Youghiogheny River

“ The route thence to the Great Meadows or Fort Necessity was well chosen, though over a mountainous tract, conforming very nearly to the ground now occupied by the National Road, and keeping on the dividing ridge between the waters flowing into the Youghiogheny on the one hand and the Cheat River on the other. ”

“ The sun was setting behind the rim of the river basin, when we reached the broad mouth of the Youghiogheny (pr. Yock-i-o-gai'-ny) , which is implanted with a cluster of iron-mill towns, of which McKeesport is the center. So far as we could see down the Monongahela, the air was thick with the smoke of glowing chimneys, and the pulsating whang of steel-making plants and [pg 14] rolling-mills made the air tremble. ”

“ This extract from Washington's journal gives us the most complete information obtainable of a region of country concerning which it is difficult to secure even present-day information. The drift of the pioneer tide had been on north and south lines here; the first-comers into these mountains wandered up the Monongahela and Youghiogheny Rivers and their tributaries. Even as early as the Old French War a few bold companies of men had sifted into the dark valleys of the Cheat and Youghiogheny. ”

“ This Middle Section, therefore, extended from Cumberland, or the western extremity of the Eastern Section, to the mouth of Casselman's River in the Youghiogheny, the "Turkey Foot" of pioneer days. [16] Its length was seventy miles and one thousand and ten yards. The lockage was nineteen hundred and sixty-one feet and the summit was to be crossed by a tunnel four miles and eighty yards long, dug at eight hundred and fifty-six feet below the summit of the ridge. The Middle Section was divided into an eastern and a western portion. ”

“ Your gypsy craft should ride to a single anchor; free to swing to wind and tide in the rhythm of the river. It is of the essence of home life afloat to sit down to dinner heading up-stream, and to rise from table heading down-stream; to open a favourite book with a bit of shore-view in the casement beside you, and to close the chapter with the open river stretching from under your window, your half-drawn shade perhaps cutting the topsail from a distant schooner. ”

“ It is a really remarkable stream in making its debut without the slightest fuss, for it is large enough at its very birth to be called a small river. Its modesty is a great loss to Yorkshire, for if, instead of gathering strength in the hidden places in the limestone fells, it were to keep to more rational methods, it would flow to the edge of the Cover, and there precipitate itself in majestic fashion into a great pool below. ”

“ The Yukon is a mighty and a beautiful river, and its memory becomes more haunting and more compelling with the passage of time. From the slender blue stream of its source, it grows, in its twenty-three hundred miles of wandering to the sea, to a width of sixty miles at its mouth. In its great course it widens, narrows, and widens; cuts through the foot-hills of vast mountain systems, spreads over flats, makes many splendid sweeping curves, and slides into hundreds of narrow channels around spruce-covered islands. ”

“ Marin, who hurried on down the Allegheny building Forts Machault (Venango) at the junction of Rivière aux Bœufs and the Allegheny, and Duquesne at the junction of Allegheny and Monongahela, should have named the Youghiogheny “English Creek.” When once on the way, the time taken by the French and English to reach the key position of the West—Pittsburg—varied inversely as the length of the portages they had to traverse. ”

“ The Yukon basin is peculiar. Except for the big delta at the lower end and the Yukon Flats below Porcupine River there is no area of valley land in all its tremendous expanse from British Columbia to the Bering Sea. It is hills, hills—illimitable hills separated by a vast network of long gulches twisting and turning with the streams that drain them. Unless you know well a given locality you have nothing to guide you except the general direction of the main river itself and its nearest large confluent. ”

“ The Yukon River brings down from its course of two thousand miles and more many hundred tons of soil daily which it deposits along the coast, while the Kuskoquin River, second only to the Yukon in volume, is engaged in the same work about a hundred and fifty miles south of where the greater river empties into Norton Sound. These large water-ways carry, like the Mississippi, immense deposits to the sea, and the process has been going on night and day for no human being knows how long. ”

“ Thus, as Dawson has well pointed out, in coming up the stream the valley of the Big Salmon appears to be more nearly the continuation of the main valley below than that which still (and properly) continues to be designated the Lewes (Yukon) above; and this is still more markedly the case with the Hootalinqua (Teslin-too or Newberry River) at the confluence with the Thirty Mile. Even the valley of the Pelly at its junction with the Yukon, near Fort Selkirk, would perhapS to most persons suggest itself as the main channel of erosion. ”

“ In a canal-like stream of uniform width, which gives little chance for eddies or slack water—and the upper Yukon has many long stretches that answer to this description—every thing goes along smoothly enough until along toward evening, when the party wishes to go into camp while the river is tearing along at four or five miles an hour. ”

“ Below him, to the west, a small creek made a junction with the Yukon, its red water foaming over broken boulders, and leaping ten perpendicular feet to join the parent stream. He sauntered down towards it, the washing-pan clanking against the shovel as he walked.
Few men would have dug for gold along that creek; the surface had all the characteristics of unadulterated muck. He stuck the pick into it for the mere fun of hitting something. Though the sun shone warmly and rich the grass grew on either bank, the eternal ice was down under the surface. ”

“ Changed are the ardent dreams that filled the young man's heart when he wrote to his mother from this region that singing bullets "have truly a charming sound." Today, as he looks upon the flow of Youghiogheny, he sees it reaching out its finger tips to Potomac's tributaries. He perceives a similar movement all along the chain of the Alleghanies: on the west are the Great Lakes and the Ohio, and reaching out towards them from the east, waiting to be joined by portage road and canal, are the Hudson, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and the James. ”

“ A change, however, in the land, seems to commence near this place, and it assumes here very much the aspect of red clay, but in some parts the sandy soil predominating, and all lying very irregular, except immediately upon the streams.
I was impressed with the adaptation of the Jundiahi river, a small stream which runs near our inn, for the location of machinery of limited water-power; and when the railroad reaches this place a good mill or cotton ginning establishment would be likely to prove very advantageous on this river. ”

“ Bain, a long-headed Scotsman, pronounced dead against the St Michael's route. The idea of journeying 1800 miles up the Yukon, after the long and dangerous voyage of 2750 miles by ocean steamers across the Gulf of Alaska into Behring Sea, was absurd, he thought, especially as he averred that the river is only open for about three months, from July to October, and was then so full of bars, sandbanks, and shallows, snags and currents, that it is a most hazardous stream to navigate. ”

“ Mountains line the far horizon lines, but so far away that they frequently appear as clouds of bluish pearl piled along the sky; at other times snow-peaks are distinctly visible. Cottonwoods, birches, and spruce trees cover the islands so heavily that, from the lower deck of a steamer, one would believe that he was drifting down the single channel of a narrow river, instead of down one channel of a river twenty miles wide.
It is within the Arctic Circle that the Yukon makes its sweeping bend from its northwest course to the southwest, and here it is entered by the Porcupine ”

“ More than six million feet of lumber demands a large area, and the question of getting it into the yards was a serious one.
The Higginson yards occupied a peninsula, formed on the inland side by the Wauchung River, on the other side by the harbour. This harbour was in reality a small lake, such as one will find duplicated every little way for a hundred and fifty miles on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan. The prevailing west winds have thrown up a line of high dunes along this shore, forming a natural dam at the mouth of each of the many small rivers. ”

“ At high water the Hoogley is nearly a mile broad in front of the town, and is very pleasant to look upon. Fine ships and steamers of all nations and countries lie here within sight and sound; picturesque-looking craft of every kind are seen gliding swiftly hither and thither. But at low water the scene suddenly changes; the river becomes a shrunken and muddy ghost of itself, with filthy borders, whence myriad floating particles of miasma are wafted on the air to the poor humanity who are doomed to live and labor in its vicinity. ”

“ So summer waited for open water, and the tardy Yukon took to stretching of days and cracking its stiff joints. Now an air-hole ate into the ice, and ate and ate; or a fissure formed, and grew, and failed to freeze again. Then the ice ripped from the shore and uprose bodily a yard. But still the river was loth to loose its grip. It was a slow travail, and man, used to nursing nature with pigmy skill, able to burst waterspouts and harness waterfalls, could avail nothing against the billions of frigid tons which refused to run down the hill to Bering Sea. ”

“ Of course Weyanoke fronted upon the James, but our idea was to make a sort of back-door landing by running up this stream and in behind the plantation. There was no sheltering cove to lie in on the river front; and besides, to make the visit at the regular pier was so hopelessly commonplace. Any of the ordinary palace yachts could do the thing that way. But it took a gypsy craft like Gadabout to wriggle up the little back-country creek and to land among the chickens and the geese and—bulls perhaps; but then all explorers must take chances. ”

“ On the 5th of July we again got under way on our raft. For the first few miles, eight or ten, the river is very swift and occasionally breaks into light rapids, although I believe a powerful light-draft river steamer, such as are used on the shallow western rivers, could easily surmount all the bad places we saw below the cascades of [Pg 177] the great rapids. If I am right in my conjectures upon this point, the Yukon River is navigable for 1866 miles from the Aphoon or northernmost mouth of its delta. ”

“ The natives of the upper river knew nothing about the lower river. It is an easy matter to float down the Yukon for a thousand miles in a birch-bark canoe, but an exceedingly difficult matter to come up again. It was not until the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous fur-trading expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana River the agents of the Russian Fur Company, come up from Nulato on the same quest, that the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered ”

“ The magnitude of the Yukon—one of the twelve longest rivers in the world—will be realized by the fact that it is still a matter of doubt among different writers which of the two rivers named is the largest with respect to the volume of their currents, though Ivan Petroff, in his report as agent of the Secretary of the Interior, speaks thus confidently upon the subject: “The people of the United States will not be quick to take the idea that the volume of water in an Alaskan river is greater than that discharged by their own Mississippi ”

“ She possesses many natural advantages of position. She is not in a slough, like Chicago, being built on a gravelly plain about one hundred feet above the lake. Nor is she subject to inundation, like Cincinnati, most of her business sites and residences being far above the water. The Cuyahoga River sometimes, however, does damage to the manufacturing establishments along its shores. In February, 1883, a freshet occurred, which raised the river ten feet above its ordinary level, and flooded all its valley. Enormous quantities of lumber and shingles were washed from the lumber yards. ”

“ Twice the size of the Hudson at Poughkeepsie, confined between high banks, 119it rushes its milky-looking flood onwards to the ocean. Indeed, this is a terrible stream.
The banks of the Hvitá, for several miles, are from 100 to 150 feet high, and perpendicular. What an explosion there must have been when that crack burst in the lava, and formed the chasm where the river flows! The stream, too, has undoubtedly worn it much deeper than it was at first. And how swift the river runs! Where will streams be swift, if not on mountainous islands? ”

“ This lake is a very stormy one, and travelers often have to wait in camp for several days on its shores until calmer weather permits them to go on. This whole river valley is a great trough sucking inland the prevailing southerly summer winds, and navigation on all the lakes is likely to be rough for small boats.
[57]
The river below Lake Labarge is crooked, and at first rapid—six miles or more an hour, and interrupted by boulders; but it is believed that a stern wheel steamer of proper power could ascend at all times. The banks are earthen, but little worn, as floods do not seem to occur. ”