On Douglas Island There Is A Large Mill Of 240 Stamps, All
Run By One Small Water-Wheel, Which, However, Is Acted On By Water At
Enormous Pressure.
The forests around the mill are being rapidly
nibbled away.
Wind is here said to be very violent at times, blowing
away people and houses and sweeping scud far up the mountain-side.
Winter snow is seldom more than a foot or two deep.
June 21. We arrived at Douglas Island at five in the afternoon and
went sight-seeing through the mill. Six hundred tons of low-grade
quartz are crushed per day. Juneau, on the mainland opposite the
Douglas Island mills, is quite a village, well supplied with stores,
churches, etc. A dance-house in which Indians are supposed to show
native dances of all sorts is perhaps the best-patronized of all the
places of amusement. A Mr. Brooks, who prints a paper here, gave us
some information on Mt. St. Elias, Mt. Wrangell, and the Cook Inlet
and Prince William Sound region. He told Russell that he would never
reach the summit of St. Elias, that it was inaccessible. He saw no
glaciers that discharged bergs into the sea at Cook Inlet, but many
in Prince William Sound.
June 22. Leaving Juneau at noon, we had a good view of the Auk
Glacier at the mouth of the channel between Douglas Island and the
mainland, and of Eagle Glacier a few miles north of the Auk on the
east side of Lynn Canal. Then the Davidson Glacier came in sight,
finely curved, striped with medial moraines, and girdled in front by
its magnificent tree-fringed terminal moraine; and besides these many
others of every size and pattern on the mountains bounding Lynn
Canal, most of them comparatively small, completing their sculpture.
The mountains on either hand and at the head of the canal are
strikingly beautiful at any time of the year. The sky to-day is
mostly clear, with just clouds enough hovering about the mountains to
show them to best advantage as they stretch onward in sustained
grandeur like two separate and distinct ranges, each mountain with
its glaciers and clouds and fine sculpture glowing bright in smooth,
graded light. Only a few of them exceed five thousand feet in height;
but as one naturally associates great height with ice-and-snow-laden
mountains and with glacial sculpture so pronounced, they seem much
higher. There are now two canneries at the head of Lynn Canal. The
Indians furnish some of the salmon at ten cents each. Everybody sits
up to see the midnight sky. At this time of the year there is no
night here, though the sun drops a degree or two below the horizon.
One may read at twelve o'clock San Francisco time.
June 23. Early this morning we arrived in Glacier Bay. We passed
through crowds of bergs at the mouth of the bay, though, owing to
wind and tide, there were but few at the front of Muir Glacier.
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