Here we were put off, and here we would, two days later, take the bi-weekly steamer for Atlin, on Atlin Lake, where we now are, and here the railway leaves the lakes and takes a short cut across a low divide to White Horse Rapids, where begins the steamboat navigation on the Yukon River.
Caribou is a collection of cabins and tents, and is the first settlement where, they say, will some day be a city.
It was on Lake Bennett that the weary pilgrims used to camp to build their boats and rafts and begin their long water journey of five hundred miles to Dawson and the golden Klondike.
Our hotel we found surprisingly neat and clean; owned and kept by a famous Indian, “Dawson Charlie,” who was one of the discoverers of the gold of Bonanza Creek in the Klondike, and who had the sense to himself stake out several claims, the gold from which has made him now a magnate worth several hundred thousand dollars, and who lives and entertains like a white man. He housed us in a neat, comfortable room, iron bedstead, wire mattress, carpeted floor. He fed us at fifty cents a meal as well, as abundantly as in West Virginia, and only his Indian daughter, who waited on us, dressed neatly and fashionably, with big diamonds in her ears, made us realize that we were not in our own land. Here we have spent two delightful days. The air is as wonderfully clear as on the table-lands of Mexico, full of ozone, but cold in the shadow even in midday, though the sun is warm.
On the ship we met a delightful naturalist, Mr. Baldwin, of New Haven, artist of the U. S. Fish Commission, and who came with us to try and catch some grayling, in order to make drawings for the Commission, and for two days we have been out in the woods, he with my rod, H – with your butterfly net, and I with my gun. He caught his grayling, several of them. I shot several mallard ducks, but H – caught no butterflies, nor saw one. It was too late in the season for that.
On the way up we fell in with a very intelligent Swede, whose partner in the Klondike is a Dane, and who, when he learned H – ’s nationality, and she had talked Danish with him, was all courtesy and friendliness. He had come in with the “mushers” (corruption of the French marche), as the early foot-farers are called, and had succeeded. When we get to Dawson he will welcome us.
At Caribou we also made acquaintance with the Canadian customs officer, Mr. John Turnure, a fine type of Canadian official, big, bluff, yet courteous, who at first was going to tax all my cartridges and kodak films, notwithstanding I had passed the customs at Winnipeg and had come from Vancouver direct, but who, upon explanation, relented, and afterward called on us and invited H – , Mr. B – and myself to call on his wife and family at his log cabin mansion near the station, which we did, and were served cake and coffee from dainty china, and sat on a divan covered with priceless furs, near a good piano. His daughters were now at home from school on vacation, and his wife, a cultured woman, was next day going with them on a shopping visit to Dawson, the New York or Cincinnati of this far north.
The Yukon territory is governed from Ottawa by appointees, and policed by the “Northwest Mounted Police,” a fine body of men – including many young Englishmen of good family – in cowboy hats and red coats. While here in Atlin, we are just over the line in the Province of British Columbia, a state with its own laws and civil magistrates.
We left Caribou on a little steamer with a big sternwheel – all of which, timber and machinery, had been carried from Skagway over the White Pass on horses’ backs, and sledges, dragged by men and dogs, and put together on Lake Bennett, before the railway was even thought of. How in the name of heaven a ten-ton boiler, and the engines and big timbers, were got over that foot-path trail, is even yet a standing marvel – the boat is as big as the steamer “Calvert” on the Kanawha River – but it was done, and to-day I have talked with the man who bossed and directed the job, Captain Irving, now a gold hunter of Atlin and a member of the British Columbia Parliament.
We first came slowly through a well-marked track on a little lake, Lake Marsh, for about ten miles, then through a short river, and then out into Lake Taggish, a sheet of water larger than Lake Bennett, and one arm of which is famous for its desperate winds from the glaciers – the “hurricane” arm – another arm of which heads toward the White Horse Rapids, and a third arm, “The Taku Arm,” which extends southerly toward Lake Atlin, a lake more than one hundred miles in length, which empties into it through a short, swift, turbulent river. This southerly portion of the lake is eight or ten miles wide and we were all night steaming on it to Taku, where we landed this morning – a distance of forty or fifty miles – when, taking a little, short, two-mile railway, we were pulled over to Atlin Lake, a yet bigger body of water. There embarking on another steamboat, we were ferried ten miles across to Atlin, a town with a courthouse, several churches, a little hospital, a newspaper, a bank, a dozen hotels, a multitude of restaurants, bicycles, numerous livery stables, and which is the center of a gold-mining region from which already several millions of dollars have been taken since the first pay dirt was found in 1898. We dined at a restaurant where a colored French cook presides, and you may have any delicacy New York could afford. At the bars men preside with diamonds the size of hickory nuts in their shirts, drinks are twenty-five cents each and cigars the same. The hotels are full of keen-faced men; well-gowned and refined women are to be seen on the streets; the baby carriages are pulled by great big dogs, and even the water carts and delivery wagons are hauled by teams of eight and ten dogs – Newfoundland or wolfish Esquimaux.
“The Camp,” or city, is now in the midst of a boom, and this morning we were shown several buckets of gold nuggets just brought in last night from a recent “clean up.”
When in the midst of Lake Taggish, yesterday afternoon, we were hailed by a naphtha launch of the Mounted Police, and, on our lying to, three gentlemen climbed in. One face seemed in some way familiar to me, and when I presently heard some one call him Mr. Sutton I recognized one of my old Port Hope schoolmates, who had also been at Cornell, and who had been an especial friend. He was as well pleased as I at the meeting, and is now here with me. He was a brilliant scholar, and is now British Columbia’s most eminent geologist and mining expert. We have been out together to-day, and to have his expert opinion here on what I see is invaluable. We have also met here a Mr. and Mrs. R – , of Philadelphia, to whom I had a letter, a promoter of the largest hydraulic company here, and H – has been off with Mrs. R – to-day and panned her first chunks of real, true, genuine gold, of which performance she is not a little proud. The whole country seems to be more or less full of gold; it is in the gravels and sands everywhere, and a number of very large gold-getting enterprises are under way, mostly hydraulic placer mining, but also some fine quartz veins carrying free gold are being opened up, and I have been off with Sutton all the afternoon looking at one.
We have had three days of outing; at least, I have. Saturday morning I made an early start with Sutton and three other men for a visit to some hydraulic mining operations up on Pine Creek, and to the great dredge now being built. At one of these, an operation called “The Sunrise Gold Co.,” I found in charge a Mr. Ruffner, of Cincinnati, a cousin to the Kanawha family, grandson of one of the original Ruffner brothers, who, hating slavery, had freed his slaves and removed to free soil in Ohio. A bright young fellow, managing a large operation. Then we went on further to Gold Run, where an enormous dredge is being built. An experiment in this country, about the final success of which there is yet much question. Here I dined in a tent, which is warmer, they say, than any timber building, even when the temperature is 50 degrees below zero. The valley is a broad, open one, all of glacial formation. It is very level, with Pine Creek cutting deeply between high gravel banks. A black top soil of a foot or two, eight or ten feet of grey gravel, then as much more yellowish sandy gravel, and often a foot or two of black sand at the bottom, lying upon a bed of serpentine rock; and it is in this lowest ten feet of yellow gravel and black sand that the free gold is found, nuggets of a pound or two down to minute gold dust, a red gold of about 22 to 23 carats in combination with copper or silver. Through this gravel are also immense stones and boulders, and these are the gold diggers’ particular bete noir. Most of the digging is done by getting out this gravel, freeing it of the boulders and washing it. Pine Creek is the overflow of Surprise Lake, a sheet of water twenty miles long and one-half to one mile wide; and although a considerable stream, yet its waters are so much needed in these gold-washing operations that a constant water-war among the diggers and digging