are equalled only in the tropics. The pine-trees cover the mountain slopes as thickly as the grass on a hillside, and as fires have never destroyed the forests, only the spring avalanches and land-slides break their continuity. There is an inside passage between the mountains from Queen Charlotte to Milbank Sound that gave us an afternoon and evening in the midst of fine scenery, but for another whole day we passed through the grandest of fiords on the British Columbia coast.
The sun rose at three o’clock on that rare summer morning, when the ship thrust her bow into the clear, mirror-like waters of the Finlayson Channel, and at four o’clock a dozen passengers were up in front watching the matchless panorama of mountain walls that slipped silently past us. The clear, soft light, the pure air, and the stillness of sky, and shore, and water, in the early morning, made it seem like the dawn of creation in some new paradise. The breath of the sea and the breath of the pine forest were blended in the air, and the silence and calm added to the inspiration of the surroundings. The eastern wall of the channel lay in pure shadow, the forest slopes were deep unbroken waves of green, with a narrow base-line of sandstone washed snowy white, and beneath that every tree and twig lay reflected in the still mirror of waters of a deeper, purer, and softer green than the emerald.
The marks of the spring avalanches were white scars on the face of the mountains, and the course of preceding landslides showed in the paler green of the ferns, bushes, and the dense growth of young trees that quickly cover these places. Cliffs of the color and boldness of the Yosemite walls shone in the sunlight on the opposite side, and wherever there were snowbanks on the summits, or lakes in the hollows and amphitheatres back of the mountain ridge, foaming white cataracts tumbled down the sheer walls into the green sea water. Eagles soared overhead in long, lazy sweeps, and hundreds of young ducks fluttered away from the ship’s bow, and dived at the sharp echoes of a rifle shot. In this Finlayson Channel the soundings give from 50 to 130 fathoms, and from the surface of these still, deep waters the first timbered slopes of the mountains rise nearly perpendicularly for 1,500 feet, and their snow-crowned summits reach 3,000 feet above their perfect reflections. From a width of two miles at the entrance, the pass narrows one half, and then by a turn around an island the ship enters Tolmie and Fraser channels, which repeat the same wonders in bolder forms, and on deeper waters. At the end of that last fiord, where submerged mountain peaks stand as islands, six diverging channels appear, and the intricacy of the inside passage up the coast is as marvellous now, as when Vancouver dropped his anchor in this Wright Sound, puzzled as to which way he should turn to reach the ocean. Finer even than the three preceding fiords is the arrowy reach of Grenville Channel, which is a narrow cleft in the mountain range, forty-five miles long, and with scarcely a curve to break the bold palisade of its walls. In the narrowest part it is not a quarter of a mile in width; and the forest walls, and bold granite cliffs, rising there to their greatest height, give back an echo many times before it is lost in long reverberations.
Emerging from Grenville Channel, the church and houses of Metlakatlah, the one model missionary settlement on the coast, and an Arcadian village of civilized and Christianized Indians, were seen shining in the afternoon sun. At that point the water is tinged a paler green by the turbid currents of the Skeena River, and up that river the newest El Dorado has lately been found. Miners have gone up in canoes, and fishermen have dropped their lines and joined them in the hunt for gold, which is found in nuggets from the size of a pea to solid chunks worth $20 and $60. “Jerry,” the first prospector, took out $600 in two days, and in the same week two miners panned out $680 in six hours. One nugget, taken from a crevice in a rock, was sent down to Victoria, and found to be pure gold and worth $26. Other consignments of treasure following, that quiet colonial town has been shaken by a gold fever that is sending all the adventurous spirits off to the Lorne Creek mines.
Before the sunset hour we crossed Dixon Entrance and the famous debatable line of 59° 40´, and the patriots who said the northern boundary of the United States should be “Fifty-nine Forty, or Fight,” are best remembered now, when it is seen that the Alaska possessions begin at that line. We were within the Alaska boundaries and standing on United States soil again at the fishing station of Tongass, on Wales Island. It is a wild and picturesque little place, tucked away in the folds of the hills and islands, and the ship rounded many points before it dropped anchor in front of two new wooden houses on a rocky shore that constituted Tongass. A cluster of bark huts and tents further down the beach was the home of the Indians who catch, salt, and barrel the salmon. There was one white man as host at the fish house, a fur-capped, sad-eyed mortal, who wistfully said that he had not been “below” in seven years, and entertained us with the sight of his one hundred and forty barrels of salmon, and the vats and scow filled with split and salted or freshly caught fish. He showed us a string of fine trout that set the amateur fishermen wild, and then gallantly offered to weigh the ladies on his new scales. Over in the group of Tongass Indians, sitting stolidly in a row before their houses, there was a “one-moon-old” baby that gave but a look at the staring white people, and then sent up one pitiful little barbaric yawp. A clumsy, flat-bottomed scow was rowed slowly out to the steamer, and while the salt, the barrel hoops, barrel staves, and groceries were unloaded to it from the ship, a ball was begun on deck. A merry young miner bound for the Chilkat country gave rollicking old tunes on his violin, and a Juneau miner called off figures that convulsed the dancers and kept the four sets flying on the after deck. “The winnowing sound of dancers’ feet” and the scrape of the fiddle brought a few Indian women out in canoes, and they paddled listlessly around the stern, talking in slow gutturals of the strange performances of the “Boston people,” as all United States citizens have been termed by them since Captain Gray and John Jacob Astor’s ships first came to the Northwest coast. At half-past ten o’clock daylight still lingered on the sky, and the Chicago man gravely read a page of a Lake Shore railroad time-table in fine print for a test, and then went solemnly to bed, six hundred miles away from the rest of the United States.
CHAPTER III.
CAPE FOX AND NAHA BAY.
From the Tongass fishery, which is some miles below the main village of the Tongass Indians and the deserted fort where United States troops were once stationed, the ship made its way by night to Cape Fox. At this point on the mainland shore, beyond Fort Tongass, the Kinneys, the great salmon packers of Astoria, have a cannery that is one of the model establishments up here. Two large buildings for the cannery, two houses, a store, and the scattered line of log houses, bark houses and tents of the Indian village, are all that one sees from the water. In the cannery most of the work is done by the Indians, but a few Chinamen perform the work which requires a certain amount of training and mechanical skill. The Indians cast the nets and bring in the shining silver fish with their deep moss-green backs and fierce mouths, and heap them in slippery piles in an outside shed overhanging the water. A Chinaman picks them up with a long hook, and, laying them in a row across a table, goes through a sleight-of-hand performance with a sharp knife, which in six minutes leaves twenty salmon shorn of their heads, tails, fins, and inwards. Experienced visitors to such places took out their watches and timed him, and in ten seconds a fish was put through his first rough process of trimming, and passed on to men who washed it, cleaned it more thoroughly, scraped off a few scales, and by a turn of revolving knives cut it in sections the length of a can. Indian women packed the tins, which were soldered, plunged into vats of boiling water, tested, resoldered, laquered, labelled, and packed in boxes in quick routine. There was the most perfect cleanliness about the cannery, and the salmon itself is only touched after the last washing by the fingers of the Indian women, who fill the cans with solid pieces of bright red flesh. In 1883 there were 3,784 cases of canned salmon shipped from this establishment as the result of the first season’s venture. In the following year, 1,156 cases were shipped by the July steamer, and the total for the season was about double that of the preceding year.
Owing to the good salmon season and the steady employment given them at the cannery, the Indians held their things so high that even the most insatiate and abandoned curio-buyers made no purchases, although there has been regret
