Neither The Great White Heart Of The Fire Nor The Quivering
Enthusiastic Flames Shooting Aloft Like Auroral Lances Could Be
Seen
from the village on account of the trees in front of it and its being
back a tattle way
Over the brow of the hill; but the light in the
clouds made a great show, a portentous sign in the stormy heavens
unlike anything ever before seen or heard of in Wrangell. Some
wakeful Indians, happening to see it about midnight, in great
alarm aroused the Collector of Customs and begged him to go to the
missionaries and get them to pray away the frightful omen, and
inquired anxiously whether white men had ever seen anything like that
sky-fire, which instead of being quenched by the rain was burning
brighter and brighter. The Collector said he had heard of such
strange fires, and this one he thought might perhaps be what the
white man called a "volcano, or an ignis fatuus." When Mr. Young was
called from his bed to pray, he, too, confoundedly astonished and at
a loss for any sort of explanation, confessed that he had never seen
anything like it in the sky or anywhere else in such cold wet
weather, but that it was probably some sort of spontaneous combustion
"that the white man called St. Elmo's fire, or Will-of-the-wisp."
These explanations, though not convincingly clear, perhaps served
to veil their own astonishment and in some measure to diminish the
superstitious fears of the natives; but from what I heard, the few
whites who happened to see the strange light wondered about as wildly
as the Indians.
I have enjoyed thousands of camp-fires in all sorts of weather and
places, warm-hearted, short-flamed, friendly little beauties glowing
in the dark on open spots in high Sierra gardens, daisies and lilies
circled about them, gazing like enchanted children; and large fires
in silver fir forests, with spires of flame towering like the trees
about them, and sending up multitudes of starry sparks to enrich the
sky; and still greater fires on the mountains in winter, changing
camp climate to summer, and making the frosty snow look like beds of
white flowers, and oftentimes mingling their swarms of swift-flying
sparks with falling snow-crystals when the clouds were in bloom. 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. Nearly a third of this whole
number set out from here in the month of February, traveling on the
Stickeen River, which usually remains safely frozen until toward the
end of April. The main body of the miners, however, went up on the
steamers in May and June. On account of the severe winters they were
all compelled to leave the mines the end of September. Perhaps about
two thirds of them passed the winter in Portland and Victoria and the
towns of Puget Sound. The rest remained here in Wrangell, dozing away
the long winter as best they could.
Indians, mostly of the Stickeen tribe, occupied the two ends of
the town, the whites, of whom there were about forty or fifty, the
middle portion; but there was no determinate line of demarcation, the
dwellings of the Indians being mostly as large and solidly built of
logs and planks as those of the whites.
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