Travels in Alaska | Page 5

A
specimen that I measured near Olympia was about three hundred feet in
height and twelve feet in diameter four feet above the ground. It is a
widely distributed tree, extending northward through British Columbia,
southward through Oregon and California, and eastward to the Rocky
Mountains. The timber is used for shipbuilding, spars, piles, and the
framework of houses, bridges, etc. In the California lumber markets it
is known as "Oregon pine." In Utah, where it is common on the
Wahsatch Mountains, it is called "red pine." In California, on the
western slope of the Sierra Nevada, it forms, in company with the
yellow pine, sugar pine, and incense cedar, a pretty well-defined belt at
a height of from three to six thousand feet above the sea; but it is only
in Oregon and Washington, especially in this Puget Sound region, that
it reaches its very grandest development,--tall, straight, and strong,
growing down close to tidewater.
All the towns of the Sound had a hopeful, thrifty aspect. Port Townsend,
picturesquely located on a grassy bluff, was the port of clearance for
vessels sailing to foreign parts. Seattle was famed for its coal-mines,
and claimed to be the coming town of the North Pacific Coast. So also
did its rival, Tacoma, which had been selected as the terminus of the
much-talked-of Northern Pacific Railway. Several coal-veins of
astonishing thickness were discovered the winter before on the Carbon
River, to the east of Tacoma, one of them said to be no less than
twenty-one feet, another twenty feet, another fourteen, with many
smaller ones, the aggregate thickness of all the veins being upwards of
a hundred feet. Large deposits of magnetic iron ore and brown hematite,
together with limestone, had been discovered in advantageous
proximity to the coal, making a bright outlook for the Sound region in
general in connection with its railroad hopes, its unrivaled timber

resources, and its far-reaching geographical relations.
After spending a few weeks in the Puget Sound with a friend from San
Francisco, we engaged passage on the little mail steamer California, at
Portland, Oregon, for Alaska. The sail down the broad lower reaches of
the Columbia and across its foamy bar, around Cape Flattery, and up
the Juan de Fuca Strait, was delightful; and after calling again at
Victoria and Port Townsend we got fairly off for icy Alaska.
Chapter II
Alexander Archipelago and the Home I found in Alaska
To the lover of pure wildness Alaska is one of the most wonderful
countries in the world. No excursion that I know of may be made into
any other American wilderness where so marvelous an abundance of
noble, newborn scenery is so charmingly brought to view as on the trip
through the Alexander Archipelago to Fort Wrangell and Sitka. Gazing
from the deck of the steamer, one is borne smoothly over calm blue
waters, through the midst of countless forest-clad islands. The ordinary
discomforts of a sea voyage are not felt, for nearly all the whole long
way is on inland waters that are about as waveless as rivers and lakes.
So numerous are the islands that they seem to have been sown
broadcast; long tapering vistas between the largest of them open in
every direction.
Day after day in the fine weather we enjoyed, we seemed to float in
true fairyland, each succeeding view seeming more and more beautiful,
the one we chanced to have before us the most surprisingly beautiful of
all. Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly
beyond description. To sketch picturesque bits, definitely bounded, is
comparatively easy--a lake in the woods, a glacier meadow, or a
cascade in its dell; or even a grand master view of mountains beheld
from some commanding outlook after climbing from height to height
above the forests. These may be attempted, and more or less telling
pictures made of them; but in these coast landscapes there is such
indefinite, on-leading expansiveness, such a multitude of features

without apparent redundance, their lines graduating delicately into one
another in endless succession, while the whole is so fine, so tender, so
ethereal, that all pen-work seems hopelessly unavailing. Tracing
shining ways through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls,
islands and mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely we
must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the
blessed.
Some idea of the wealth of this scenery may be gained from the fact
that the coast-line of Alaska is about twenty-six thousand miles long,
more than twice as long as all the rest of the United States. The islands
of the Alexander Archipelago, with the straits, channels, canals, sounds,
passages, and fiords, form an intricate web of land and water
embroidery sixty or seventy miles wide, fringing the lofty