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 mines.
These placer mines, on tributaries of the Mackenzie River, were
discovered in the year 1874. About eighteen hundred miners and
prospectors were said to have passed through Wrangell that season of
1879, about half of them being Chinamen.
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