afar. We
needed no Hoonah guide this time, and it was well we did not, for both
Hoonah villages were deserted. The inhabitants had gone to their
hunting, fishing or berry-picking grounds.
At Pleasant Island we loaded, as on the previous trip, with dry wood for
our voyage into Glacier Bay. We were not to attempt the head of the bay
this time, but to confine our exploration to Muir Glacier, which we had
only touched upon the previous fall. Pleasant Island was the scene of
one of Stickeen's many escapades. The little island fairly teemed with
big field mice and pine squirrels, and Stickeen went wild. We could hear
his shrill bark, now here, now there, from all parts of the island. When
we were ready to leave the next morning he was not to be seen. We got
aboard as usual, thinking that he would follow. A quarter of a mile's
paddling and still no little black head could be discovered in our wake.
Muir, who was becoming very much attached to the little dog, was plainly
worried.
"Row back," he said.
So we rowed back and called, but no Stickeen. Around the next point we
rowed and whistled; still no Stickeen. At last, discouraged, I gave the
signal to move off. So we rounded the curving shore and pushed towards
Glacier Bay. At the far point of the island, a mile from our camping
place, we suddenly discovered Stickeen away out in the water, paddling
calmly and confidently towards our canoe. How he had ever got there I
cannot imagine. I think he must have been taking a long swim out on the
bay for the mere pleasure of it. Muir always insisted that he had
listened to our discussion of the route to be taken, and, with an
uncanny intuition that approached clairvoyance, knew just where to head
us off.
When we took him aboard he went through his usual performance, making
his way, the whole length of the canoe, until he got under Muir's legs,
before shaking himself. No protests or discipline availed, for Muir's
kicks always failed of their pretended mark. To the end of his
acquaintance with Muir, he always chose the vicinity of Muir's legs as
the place to shake himself after a swim.
At Muir Glacier we spent a week this time, making long trips up the
mountains that overlooked the glacier and across its surface. On one
occasion Muir, with the little dog at his heels, crossed entirely in a
diagonal direction the great glacial lake, a trip of some thirty miles,
starting before daylight in the morning and not appearing at camp until
long after dark. Muir always carried several handkerchiefs in his
pockets, but this time he returned without any, having used them all up
making moccasins for Stickeen, whose feet were cut and bleeding from the
sharp honeycomb ice of the glacial surface. This mass of ice is so vast
and so comparatively still that it has but few crevasses, and Muir's day
for traversing it was a perfect one--warm and sunny.
[Illustration: THE FRONT OF MUIR GLACIER
We could understand the constant breaking off and leaping up and
smashing down of the ice, and the formation of the great mass of bergs]
Another day he and I climbed the mountain that overlooked it and
skirted the mighty ice-field for some distance, then walked across the
face of the glacier just back of the rapids, keeping away from the deep
crevasses. We drove a straight line of stakes across the glacial stream
and visited them each day to watch the deflection and curves of the
stakes, and thus arrive at some conception of the rate at which the ice
mass was moving. In some parts of the glacial stream this ice current
flowed as fast as fifty or sixty feet a day, and we could understand the
constant breaking off and leaping up and smashing down of the ice and
the formation of that great mass of bergs.
Shortly before we left Muir Glacier, I saw Muir furiously angry for the
first and last time in my acquaintance with him. We had noticed day
after day, whenever the mists admitted a view of the mountain slopes,
bands of mountain goats looking like little white mice against the green
of the high pastures. I said to Joe, the hunter, one morning: "Go up and
get us a kid. It will be a great addition to our larder."
He took my breech-loading rifle and went. In the afternoon he returned
with a fine young buck on his shoulders. While we were examining it he
said:
"I picked the fattest and most tender of those that I killed."
"What!" I exclaimed, "did you kill more than this one?"
He put up both hands with fingers extended and then one finger:
"_Tatlum-pe-ict_ (eleven)," he replied.
Muir's face flushed red, and with an exclamation that was as near to an
oath as he ever came, he started for Joe. Luckily for that Indian he saw
Muir and fled like a deer up the rocks, and would not come down until he
was assured that he would not be hurt. I shared Muir's indignation and
would have enjoyed seeing him administer the richly deserved thrashing.
Muir had a strong aversion to taking the life of any animal; although he
would eat meat when prepared, he never killed a wild animal; even the
rattlesnakes he did not molest during his rambles in California. Often
his softness of heart was a source of some annoyance and a great deal of
astonishment to our natives; for he would take pleasure in rocking the
canoe when they were trying to get a bead on a flock of ducks or a deer
standing on the shore.
On leaving the mouth of Glacier Bay we spent a week or more exploring
the inlets and glaciers to the west. These days were rainy and cold. We
groped blindly into unknown, unmapped, fog-hidden fiords and bayous,
exploring them to their ends and often making excursions to the glaciers
above them.
The climax of the trip, however, was the last glacier we visited, Taylor
Glacier, the scene of Muir's great adventure with Stickeen. We reached
this fine glacier in the afternoon of a very stormy day. We were
approaching the open Pacific, and the _saanah_, the southeast rain-wind,
was howling through the narrow entrance into Cross Sound. For twenty
miles we had been facing strong head winds and tidal waves as we crept
around rocky points and along the bases of dizzy cliffs and
glacier-scored rock-shoulders. We were drenched to the skin; indeed, our
clothing and blankets had been soaking wet for days. For two hours
before we turned the point into the cozy harbor in front of the glacier
we had been exerting every ounce of our strength; Lot in the stern
wielding his big steering paddle, now on this side, now on that,
grunting with each mighty stroke, calling encouragement to his crew,
"_Ut-ha, ut-ha! hlitsin! hlitsin-tin!_ (pull, pull, strong, with
strength!)"; Joe and Billy rising from their seats with every stroke and
throwing their whole weight and force savagely into their oars; Muir and
I in the bow bent forward with heads down, butting into the slashing
rain, paddling for dear life; Stickeen, the only idle one, looking over
the side of the boat as though searching the channel and then around at
us as if he would like to help. All except the dog were exhausted when
we turned into the sheltered cove.
While the men pitched the tents and made camp Muir and I walked through
the thick grass to the front of the large glacier, which front stretched
from a high, perpendicular rock wall about three miles to a narrow
promontory of moraine boulders next to the ocean.
"Now, here is something new," exclaimed Muir, as we stood close to the
edge of the ice. "This glacier is the great exception. All the others of
this region are receding; this has been coming forward. See the mighty
ploughshare and its furrow!"
For the icy mass was heaving up the ground clear across its front, and,
on the side where we stood, had evidently found a softer stratum under
a forest-covered hill, and inserted its shovel point under the hill,
heaved it upon the ice, cracking the rocks into a thousand fragments;
and was carrying the whole hill upon its back towards the sea. The large
trees were leaning at all angles, some of them submerged, splintered and
ground by the crystal torrent, some of the shattered trunks sticking out
of the ice. It was one of the most tremendous examples of glacial power
I have ever seen.
"I must climb this glacier to-morrow," said Muir. "I shall have a great
day of it; I wish you could come along."
I sighed, not with resignation, but with a grief that was akin to
despair. The condition of my shoulders was such that it would be madness
to attempt to join Muir on his longer and more perilous climbs. I
should only spoil his day and endanger his life as well as my own.
That night I baked a good batch of camp bread, boiled a fresh kettle of
beans and roasted a leg of venison ready for Muir's breakfast, fixed the
coffee-pot and prepared dry kindling for the fire. I knew he would be up
and off at daybreak, perhaps long before.
"Wake me up," I admonished him, "or at least take time to make hot
coffee before you start." For the wind was rising and the rain pouring,
and I knew how imperative the call of such a morning as was promised
would be to him. To traverse a great, new, living, rapidly moving
glacier would be high joy; but to have a tremendous storm added to this
would simply drive Muir wild with desire to be himself a part of the
great drama played on the glacier-stage.
Several times during the night I was awakened by the flapping of the
tent, the shrieking of the wind in the spruce-tops and the thundering of
the ocean surf on the outer barrier of rocks. The tremulous howling of a
persistent wolf across the bay soothed me to sleep again, and I did not
wake when Muir arose. As I had feared, he was in too big a hurry to take
time for breakfast, but pocketed a small cake of camp bread and hastened
out into the storm-swept woods. I was aroused, however, by the
controversy between him and Stickeen outside of the tent. The little
dog, who always slept with one eye and ear alert for Muir's movements,
had, as usual, quietly left his warm nest and followed his adopted
master. Muir was scolding and expostulating with him as if he were a
boy. I chuckled to myself at the futility of Muir's efforts; Stickeen
would now, as always, do just as he pleased--and he would please to go
along.
Although I was forced to stay at the camp, this stormy day was a most
interesting one to me. There was an old Hoonah chief camped at the mouth
of the little river which flowed from under Taylor Glacier. He had with
him his three wives and a little company of children and grandchildren.
The many salmon weirs and summer houses at this point showed that it had
been at one time a very important fishing place.
But the advancing glacier had played havoc with the chief's salmon
stream. The icy mass had been for several years traveling towards the
sea at the rate of at least a mile every year. There were still silver
hordes of fine red salmon swimming in the sea outside of the river's
mouth. But the stream was now so short that the most of these salmon
swam a little ways into the mouth of the river and then out into the
salt water again, bewildered and circling about, doubtless wondering
what had become of their parent stream.
The old chief came to our camp early, followed by his squaws bearing
gifts of salmon, porpoise meat, clams and crabs; and at his command two
of the girls of his family picked me a basketful of delicious wild
strawberries. He sat motionless by my fire all the forenoon, smoking my
leaf tobacco and pondering deeply. After the noon meal, which I shared
with him, he called Billy, my interpreter, and asked for a big talk.
With all ceremony I made preparations, gave more presents of leaf
tobacco and hardtack and composed myself for the palaver. After the
usual preliminaries, in which he told me at great length what a great
man I was, how like a father to all the people, comparing me to sun,
moon, stars and all other great things; I broke in upon his stream of
compliments and asked what he wanted.
Recalled to earth he said: "I wish you to pray to your God."
"For what do you wish me to pray?" I asked.
The old man raised his blanketed form to its full height and waved his
hand with a magnificent gesture towards the glacier. "Do you see that
great ice mountain?"
"Yes."
"Once," he said, "I had the finest salmon stream upon the coast."
Pointing to a point of rock five or six miles beyond the mouth of the
glacier he continued: "Once the salmon stream extended far beyond that
point of rock. There was a great fall there and a deep pool below it,
and here for years great schools of king salmon came crowding up to the
foot of that fall. To spear them or net them was very easy; they were
the fattest and best salmon among all these islands. My household had
abundance of meat for the winter's need. But the cruel spirit of that
glacier grew angry with me, I know not why, and drove the ice mountain
down towards the sea and spoiled my salmon stream. A year or two more
and it will be blotted out entirely. I have done my best. I have prayed
to my gods. Last spring I sacrificed two of my slaves, members of my
household, my best slaves, a strong man and his wife, to the spirit of
that glacier to make the ice mountain stop; but it comes on, and now I
want you to pray to _your_ God, the God of the white man, to see if He
will make the glacier stop!"
I wish I could describe the pathetic earnestness of this old Indian,
the simplicity with which he told of the sacrifice of his slaves and the
eager look with which he awaited my answer. When I exclaimed in horror
at his deed of blood he was astonished; he could not understand.
"Why, they were _my_ slaves," he said, "and the man suggested it
himself. He was glad to go to death to help his chief."
A few years after this our missionary at Hoonah had the pleasure of
baptizing this old chief into the Christian faith. He had put away his
slaves and his plural wives, had surrendered the implements of his old
superstition, and as a child embraced the new gospel of peace and love.
He could not get rid of his superstition about the glacier, however, and
about eight years afterwards, visiting at Wrangell, he told me as an
item of news which he expected would greatly please me that, doubtless
as a result of my prayers, Taylor Glacier was receding again and the
salmon beginning to come into that stream.
At intervals during this eventful day I went to the face of the glacier
and even climbed the disintegrating hill that was riding on the
glacier's ploughshare, in an effort to see the bold wanderers; but the
jagged ice peaks of the high glacial rapids blocked my vision, and the
rain driving passionately in horizontal sheets shut out the mountains
and the upper plateau of ice. I could see that it was snowing on the
glacier, and imagined the weariness and peril of dog and man exposed to
the storm in that dangerous region. I could only hope that Muir had not
ventured to face the wind on the glacier, but had contented himself with
tracing its eastern side, and was somewhere in the woods bordering it,
beside a big fire, studying storm and glacier in comparative safety.
When the shadows of evening were added to those of the storm I had my
men gather materials for a big bonfire, and kindle it well out on the
flat, where it could be seen from mountain and glacier. I placed dry
clothing and blankets in the fly tent facing the camp-fire, and got
ready the best supper at my command: clam chowder, fried porpoise, bacon
and beans, "savory meat" made of mountain kid with potatoes, onions,
rice and curry, camp biscuit and coffee, with dessert of wild
strawberries and condensed milk.
It grew pitch-dark before seven, and it was after ten when the dear
wanderers staggered into camp out of the dripping forest. Stickeen did
not bounce in ahead with a bark, as was his custom, but crept silently
to his piece of blanket and curled down, too tired to shake himself.
Billy and I laid hands on Muir without a word, and in a trice he was
stripped of his wet garments, rubbed dry, clothed in dry underwear,
wrapped in a blanket and set down on a bed of spruce twigs with a plate
of hot chowder before him. When the chowder disappeared the other hot
dishes followed in quick succession, without a question asked or a word
uttered. Lot kept the fire blazing just right, Joe kept the victuals hot
and baked fresh bread, while Billy and I waited on Muir.
Not till he came to the coffee and strawberries did Muir break the
silence. "Yon's a brave doggie," he said. Stickeen, who could not yet be
induced to eat, responded by a glance of one eye and a feeble pounding
of the blanket with his heavy tail.
Then Muir began to talk, and little by little, between sips of coffee,
the story of the day was unfolded. Soon memories crowded for utterance
and I listened till midnight, entranced by a succession of vivid
descriptions the like of which I have never heard before or since. The
fierce music and grandeur of the storm, the expanse of ice with its
bewildering crevasses, its mysterious contortions, its solemn voices
were made to live before me.
[Illustration: GLACIAL CREVASSES
"We had to make long, narrow tacks and doublings, tracing the edges of
tremendous transverse and longitudinal crevasses--beautiful and awful"]
When Muir described his marooning on the narrow island of ice
surrounded by fathomless crevasses, with a knife-edged sliver curving
deeply "like the cable of a suspension bridge" diagonally across it as
the only means of escape, I shuddered at his peril. I held my breath as
he told of the terrible risks he ran as he cut his steps down the wall
of ice to the bridge's end, knocked off the sharp edge of the sliver,
hitched across inch by inch and climbed the still more difficult ascent
on the other side. But when he told of Stickeen's cries of despair at
being left on the other side of the crevasse, of his heroic
determination at last to do or die, of his careful progress across the
sliver as he braced himself against the gusts and dug his little claws
into the ice, and of his passionate revulsion to the heights of
exultation when, intoxicated by his escape, he became a living whirlwind
of joy, flashing about in mad gyrations, shouting and screaming "Saved!
saved!" my tears streamed down my face. Before the close of the story
Stickeen arose, stepped slowly across to Muir and crouched down with his
head on Muir's foot, gazing into his face and murmuring soft canine
words of adoration to his god.
Not until 1897, seventeen years after the event, did Muir give to the
public his story of Stickeen. How many times he had written and
rewritten it I know not. He told me at the time of its first publication
that he had been thinking of the story all of these years and jotting
down paragraphs and sentences as they occurred to him. He was never
satisfied with a sentence until it balanced well. He had the keenest
sense of melody, as well as of harmony, in his sentence structure, and
this great dog-story of his is a remarkable instance of the growth to
perfection of the great production of a great master.
The wonderful power of endurance of this man, whom Theodore Roosevelt
has well called a "perfectly natural man," is instanced by the fact
that, although he was gone about seventeen hours on this day of his
adventure with Stickeen, with only a bite of bread to eat, and never
rested a minute of that time, but was battling with the storm all day
and often racing at full speed across the glacier, yet he got up at
daylight the next morning, breakfasted with me and was gone all day
again, with Stickeen at his heels, climbing a high mountain to get a
view of the snow fountains and upper reaches of the glacier; and when he
returned after nightfall he worked for two or three hours at his notes
and sketches.
The latter part of this voyage was hurried. Muir had a wife waiting for
him at home and he had promised to stay in Alaska only one month. He had
dallied so long with his icy loves, the glaciers, that we were obliged
to make all haste to Sitka, where he expected to take the return
steamer. To miss that would condemn him to Alaska and absence from his
wife for another month. Through a continually pouring rain we sailed by
the then deserted town of Hoonah, ascended with the rising tide a long,
narrow, shallow inlet, dragged our canoe a hundred yards over a little
hill and then descended with the receding tide another long, narrow
passage down to Chatham Strait; and so on to the mouth of Peril Strait
which divided Baranof from Chichagof Island.
On the other side of Chatham Strait, opposite the mouth of Peril, we
visited again Angoon, the village of the Hootz-noos. From this town the
painted and drunken warriors had come the winter before and attacked the
Stickeens, killing old Tow-a-att, Moses and another of our Christian
Indians. The trouble was not settled yet, and although the two tribes
had exchanged some pledges and promised to fight no more, I feared a
fresh outbreak, and so thought it wise to pay another visit to the
Hootz-noos. As we approached Angoon, however, I heard the war-drums
beating with their peculiar cadence, "tum-tum"--a beat off--"tum-tum,
tum-tum." As we came up to the beach I saw what was seemingly the whole
tribe dancing their war-dances, arrayed in their war-paint with their
fantastic war-gear on. So earnestly engaged were they in their dance
that they at first paid no attention whatever to me. My heart sank into
my boots. "They are going back to Wrangell to attack the Stickeens," I
thought, "and there will be another bloody war."
Driving our canoe ashore, we hurried up to the head chief of the
Hootz-noos, who was alternately haranguing his people and directing the
dances.
"Anatlask," I called, "what does this mean? You are going on the
warpath. Tell me what you are about. Are you going back to Stickeen?"
He looked at me vacantly a little while, and then a grin spread from ear
to ear. It was the same chief in whose house I had seen the idiot boy a
year before.
"Come with me," he said.
He led us into his house and across the room to where in state,
surrounded by all kinds of chieftain's gear, Chilcat blankets, totemic
carvings and paintings, chieftain's hats and cunningly woven baskets,
there lay the body of a stalwart young man wrapped in a
button-embroidered blanket. The chief silently removed the blanket from
the face of the dead. The skull was completely crushed on one side as
by a heavy blow. Then the story came out.
The hootz, or big brown bear of that country, is as large and savage as
the grizzly bear of the Rockies. At certain seasons he is, as the
natives say, "_quonsum-sollex_" (always mad). The natives seldom attack
these bears, confining their attention to the more timid and easily
killed black bears. But this young man with a companion, hunting on
Baranof Island across the Strait, found himself suddenly confronted by
an enormous hootz. The young man rashly shot him with his musket,
wounding him sufficiently to make him furious. The tremendous brute
hurled his thousand pounds of ferocity at the hunter, and one little tap
of that huge paw crushed his skull like an egg-shell. His companion
brought his body home; and now the whole tribe had formally declared
war on that bear, and all this dancing and painting and drumming was in
preparation for a war party, composed of all the men, dogs and guns in
the town. They were going on the warpath to get that bear. Greatly
relieved, I gave them my blessing and sped them on their way.
We had been rowing all night before this incident, and all the next
night we sailed up the tortuous Peril Strait, going upward with the
flood, one man steering while the other slept, to the meeting place of
the waters; then down with the receding tide through the islands, and so
on to Sitka. Here we met a warm reception from the missionaries, and
also from the captain and officers of the old man-of-war _Jamestown_,
afterwards used as a school ship for the navy in the harbor of San
Francisco.
Alaska at that time had no vestige of civil government, no means of
punishing crime, no civil officers except the customs collectors, no
magistrate or police,--everyone was a law to himself. The only sign of
authority was this cumbersome sailing vessel with its marines and
sailors. It could not move out of Sitka harbor without first sending by
the monthly mail steamer to San Francisco for a tug to come and tow it
through these intricate channels to the sea where the sails could be
spread. Of course, it was not of much use to this vast territory. The
officers of the _Jamestown_ were supposed to be doing some surveying,
but, lacking the means of travel, what they did amounted to very little.
They were interested at once in our account of the discovery of Glacier
Bay and of the other unmapped bays and inlets that we had entered. At
their request, from Muir's notes and our estimate of distances by our
rate of sailing, and of directions from observations of our little
compass, we drew a rough map of Glacier Bay. This was sent on to
Washington by these officers and published by the Navy Department. For
six or seven years it was the only sailing chart of Glacier Bay, and two
or three steamers were wrecked, groping their way in these uncharted
passages, before surveying vessels began to make accurate maps. So from
its beginning has Uncle Sam neglected this greatest and richest of all
his possessions.
Our little company separated at Sitka. Stickeen and our Indian crew were
the first to leave, embarking for a return trip to Wrangell by canoe.
Stickeen had stuck close to Muir, following him everywhere, crouching
at his feet where he sat, sleeping in his room at night. When the time
came for him to leave Muir explained the matter to him fully, talking to
and reasoning with him as if he were human. Billy led him aboard the
canoe by a dog-chain, and the last Muir saw of him he was standing on of
the canoe, howling a sad farewell.
Muir sailed south on the monthly mail steamer; while I took passage on a
trading steamer for another missionary trip among the northern tribes.
So ended my canoe voyages with John Muir. Their memory is fresh and
sweet as ever. The flowing stream of years has not washed away nor
dimmed the impressions of those great days we spent together. Nearly all
of them were cold, wet and uncomfortable, if one were merely an animal,
to be depressed or enlivened by physical conditions. But of these
so-called "hardships" Muir made nothing, and I caught his spirit;
therefore, the beauty, the glory, the wonder and the thrills of those
weeks of exploration are with me yet and shall endure--a rustless,
inexhaustible treasure.
THE MAN IN PERSPECTIVE
JOHN MUIR
He lived aloft, exultant, unafraid.
All things were good to him. The mountain old
Stretched gnarled hands to help him climb. The peak
Waved blithe snow-banner greeting; and for him
The rav'ning storm, aprowl for human life,
Purred like the lion at his trainer's feet.
The grizzly met him on the narrow ledge,
Gave gruff "good morning"--and the right of way.
The blue-veined glacier, cold of heart and pale,
Warmed, at his gaze, to amethystine blush,
And murmured deep, fond undertones of love.
He walked apart from men, yet loved his kind,
And brought them treasures from his larger store.
For them he delved in mines of richer gold.
Earth's messenger he was to human hearts.
The starry moss flower from its dizzy shelf,
The ouzel, shaking forth its spray of song,
The glacial runlet, tinkling its clear bell,
The rose-of-morn, abloom on snowy heights--
Each sent by him a jewel-word of cheer.
Blind eyes he opened and deaf ears unstopped.
He lived aloft, apart. He talked with God
In all the myriad tongues of God's sweet world;
But still he came anear and talked with us,
Interpreting for God to listn'ing men.
[Illustration: JOHN MUIR IN LATER LIFE]
VII
THE MAN IN PERSPECTIVE
The friendship between John Muir and myself was of that fine sort which
grows and deepens with absence almost as well as with companionship.
Occasional letters passed from one to the other. When I felt like
writing to Muir I obeyed the impulse without asking whether I "owed" him
a letter, and he followed the same rule--or rather lack of rule.
Sometimes answers to these letters came quickly; sometimes they were
long delayed, so long that they were not answers at all. When I sent him
"news of his mountains and glaciers" that contained items really novel
to him his replies were immediate and enthusiastic. When he had found
in his great outdoor museum some peculiar treasure he talked over his
find with me by letter.
Muir's letters were never commonplace and sometimes they were long and
rich. I preserved them all; and when, a few years ago, an Alaska
steamboat sank to the bottom of the Yukon, carrying with it my library
and all my literary possessions, the loss of these letters from my
friend caused me more sorrow than the loss of almost any other of my
many priceless treasures.
The summer of 1881, the year following that of our second canoe voyage,
Muir went, as scientific and literary expert, with the U.S. revenue
cutter _Rogers_, which was sent by the Government into the Arctic Ocean
in search of the ill-fated De Long exploring party. His published
articles written on the revenue cutter were of great interest; but in
his more intimate letters to me there was a note of disappointment.
"There have been no mountains to climb," he wrote, "although I have had
entrancing long-distance views of many. I have not had a chance to visit
any glaciers. There were no trees in those arctic regions, and but few
flowers. Of God's process of modeling the world I saw but
little--nothing for days but that limitless, relentless ice-pack. I was
confined within the narrow prison of the ship; I had no freedom, I went
at the will of other men; not of my own. It was very different from
those glorious canoe voyages with you in your beautiful, fruitful
wilderness."
A very brief visit at Muir's home near Martinez, California, in the
spring of 1883 found him at what he frankly said was very distasteful
work--managing a large fruit ranch. He was doing the work well and
making his orchards pay large dividends; but his heart was in the hills
and woods. Eagerly he questioned me of my travels and of the "progress"
of the glaciers and woods of Alaska. Beyond a few short mountain trips
he had seen nothing for two years of his beloved wilds.
Passionately he voiced his discontent: "I am losing the precious days. I
am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing
in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the
mountains to learn the news."
In 1888 the ten years' limit which I had set for service in Alaska
expired. The educational necessities of my children and the feeling that
was growing upon me like a smothering cloud that if I remained much
longer among the Indians I would lose all power to talk or write good
English, drove me from the Northwest to find a temporary home in
Southern California.
I had not notified Muir of my coming, but suddenly appeared in his
orchard at Martinez one day in early summer. It was cherry-picking time
and he was out among his trees superintending a large force of workmen.
He saw me as soon as I discovered him, and dropping the basket he was
carrying came running to greet me with both hands outstretched.
"Ah! my friend," he cried, "I have been longing mightily for you. You
have come to take me on a canoe trip to the countries beyond--to Lituya
and Yakutat bays and Prince William Sound; have you not? My weariness of
this hum-drum, work-a-day life has grown so heavy it is like to crush
me. I'm ready to break away and go with you whenever you say."
"No," I replied, "I am leaving Alaska."
"Man, man!" protested Muir, "how can you do it? You'll never carry out
such a notion as that in the world. Your heart will cry every day for
the North like a lost child; and in your sleep the snow-banners of your
white peaks will beckon to you.
"Why, look at me," he said, "and take warning. I'm a horrible example.
I, who have breathed the mountain air--who have really lived a life of
freedom--condemned to penal servitude with these miserable little
bald-heads!" (holding up a bunch of cherries). "Boxing them up; putting
them in prison! And for money! Man! I'm like to die of the shame of it.
"And then you're not safe a day in this sordid world of money-grubbing
men. I came near dying a mean, civilized death, the other day. A
Chinaman emptied a bucket of phosphorus over me and almost burned me up.
How different that would have been from a nice white death in the
crevasse of a glacier!
"Gin it were na for my bairnies I'd rin awa' frae a' this tribble an'
hale ye back north wi' me."
So Muir would run on, now in English, now in broad Scotch; but through
all his raillery there ran a note of longing for the wilderness. "I want
to see what is going on," he said. "So many great events are happening,
and I'm not there to see them. I'm learning nothing here that will do me
any good."
I spent the night with him, and we talked till long after midnight,
sailing anew our voyages of enchantment. He had just completed his work
of editing "Picturesque California" and gave me a set of the beautiful
volumes.
Our paths did not converge again for nine years; but I was to have,
after all, a few more Alaska days with John Muir. The itch of the
wanderlust in my feet had become a wearisome, nervous ache, increasing
with the years, and the call of the wild more imperative, until the
fierce yearning for the North was at times more than I could bear.
The first of the great northward gold stampedes--that of 1897 to the
Klondyke in Northwestern Canada on the borders of Alaska--afforded me
the opportunity for which I was longing to return to the land of my
heart. The latter part of August saw me on _The Queen_, the largest of
that great fleet of passenger boats that were traversing the thousand
miles of wonder and beauty between Seattle and Skagway. These steamboats
were all laden with gold seekers and their goods. Seattle sprang into
prominence and wealth, doubling her population in a few months. From
every community in the United States, from all Canada and from many
lands across the oceans came that strange mob of lawyers, doctors,
clerks, merchants, farmers, mechanics, engineers, reporters,
sharpers--all gold-struck--all mad with excitement--all rushing
pell-mell into a thousand new and hard experiences.
As I stood on the upper deck of the vessel, watching the strange scene
on the dock, who should come up the gang-plank but John Muir, wearing
the same old gray ulster and Scotch cap! It was the last place in the
world I would have looked for him. But he was not stampeding to the
Klondyke. His being there at that time was really an accident. In
company with two other eminent "tree-men" he had been spending the
summer in the study of the forests of Canada and the three were
"climaxing," as they said, in the forests of Alaska.
Five pleasurable days we had together on board _The Queen_. Muir was
vastly amused by the motley crowd of excited men, their various outfits,
their queer equipment, their ridiculous notions of camping and life in
the wilderness. "A nest of ants," he called them, "taken to a strange
country and stirred up with a stick."
As our steamboat touched at Port Townsend, Muir received a long telegram
from a San Francisco newspaper, offering him a large sum if he would go
over the mountains and down the Yukon to the Klondyke, and write them
letters about conditions there. He brought the telegram to me, laughing
heartily at the absurdity of anybody making him such a proposition.
"Do they think I'm daft," he asked, "like a' the lave o' thae puir
bodies? When I go into that wild it will not be in a crowd like this or
on such a sordid mission. Ah! my old friend, they'll be spoiling our
grand Alaska."
He offered to secure for me the reporter's job tendered to him. I
refused, urging my lack of training for such work and my more important
and responsible position.
"Why, that same paper has a host of reporters on the way to the Klondyke
now," I said. "There is ----" (naming a noted poet and author of the
Coast). "He must be half-way down to Dawson by this time."
"---- doesn't count," replied Muir, "for the patent reason that
everybody knows he can't tell the truth. The poor fellow is not to blame
for it. He was just made that way. Everybody will read with delight his
wonderful tales of the trail, but nobody will believe him. We all know
him too well."
Muir contracted a hard cold the first night out from Seattle. The hot,
close stateroom and a cold blast through the narrow window were the
cause. A distressing cough racked his whole frame. When he refused to go
to a physician who was on the boat I brought the doctor to him. After
the usual examination the physician asked, "What do you generally do for
a cold?"
"Oh," said Muir, "I shiver it away."
"Explain yourself," said the puzzled doctor.
"We-ll," drawled Muir, "two or three years ago I camped by the Muir
Glacier for a week. I had caught just such a cold as this from the same
cause--a stuffy stateroom. So I made me a little sled out of spruce
boughs, put a blanket and some sea biscuit on it and set out up the
glacier. I got into a labyrinth of crevasses and a driving snowstorm,
and had to spend the night on the ice ten miles from land. I sat on the
sled all night or thrashed about it, and had a dickens of a time; I
shivered so hard I shook the sled to pieces. When morning came my cold
was all gone. That is my prescription, Doctor. You are welcome to use it
in your practice."
"Well," laughed the doctor, "if I had such patients as you in such a
country as this I might try your heroic remedy, but I am afraid it would
hardly serve in general practice."
Muir and I made the most of these few days together, and walked the
decks till late each night, for he had much to tell me. He had at last
written his story of Stickeen; and was working on books treating of the
Big Trees, the National Parks and the glaciers of Alaska.
At Wrangell, as we went ashore, we were greeted by joyful exclamations
from the little company of old Stickeen Indians we found on the dock.
That sharp intaking of the breath which is the Thlinget's note of
surprise and delight, and the words _Nuknate Ankow ka Glate Ankow_
(Priest Chief and Ice Chief) passed along the line. Death had made many
gaps in the old circle of friends, both white and native, but the
welcome from those who remained warmed our hearts.
From Wrangell northward the steamboat followed the route of our canoe
voyage of 1880 through Wrangell Narrows into Prince Frederick Sound,
past Norris Glacier and Holkham Bay into Stevens Passage, past Taku Bay
to Juneau and on to Lynn Canal--then on the track of our voyage of 1879
up to Haines and beyond fifteen miles to that new, chaotic camp in the
woods called Skagway.
The two or three days which it took _The Queen_ to discharge her load of
passengers and cargo of their outfits were spent by Muir and his
scientific companions in roaming the forests and mountains about Skagway
and examining the flora of that region. They kept mostly off the trail
of the struggling, straggling army of _Cheechakoes_ (newcomers) who
were blunderingly trying to get their goods and themselves across the
rugged, jagged mountains on their way to the promised land of gold; but
Muir found time to spend some hours with me in my camp under a hemlock,
where he ate again of my cooking over a camp-fire.
"You are going on a strange journey this time, my friend," he admonished
me. "I don't envy you. You'll have a hard time keeping your heart light
and simple in the midst of this crowd of madmen. Instead of the music of
the wind among the spruce-tops and the tinkling of the waterfalls, your
ears will be filled with the oaths and groans of these poor, deluded,
self-burdened men. Keep close to Nature's heart, yourself; and break
clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the
woods. Wash your spirit clean from the earth-stains of this sordid,
gold-seeking crowd in God's pure air. It will help you in your efforts
to bring to these men something better than gold. Don't lose your
freedom and your love of the Earth as God made it."
In 1899 it was my good fortune to have one more Alaska day with John
Muir at Skagway. After a year in the Klondyke I had spent the winter of
1898-99 in the Eastern States arousing the Christian public to the needs
of this newly discovered Empire of the North; and was returning with
other ministers to interior and western Alaska. The White Pass Railroad
was completed only to the summit; and it was a laborious task, requiring
a month of very hard work, to get our goods from Skagway over the thirty
miles of mountains to Lake Bennett, where we could load them on our
open boat for the voyage of two thousand miles down the Yukon.
While I was engaged in this task there came to Skagway the steamship
_George W. Elder_, carrying one of the most remarkable companies of
scientific men ever gathered together in one expedition. Mr. Harriman,
the great railroad magnate, had chartered the steamer, and had invited
as his guests many men of world reputation in various branches of
natural science. Among them were John Burroughs, Drs. Merriam and Dahl
of the Smithsonian Institute, and, not least, John Muir. Indeed he was
called the Nestor of the expedition and his advice followed as that of
no other.
The enticing proposition was made me by Muir, and backed by Mr.
Harriman's personal invitation, that I should join this distinguished
company, share Muir's stateroom and spend the summer cruising along the
southern and western coasts of Alaska. However, the new mining camps
were calling with a still more imperative voice, and I had to turn my
back to the Coast and face the great, sun-bathed Interior. But what a
joy and inspiration it would have been to climb Muir, Geicke and Taylor
glaciers again with Muir, note the rapid progress God was making in His
work of landscape gardening by means of these great tools, make at last
our deferred visits to Lituya and Yakutat bays and the fine glaciers of
Prince William's Sound, and renew my studies of this good world under my
great Master.
A letter from Muir about his summer's cruise, written in November, 1899,
reached me at Nome in June, 1900; for those of us who had reached that
bleak, exposed northwestern coast and wintered there did not get any
mail for six months. We were fifteen hundred miles from a post-office.
In his letter Muir wrote: "The voyage was a grand one, and I saw much
that was new to me and packed full of interest and instruction. But, do
you know, I longed to break away from the steamboat and its splendid
company, get a dugout canoe and a crew of Indians, and, with you as my
companion, poke into the nooks and crannies of the mountains and
glaciers which we could not reach from the steamer. What great days we
have had together, you and I!"
This day at Skagway, in 1899, was the last of my Alaska days with John
Muir, except as I bring them back and live them over in my thoughts. How
often in my long voyages, by canoe or steamer, among the thousand
islands of southeastern Alaska, the intricate channels of Prince
William's Sound, the great rivers, and multitudinous lakes of the
Interior, and the treeless, windswept coasts of Bering Sea and the
Arctic Ocean; or in my tramps in the summer over the mountains and
plains of Alaska, or in the winter with my dogs over the frozen
wilderness fighting the great battle with the fierce cold or spellbound
under the magic of the Aurora--how often have I longed for the presence
of Muir to heighten my enjoyment by his higher ecstasy, or reveal to me
what I was too dull to see or understand. I have had inspiring
companions, and my life has been blessed by many friendships inestimably
precious and rich; but for me the World has produced but one John Muir;
and to no other man do I feel that I owe so much; for I was blind and
he made me see!
Only once since 1899 did I meet him, and then but for an hour at his
temporary home in Los Angeles in 1910. He was putting the finishing
touches on his rich volume, "The Story of My Boyhood and Youth." I
submitted for his review and correction the article which forms the
first two chapters of this book. With that nice regard for absolute
verity which always characterized him he pointed out two or three
passages in which his recollection clashed with mine, and I at once made
the changes he suggested.
Muir never grew old. After he was sixty years of age (as men count age)
some of his most daring feats of mountain climbing and some of his
longest journeys into the wilds were undertaken. When he was past
seventy he was still tramping and camping in the forests and among the
hills. When he was seventy-three he made long trips to South America and
Africa, and to the very end he was exploring, studying, working and
enjoying.
All his writings exult with the spirit of immortal youth. There is in
his books an intimate companionship with the trees, the mountains, the
flowers and the animals, that is altogether fine. Surely no such books
of mountains and forests were ever written as his "Mountains of
California," "My First Summer in the Sierra," "The Yosemite" and "Our
National Parks." His brooks and trees are the abode of dryads and
hamadryads--they live and talk.
And when he writes of the animals he has met in his rambles, without any
attempt to put into their characters anything that does not belong to
them, without "manufacturing his data," he somehow manages to do much
more than introduce them to you; he makes you their intimate and
admiring friends, as he was. His ouzel bobs you a cheery good morning
and sprays you with its "ripple of song"; his Douglas squirrel scolds
and swears at you with rough good-nature; and his big-horn gazes at you
with frank and friendly eyes and challenges you to follow to its
splendid heights, not as a hunter but as a companion. You love them all,
as Muir did.
As an instance of this power in his writings, when I returned from the
Klondyke in 1898 the story of Stickeen had been published in a magazine
a few months before. I met in New York a daughter of the great Field
family, who when a child had heard me tell of Muir's exploit in rescuing
me from the mountain top, and who had shouted with delight when I told
of our sliding down the mountain in the moraine gravel. She asked me
eagerly if I was the Mr. Young mentioned in Muir's story. When I said
that I was she called to her companions and introduced me as the Owner
of Stickeen; and I was content to have as my claim to an earthly
immortality my ownership of an immortalized dog.
I cannot think of John Muir as dead, or as much changed from the man
with whom I canoed and camped. He was too much a part of nature--too
natural--to be separated from his mountains, trees and glaciers.
Somewhere, I am sure, he is making other explorations, solving other
natural problems, using that brilliant, inventive genius to good effect;
and some time again I shall hear him unfold anew, with still clearer
insight and more eloquent words, fresh secrets of his "mountains of
God."
The Thlingets have a Happy Hunting Ground in the Spirit Land for dogs as
well as for men; and Muir used to contend that they were right--that the
so-called lower animals have as much right to a Heaven as humans. I
wonder if he has found a still more beautiful--a glorified--Stickeen;
and if the little fellow still follows and frisks about him as in those
old days. I like to think so; and when I too cross the Great Divide--and
it can't be long now--I shall look eagerly for them both to be my
companions in fresh adventures. In the meantime I am lonely for them and
think of them often, and say, with _The Harvester_, "What a dog!--and
what a MAN!!"
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