Klondyke Nuggets | Page 3

a great inland
highway, which will make it possible for the explorer to penetrate the
mysterious fastnesses of that still unknown region. The Yukon has its
source in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and the Coast
Range Mountains in southeastern Alaska, about 125 miles from the city
of Juneau, which is the present metropolis of Alaska. But it is only
known as the Yukon River at the point where the Pelly River, the
branch that heads in British Columbia, meets with the Lewes River,
which heads in southeastern Alaska. This point of confluence is at Fort
Selkirk, in the Northwest Territory, about 125 miles south-east of the
Klondyke. The Yukon proper is 2,044 miles in length. From Fort
Selkirk it flows north-west 400 miles, just touching the Arctic circle;
thence southward for a distance of 1,600 miles, where it empties into
Behring Sea. It drains more than 600,000 square miles of territory, and
discharges one-third more water into Behring Sea than does the
Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. At its mouth it is sixty miles wide.
About 1,500 miles inland it widens out from one to ten miles. A
thousand islands send the channel in as many different directions. Only
natives who are thoroughly familiar with the river are entrusted with
the piloting of boats up the stream during the season of low water. Even
at the season of high water it is still so shallow as not to be navigable
anywhere by seagoing vessels, but only by flat-bottomed boats with a
carrying capacity of four to five hundred tons. The draft of steamers on
the Yukon should not exceed three and a half feet.
"The Yukon district, which is within the jurisdiction of the Canadian
Government and in which the bulk of the gold has been found, has a
total area, approximately, of 192,000 square miles, of which 150,768
square miles are included in the watershed of the Yukon. Illustrating
this, so that it may appeal with definiteness to the reader, it may be said

that this territory is greater by 71,100 square miles than the area of
Great Britain, and is nearly three times that of all the New England
States combined.
"A further fact must be borne in mind. The Yukon River is absolutely
closed to navigation during the winter months. In the winter the
frost-king asserts his dominion and locks up all approaches with
impenetrable ice, and the summer is of the briefest. It endures only for
twelve to fourteen weeks, from about the first of June to the middle of
September. Then an unending panorama of extraordinary
picturesqueness is unfolded to the voyager. The banks are fringed with
flowers, carpeted with the all-pervading moss or tundra. Birds
countless in numbers and of infinite variety in plumage, sing out a
welcome from every treetop. Pitch your tent where you will in
midsummer, a bed of roses, a clump of poppies and a bunch of
bluebells will adorn your camping. But high above this paradise of
almost tropical exuberance giant glaciers sleep in the summit of the
mountain wall, which rises up from a bed of roses. By September
everything is changed. The bed of roses has disappeared before the icy
breath of the winter king, which sends the thermometer down
sometimes to seventy degrees below freezing point. The birds fly to the
southland and the bear to his sleeping chamber in the mountains. Every
stream becomes a sheet of ice, mountain and valley alike are covered
with snow till the following May.
"That part of the basin of the Yukon in which gold in greater or less
quantities has actually been found lies partly in Alaska and partly in
British territory. It covers an area of some 50,000 square miles. But so
far the infinitely richest spot lies some one hundred miles east of the
American boundary, in the region drained by the Klondyke and its
tributaries. This is some three hundred miles by river from Circle City.
"We have described some of the beauties of the Yukon basin in the
summer season, but this radiant picture has its obverse side.
"Horseflies, gnats and mosquitoes add to the joys of living throughout
the entire length of the Yukon valley. The horsefly is larger and more
poignantly assertive than the insect which we know by that name. In

dressing or undressing, it has a pleasant habit of detecting any bare spot
in the body and biting out a piece of flesh, leaving a wound which a
few days later looks like an incipient boil. Schwatka reports that one of
his party, so bitten was completely disabled for a week. 'At the moment
of infliction.' he adds, 'it was hard to believe that one was not disabled
for life.'
"The mosquitoes according to the same authority are equally