Travels in Alaska | Page 9

its being back a little way over
the brow of the hill; but the light in the clouds made a great show, a
portentous sign in the stormy heavens unlike anything ever before seen
or heard of in Wrangell. Some wakeful Indians, happening to see it
about midnight, in great alarm aroused the Collector of Customs and
begged him to go to the missionaries and get them to pray away the
frightful omen, and inquired anxiously whether white men had ever
seen anything like that sky-fire, which instead of being quenched by the
rain was burning brighter and brighter. The Collector said he had heard
of such strange fires, and this one he thought might perhaps be what the
white man called a "volcano, or an ignis fatuus." When Mr. Young was
called from his bed to pray, he, too, confoundedly astonished and at a
loss for any sort of explanation, confessed that he had never seen
anything like it in the sky or anywhere else in such cold wet weather,
but that it was probably some sort of spontaneous combustion "that the
white man called St. Elmo's fire, or Will-of-the-wisp." These
explanations, though not convincingly clear, perhaps served to veil
their own astonishment and in some measure to diminish the
superstitious fears of the natives; but from what I heard, the few whites
who happened to see the strange light wondered about as wildly as the
Indians.
I have enjoyed thousands of camp-fires in all sorts of weather and
places, warm-hearted, short-flamed, friendly little beauties glowing in
the dark on open spots in high Sierra gardens, daisies and lilies circled
about them, gazing like enchanted children; and large fires in silver fir
forests, with spires of flame towering like the trees about them, and
sending up multitudes of starry sparks to enrich the sky; and still

greater fires on the mountains in winter, changing camp climate to
summer, and making the frosty snow look like beds of white flowers,
and oftentimes mingling their swarms of swift-flying sparks with
falling snow-crystals when the clouds were in bloom. But this Wrangell
camp-fire, my first in Alaska, I shall always remember for its
triumphant storm-defying grandeur, and the wondrous beauty of the
psalm-singing, lichen-painted trees which it brought to light.
Chapter III
Wrangell Island and Alaska Summers
Wrangell Island is about fourteen miles long, separated from the
mainland by a narrow channel or fiord, and trending in the direction of
the flow of the ancient ice-sheet. Like all its neighbors, it is densely
forested down to the water's edge with trees that never seem to have
suffered from thirst or fire or the axe of the lumberman in all their long
century lives. Beneath soft, shady clouds, with abundance of rain, they
flourish in wonderful strength and beauty to a good old age, while the
many warm days, half cloudy, half clear, and the little groups of pure
sun-days enable them to ripen their cones and send myriads of seeds
flying every autumn to insure the permanence of the forests and feed
the multitude of animals.
The Wrangell village was a rough place. No mining hamlet in the
placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw,
approached it in picturesque, devil-may-care abandon. It was a lawless
draggle of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines, wrangling
around the boggy shore of the island for a mile or so in the general
form of the letter S, without the slightest subordination to the points of
the compass or to building laws of any kind. Stumps and logs, like
precious monuments, adorned its two streets, each stump and log, on
account of the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted with grass and
bushes, but muddy on the sides below the limit of the bog-line. The
ground in general was an oozy, mossy bog on a foundation of jagged
rocks, full of concealed pit-holes. These picturesque rock, bog, and
stump obstructions, however, were not so very much in the way, for

there were no wagons or carriages there. There was not a horse on the
island. The domestic animals were represented by chickens, a lonely
cow, a few sheep, and hogs of a breed well calculated to deepen and
complicate the mud of the streets.
Most of the permanent residents of Wrangell were engaged in trade.
Some little trade was carried on in fish and furs, but most of the
quickening business of the place was derived from the Cassiar
gold-mines, some two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles inland,
by way of the Stickeen River and Dease Lake. Two stern-wheel
steamers plied on the river between Wrangell and Telegraph Creek at
the head of navigation, a hundred and fifty miles from Wrangell,
carrying freight and passengers and connecting with pack-trains for the