Yukon

“ This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive; That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive. Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, This is the Will of the Yukon, — Lo, how she makes it plain!
The Parson's Son This is the song of the parson's son, as he squats in his shack alone, On the wild, weird nights, when the Northern Lights shoot up from the frozen zone, And it's sixty below, and couched in the snow the hungry huskies moan: "I'm one of the Arctic brotherhood, I'm an old-time pioneer. ”

“ Far westward the dying sun was painting the lofty snow-capped mountains, Northward the borrowed beams were shimering on the polar ice-bergs, in the Arctic Sea, Eastward were the last broken prongs of the defiant mountains known to the world as the rockies; and southward in all its modest beauty lay the mammoth valley of earths greatest river the Yukon. ”

“ The greatness of the Yukon is only surpassed by the greatness of its liars.
Innocence is a rose bud with a worm outside waiting to gnaw a hole in it.
A blood-sucker on a boy's toe looks bigger to him than a sea-serpent to a man. ”

“ Four days after this the hideous Yukon flats were reached, a vast desert of swamp and sand dunes, through which the great river diffuses itself, like a sky-rocket, into hundreds of lesser streams, lakes, and aqueous blind alleys, which severely taxed the skill and patience of our skipper. Here the outlook was even more depressing than on the dreary Lena. Before reaching Circle City the Yukon attains its most northerly point and then descends in a south-easterly direction for the remainder of its course. ”

“ Floored with ice or flowing yellow in the sun, she was her people's highway. In death their elevated tombs were placed where might be had the widest view of Yukon water.
The Men of the Yukon had, like other men, their careers, affections, tragedies and triumphs. The valley whose rim enclosed their world, since they knew none other, was as wide for them as our world is for us. It is certain that for their world they had worked out problems which we are still facing with puzzled trepidation in ours. No man went hungry in a Yukon village. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has a splendid site on a level plateau; and all the springlike greenness, the cleanliness and order, the luxuriant vegetation, of Dawson, are outdone here. One walks in a maze of delight along streets of tropic, instead of arctic, bloom. The log houses are set far back from the streets, and the deep dooryards are seas of tremulous color, through which neat paths lead to flower-roofed homes. Cleanliness, color, and perfume are everywhere delights, but on the lonely Yukon their unexpectedness is enchanting. ”

“ There are less than sixteen hundred Indians living over the entire Yukon region—a fact which speaks eloquently for an exceeding scantiness of the population of that vast landed expanse of this interior of the Alaskan mainland—a great arctic moor north of the Kvichpak, which is a mere surface of slightly thawed swale, swampy tundra, lakes and pools, sloughs and sluggish rivers, in the summer solstice, while the wildest storms of frigid winds, laden with snow and sleet, career in unchecked fury over them during winter. ”

“ A haunting silence prevails in the land beyond the barrier of the Yukon watershed. It is a world apart, beyond, and the other land, the land where the battle of civilization still fluctuates, still sways under the violent passions of men, remains outside.
Its fascination is beyond all explanation. Yet it is as great as its conditions are merciless. Murray McTavish had sought the explanation, and found it in the fact that it was a land in which man could make his own laws and break them at his pleasure. ”

“ The Yukon was growling and straining at its fetters. Long detours became necessary, for the trail had begun to fall through into the swift current beneath, while the ice, in constant unrest, was thundering apart in great gaping fissures. Through these and through countless airholes, the water began to sweep across the surface of the ice, and by the time he pulled into a woodchopper's cabin on the point of an island, the dogs were being rushed off their feet and were swimming more often than not. ”

“ CHAPTER III KATRINE'S NEIGHBOURS
Good Luck Row was a little row of small, insignificant cabins towards the back of the city, and at right angles to the direction of the main street. Dawson faces the Yukon, and its main thoroughfare lies parallel with the river. In the summer, when the Yukon and the Klondike, that joins it just above, are free, the waters of the two rivers united come rolling by in jubilant majesty, tossing loose blocks of ice, the remnants of their winter chains, on their swelling tide. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Michaels, the one lonely trading-station of that bleak northern coast, the mighty Yukon pours forth its turbid flood, discoloring the waters of Bering Sea for one hundred miles off shore. In point of size, as measured by length, the Yukon ranks seventeenth among the rivers of the world and fifth among those of the United States, but its volume of water is computed to be equal to that of the Mississippi, while, like the Father of Waters, it is constantly eating away its own banks and tearing them down, acres at a time, along its entire length. ”

“ No one should visit Dawson without climbing, on a clear day, to the summit of the hill behind the town, which is called "the Dome." The view of the surrounding country from this point is magnificent. The course of the winding, widening Yukon may be traced for countless miles; the little creeks pour their tawny floods down into the Klondike before the longing eyes of the beholder; and faraway on the horizon faintly shine the snow-peaks that beautify almost every portion of the northern land. ”

“ On the opposite side they strike the head-waters of the Yukon, which they follow through a series of six lakes, sledging over their still ice-bound waters, and rafting down their connecting links, in which are seething rapids, dark gorges, and roaring cañons, around which all goods must be carried on men's backs. ”

“ The scream of their whistles and puffing of these little trading-steamers as they slowly drag such tows against a rapid current, is the only enlivenment which the immense lonely solitudes of the Yukon are subjected to by our people. That area of watery waste is so wide and long, and the boats are so small and few in number, that even this innovation must be watched for every year with a hawk’s eye, or it will pass unobserved. ”

“ 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? ”

“ To steal a valley is to undermine it gradually from the other side, until the water in the first valley turns and flows the other way. But the Yukon has stolen nothing from the Skagway, and on second thought it deserves no credit for its reticence.
It looks cold to the north of the White Pass, even in mid-summer. Down the long rock-ridges between the lakes goes the trail—on and on through reindeer moss and heather, all the way above timber line, down to Lake Linderman, long and narrow, like a gigantic rock-bound ditch of the giants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet one is also reminded that, even in the Klondyke, in due season the brooding spruces are awakened from slumber by the songs of happy-throated songsters, that the melancholy of the forest is brightened by gay flowers. The weight is then lifted from men's hearts; singing is heard in the cabin, and the sound of laughter on the trail. When the mighty Yukon is open to the Behring Sea, the far North is in touch with the world and men are glad. ”

“ Immense piles of bleached and splintered drift-logs are raised on the upper ends of these islands, having lodged there at intervals when high water was booming down.
Between Anvik and Paimoot are many lofty clay cliffs, entirely made up of clean, pure earth of different bright colors—red, yellow, straw-colored, and white, with many intermediate shades. The Yukon runs down from its remote sources at the Stickeen divide in British Columbia, down through a wild, semi-wooded country, a succession of lakes and lakelets, through a region almost devoid of human life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Like most great waterways, the Yukon itself has carved its kingdom out from the rude husk of mother earth. Before man was, its waters flowed in much their present channels. At times their flood was mighty, comparable only with such streams as Amazon and Nilus. ”

“ The Doctors Krause, of the Geographical Society 122of Bremen, who spent a year at the mouth of the Chilkat lately, made some explorations of the region about the portages of the Yukon, and their maps and publications have been of great value to the Coast Survey. There are dangerous rapids and cañons on the watercourses leading to the Yukon, and none but miners and the most adventurous traders will probably ever avail themselves of this route; although by going some six hundred miles up to Fort Yukon, which is just within the Arctic Circle, the land of the midnight sun is reached. ”

“ Sayther lay down to wait in comfort.
Reclining on her side, she looked out and over the wide-stretching Yukon. Above the mountains which lay beyond the further shore, the sky was murky with the smoke of unseen forest fires, and through this the afternoon sun broke feebly, throwing a vague radiance to earth, and unreal shadows. To the sky-line of the four quarters—spruce-shrouded islands, dark waters, and ice-scarred rocky ridges—stretched the immaculate wilderness. No sign of human existence broke the solitude ”

“ Queer, uncertain noises in the silence of an arctic night there often are—noises of crackling twigs, perhaps, noises of settling snow, noises in the ice itself—but they are to be heard when there is no aurora as well as when there is. It is rare to stand on the banks of the Yukon on a cold night and not hear some faint crepitating [391] sounds, sometimes running back and forth across the frozen river, sometimes resembling the ring of distant skates. ”

“ In the darkness we have passed many fine glaciers, and along the bases of immense snow and ice crested mountains, which we are sorry not to have seen, but so much is now before us that our minds are already bent toward the great Yukon.
We are tied to an immense pier, and mechanical lifters seem to be dragging out the very entrails of the ship. Across the line of the warehouses I see the trucks of the railway, the hackmen are crying out their hotels. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Undoubtedly the pioneers to the Yukon pictured the difficulties of the route and the hardships of their life in the highest colors, both to add to their self-glory and to reduce competition. Moreover, every day mitigates the hardships and makes easier the travel. Nevertheless, enough difficulties, dangers and chances of failure remain to make the going to Alaska a matter for very careful forethought on the part of every man. ”