Yukon River

“ The Yukon division, containing 176,715 square [Pg 415] miles, and comprising the valley of the Yukon River as far as it lies within our boundaries and its tributaries from the north and south. This division is bounded by the Arctic division in the north, the one hundred forty-first meridian in the east, and Behring Sea in the west. The southern boundary lies along a line indicating the watershed between the Yukon and the Kuskokvim, Sushetno, and Copper Rivers, and runs from the above-mentioned meridian in the east to the coast of Behring Sea, in the vicinity of Hazen Bay, in the west. ”

“ Is it not a little singular that the lonely and monotonous course of the Yukon River, reaching as it does to the very limits of the pathless interior of a vast, unexplored region on either side, should be that one section of all others in Alaska the best known to us? ”

“ The graceful spruce will clothe her ravaged banks once more, and even the salmon exterminated by the canneries will replenish her waters in the fulness of time. The stern wheeler will pass away with the exhaustion of the mines, or at least become a rarity. The Arctic calm will rest once more upon her hillsides. But the Men of the Yukon trained to her ways by the experience of generations, wise in her capabilities, contented with her bounty, the true children of the river and its valley, these she shall know no more. ”

“ The vast incline of ancient glacier, rolling backwards and upwards in discolored waves from the precipitate opposite bank of Snake River. The woods, so darkly overpowering as the year progressed towards its old age. The shaking tundra, treacherous and hideous with rank growths of the summer. The river facets of broken crags awaiting the cloak of winter to conceal their crude nakedness. Then the trail, so slight, so faint. The work of sleds and moccasined feet through centuries of native traffic, with the occasional variation of the hard shod feet of the white adventurer. ”

“ In places the Yukon is bordered by low hills, behind which are mountains covered with grass, and, still farther on, peaks clad in their silvery garments of perpetual snow. At one place far back from the river, rising out of a park of the greenest of green, are rocky formations that look like castles, as clean cut and symmetrical as any to be seen on the banks of the Rhine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not only is the Yukon equally wooded on its banks with the average rivers of the world, but this fringe of fallen timber is much greater in quantity and more formidable in aspect than any found in the temperate zones. ”

“ It is 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. ”

“ Below Fort Selkirk, the Yukon River is from five to six hundred yards broad, and maintains this width down to White River, a distance of ninety-six miles. Islands are numerous, so much so that there are very few parts of the river where there are not one or more in sight. Many of them are of considerable size, and nearly all are well timbered. Bars are also numerous, but almost all are composed of gravel, so that navigators will not have to complain of shifting sand bars. The current as a general thing, is not so rapid as in the upper part of the river, averaging about four miles per hour. ”

“ The Yukon is the largest river that flows from the American continent into the Pacific ocean. Rising as the Pelly in the Rocky Mountains on the northern frontier of British Columbia, it maintains a westerly direction for several hundred miles. ”

“ These are by no means all the dangers that confronted the first Yukon stampeders—there are other troublesome waters below—for instance, Rink Rapids, where the river boils and bubbles like a kettle over an open fire, and Five Fingers, so-called by reason of a row of knobby, knuckled pinnacles that reach up like the stiff digits of a drowning hand and split the stream into divergent channels—but those three, Miles Canon, the Squaw, and White Horse, were the worst and together they constituted a menace that tried the courage of the bravest men. ”

“ The Yukon is one of the great drainage systems of the world. The Yukon itself has a length of more than 2000 m. and bisects the country from E. to W. Behind the bluffs that form in large part its immediate border its basin is a rolling country, at times sinking into great dead levels like the Yukon flats between Circle City and the Lower Ramparts, some 30,000 sq. m. in area. Of the two great affluents of the Yukon, the Tanana is for the most part unnavigable, while the Koyukuk is navigable for more than 450 m. by river steamers, and for more than 500 m. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The "Yukon Flats" flank the river for about 200 m. and are from 40 to 100 m. wide. Here the stream varies in width from 10 to nearly 20 m., and involves a confused network of constantly changing channels. Here, too, the river makes its great bend to the S.W., and its channels are constantly changing. The "Flats" are monotonous areas of sand bars and low islands, thickly wooded with spruce. The principal tributaries here are the Porcupine river (an important affluent, which enters the main stream at the great bend about 3 m. N. of the Arctic Circle) ”

“ The amount of water discharged by this stream is considerable; but there is no prospect of navigation, it being so swift and broken by small rapids.
"From Forty Mile River to the boundary the Yukon preserves the same general character as between Fort Reliance and Forty Mile, the greatest width being about half a mile and the least about a quarter.
"Fifteen miles below Forty Mile River a large mass of rock stands on the east bank. This was named by Schwatka 'Roquette Rock,' but is known to the traders as Old Woman Rock; a similar mass, on the west side of the river, being known as Old Man Rock. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 errors in dead reckoning of Mr. Homan, my topographer, in running from Pyramid Harbor in Chilkat Inlet to Fort Yukon, both carefully determined by astronomical observations and over a thousand miles apart, was less than one per cent., a fact which proves [Pg 151] that rafting as a means of surveying may be ranked with any method that requires walking or riding, and far exceeds any method in use by explorers ascending a stream, as witness any map of the Yukon River that attempts to show the position of Fort Yukon, before it was astronomically determined by Captain Raymond. ”

“ The confluence here of the Lewes and Pelly rivers forms the Yukon, which thenceforth pursues an uninterrupted course of 1,650 miles to Behring Sea. The country about the confluence is low, with extensive terrace flats running back to the bases of rounded hills and ridges. The Yukon below the junction averages about one-quarter of a mile in width, and has an average depth of about 10 feet, with a surface velocity of 43⁄4 miles an hour. A good many gravel bars occur, but no shifting sand. The general course nearly to White River, 96 miles, is a little north of west, and many islands are seen ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Provided, that in respect to that part of the line, between the Liard River and the southernmost source of the Peel River, the summit to be followed is the water­shed summit separating streams entering the Liard River below Black River, or flowing directly into the Mackenzie further north, from streams flowing westward either to the Yukon or to upper branches of the Liard River. ”

“ Stupendous mountains reach to three and nearly four miles in height, loftier than any others in the United States or its possessions. The Yukon River is 2,300 miles in length and its nearest rival, 1,000 miles. The biggest glaciers in North America are here, which make those of Europe look like mere pygmies, and volcanoes still in eruption may be viewed from a safe point. The scenery produced by the green rock-bound fiords with the snowy peaks beyond is truly magnificent. ”

“ Michael’s is situated on an island which constitutes a military reservation of the United States. Russia, in 1833, established a trading post there, and one of the curiosities of the place is the old Russian block house, a relic of primitive ideas in warfare. The town is the point of departure for the Yukon River steamers, and the aeroplane and the other luggage was taken off here to be placed on the Seattle steamer, which was to take them over to the Seward Peninsula, the other side of Norton Sound. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Large and dense timber prevails, and game is abundant.
Below the mouth of the Tat-on-duc several small streams enter, of which the Kandik on the north and the Kolto or Charley's River—at the mouth of which there used to be the home of an old Indian notability named Charley—are most important. About 160 miles from the boundary the Yukon flats are reached, and the center of another important mining district—that of Birch Creek and the Upper Tenana—at Circle City, the usual terminus of the trip up the Lower Yukon from St. Michael. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The traveler, tortured by mosquitoes in summer, blinded, confused and disturbed by whirling 'purgas,' snow and sleet in winter, finding the coast rendered almost inaccessible by the vast system of shoaling which the current of the great Yukon has effected, passes to the interior, whose superficial area comprises nearly five-sixths of the landed surface of the Territory. ”