ice SO TPdlonbetlanb University of California Berkeley (J ^Mf Tljrougl) tl|pi!derlai}d To Alaska. BY REV. WILLIAM H. MYERS, Pastor Grace Lutheran Church, Reading ', Pa* READING, PA., READING TIMES PRINT, 1895 BY THE SAME AUTHOR ; At- Leisure Papers^ Ike i$tk Century and 7 here Across the Sea % Funeral Reform, Etc. REV WM, H, iMYERS LETTERS. "The readers of he TIMES, while they will be pleased tp hear of the safe return of our esteemed jbpwnsman, Rev. Wm. H. Myers, fr-Qm his jtrip to Alaska, will no doubt be sorry to, miss a continuation of the graphically-written letters of travel which he has contributed tp the columns of this papef fqr. several months past. These letters have called out many com- plimentary expressions from among a large circle of admiring readers, and the general consensus of opinion is that in point of close observation, fine descriptive power, felicity of expression, the apt use of his- torical incidents with which the writer in- terwove his interesting narrative, these letters possess a value and literary attract- iveness that entitles them to more than the mere passing interest that attaches to a newspaper publication. They should be collected and printed in book -form, as they would adorn any library." Ed. Times, NOTE. The foregoing editorial of the "Read- ing Times," together with the numer- ous requests of friends, have induced me to present my Letters i?i this form. 1 hey were written mostly in the Palace- Sleeper of the Overland- Trains, and, but for the flattering endorsement of their merit by one so competent to speak it, I would plead the modesty of many short- comings in them. W. H. M. CONTENTS. PAGE I Anticipation of My Trip .... 9 II Viewing Chicago from its Money-making Standpoint . 15 III How Minneapolis Appeals to the Poetic and Artistic Feeling 23 IV Minneapolis, the Flour City of the Great Northwest .'..." 29 V Awaking in the Prairie Lands of North Dakota 37 VI Through the Wheat Belt and the Cowboy Land . 43 VII Climbing the Rocky Mountains by Stage 50 VIII Among the Indian and Wigwam of the Wild West 63 IX In the Rising Seaport of the Northwest 67 X Sailing Up Through Puget Sound on the Steamer Queen 74 XI Down in the Gold Mines bt the Alaskan Islands 81 XII An Evening with the Governor of Alaska, at Sitka 89 XIII Anchoring Among the Icebergs of Glacier Bay 98 XIV Sight Seeing in the Queenly Metropolis of Oregon .... 108 XV Piloted Through Chinatown at Night by a Detective . ... 118 PAGE XVI Beholding the Wonders of the Yosemite Valley .... . 131 XVII In the Prune and Olive Farms of Santa Clara Valley . . ... 140 XVIII Looking Through the Largest Telescope in the World ... 1 50 XIX Legend of the Cypress Trees . . 161 XX Sitting Under Orange Tiees and Eating Fruit ........ 163 XXI A Sunday Spent at Salt Lake with the Mormons . . . . . 170 XXII Travelling Through the Switzer- land of America. ...... 185 XXIII Homes of the Clift Dwellers. 192 < XXIV Two Mountain Views, one Earthward, the other Heaven- ward 194 XXV The Garden of the Gods . . . 206 XXVI A Study of the Chinaman Dan- ger of Immigration .... 208 XXVII Our Country East and West of the Mississippi 221 XXVIII Yellowstone Park In Retro- spect. . . XXIX Yosemite Valley In Retrospect XXX In the Mariposa Grove .... XXXI Alaska In Retrospect .... XXXII My Country In Retrospect . . 229 243 254 258 272 ANTICIPATION OF MY TRIP. I. READING, JULY 16, 1895. Once more I take in hand my pilgrim Staff I start on a journey to a far-off land. Alaska ! It beckons me with boyish anticipation. Life anyhow would be a journey through the desert without the foretaste of anticipation. We hardly are done with one day, we already span the rainbow over another to-morrow. We may not have realized what we expected, but we brush aside the disappointments by a hopeful anticipation and say "It will be better on the rising of the next sun." Buoyant youth is all anticipation, and experienced age culls hope from the lowering horizon by the forward step of expectation. I think the sweetest honey- comb of life is anticipation, for realization is a honey-comb too, but with much of the honey taken out of it. THROUGH PICTURESQUE AMERICA. Well, a pleasure trip of a thousand smiles through paradisiaeJe scenes of earthly (U-t io Through Wonderland grandeur will certainly fill any young heart with the intoxicating wine of anticipation. I will share of my pleasures with you, and as you have followed my former wander- ings through my pen-portrayals, with ex- pressions of delight, I may do well to please you again. I am not traveling along the stream of time to find the sources of history, and tell you the story of centuries long agone. Here in our land we do not record the achievements of man that inspired the pen of poet, mor- alist and historian for a thousand years. The Old World has its moss-covered churches and dust-gathered cathedrals; its treasures of art and song; its scattered upheavings of religious reformations and national conflicts every mountain, lake and river lives in rythmical lore, and cities stand that Caesar saw. My pleasure-tour may more particularly be described "A trip through Picturesque America/' Nor this alone, for the American people would seem to have compressed a thousand years into a single century. Their cities have been built almost over night, and the wheel of progress never revolved with such accelerating speed in the history of the world as now we are railroading it to Alaska. 1 1 through life, we speed along with the flash of electricity. The delights of travel are among the most health-giving experiences of our ex- istence. To those who have eyes, and cannot see things with them, who have the artist in their souls, the pictures of travel will be the active shifting of scenes that educate, elevate and inspire. I have often heard the complaint of dull compan- ions in travel, who carry their brains in their stomachs, who have contracted all their aesthetic appreciation to the level of their pocket-books, who have only three longings of the day breakfast, dinner and supper ; who mete out only one intel- lectual inquiry of their soul, amid the most God-inspiring enjoyments "what does it cost?" No less than 600,000 tourists will cross the Atlantic this summer. And yet, when we look around us, we find so many well- to-do people who never travel. It is a pity that any one should have the means and not find it convenient to apply some of it to the higher enjoyments of life. There is, however, a compensation in all stations of society, and the people of mod- erate means do more traveling than the 12 Through Wonderland wealthy. You see, a man who has a mil- lion dollars has a million entanglements, He has business investments, and one manufacturing enterprise after the other, binds him more to his home ; and having' shrewd financial qualities, and solid money backing, he will be called to one and another station of responsibility, until like Tantalus in deep water, having money, an ocean of it, and a desire to travel he yet can't make use of it. Now, life is short, and at the close, money is not even good enough material to fill up the grave with. Wealth owes us a fair living if nothing more, but many do not get more out of it than worry, work and slavery. AMERICA, THE MIRACLE OF PROGRESS. A trans-continental tour awakens the sense of the marvellous. Many countries? of the old world are no larger than one of our States, and you soon can flit from the domain of one nation into the other. But in America you speed over 3,000 miles from ocean to ocean, and it is all one land and all redeemed from the desert and wilderness to a populous country in a marvellously short period. When the Plymouth colony settled on the Mass- achusetts coast, all west of them was a to Alaska. 13 waste. Only 250 years ago, all the citizens of America could boast of a few beasts of burden, only a few cows landed in 1636 at the cost of $150 a piece, and oxen at $200 a pair, and a quart of milk could be bought for a penny, and four eggs at the same price. Then a red calf could be bought cheaper than a black one, on account of a great liability to be mistaken for a deer, and killed by wolves. Along the James River, so important was consid- ered the raising of cattle in the infant col- ony, that no domestic animals were allowed to be killed on penalty of death to the principal, and of burning of the hand and cropping of the ears of the accessory, and a sound whipping of twenty-four hours for the concealer of a knowledge of the facts. In 1611 there were 100 head of cattle grazing along the James River, in 1850 there were 18,378,907 in the United States, and animals slaughtered valued at $i 1 1,703, 142. The story of cattle-raising in 1895 can be read on the ranches of the prairies, and in the slaughtering-stocks of Chicago. Emigration from the east began to set toward the so-called inexhaustible west, which at that time meant central or western New York, now it lies beyond the 14 Through Wonderland Mississippi, and the Rockies. In the Revolution, less than 3,000,000 people inhabited this land, now nigh 70,000,000 claim to be Americans. When our fathers landed on these shores, they found no roads or carnages, or other means of moving from one place to another. How should they gather the fruits of harvests and hold communion between one long distant home and another ? The peddler with his pack-horse was then the moving emporium of a woman's world and fancy. But why delay the story of roads post roads Macadam national. In 1859 the old-time stages had 23,448,398 miles of travel, and to cross to the Pacific under the lash of whip, was almost a life-journey. Now we have railroad and steam, and sweep from coast to coast in a week. What a marvel of progress is America ! So I fasten up my tourist's bag and strap down .my steamer-trunk and take the train for the glaciers of the Alaskan clime. I am well-equipped for heat and cold, for land-rain and ocean-Storm. With the se- curement of my ticket I have bespoken the assurance of good health, and so until we meet again we wish to each other ( i(d VIEWING CHICAGO FROM ITS MONEY-MAKING STAND- POINT. IL CHICAGO, JULY 12, 1895. Gently, like an angel's flight, the train glided out from the Philadelphia Broad street station. It was 8.50 o'clock of the evening, and the luxuriant sleeper Para- gon was a*- picture of beauty under the .glow of the over-hanging gas-jets. Not a care-worn face did I see in it, but antici- pation of something pleasant seemed to be written upon every countenance. One pretty maiden particularly, had eight hand- somely dressed courtiers to bid her adieu, and I noticed that a sweet satisfaction hov- ered around her unconscious smiles when far on her journey. She sat alone and mused, forecasting the future, and un- clouded hope sat upon her brow. Do not mar that delusion it is the rightful wealth of youth. 1 6 Through Wonderland ASLEEP ON WHEELS. Very soon the swarthy porter touched the springs of the veneered mahogany ceil- ing, and in separate parts it fell down, transforming the car into a sleeping em- porium. One after another, the travelers stole behind the drawn curtains, and before long, I sat alone amid a scene of silence. I thought that a car-full is like a city-full of people when night comes, sleep silences the animated streets, and a hundred thou- sand souls, and as many more, are stowed away behind barred doors. Sleep is the magic power that tames and quiets- the restless lion of New York and London-life. By day he goes about roaring at night, where is he ? My bed is made I also go to rest. I awake 1 have had a dream. I walked in a garden of shooting geysers, and their hot spray spread aloft like bou- quets of variegated flowers ; I sailed amid icebergs, and my boat was frozen into eccentric shapes of ice-colored animals, plants and images, projecting from the sides in carved relief. Yellowstone-Park and glacier-laden Alaska must have warmed my brain before sleep. I thought of the beautiful dream of the poet Tasso when traveling in Italy. In a night- vision to Alaska. 17 he sailed by boat to a little island, and the natives brought him birds of the most ex- traordinary plumage, and he arranged them along the sides, so that their long fan-tails of rainbow-hues reached over the water, and his whole craft sparkled in the sun like a setting of delicately-tinted gems. How delighted ! When he awoke he said " these birds presage my new poems which I will send to my friends at home. ' ' I modestly think like Tasso, that my dream of Wonderland presaged the letters I will write to my friends at home. They scarcely will be poetical gems of a Tasso style, but they may be gems worth the setting in some kind of current type. Bishop Berkeley has said "Westward the course of empire takes its way." I follow this star of progress in my westward flight. But here I awake in Pittsburg, and a pilgrim by my side says "we will have to turn our watches back one hour. ' ' 1 did so as directed, and when I reach the Pacific coast I will have turned the hour of the dial back three hours. Now, that hardly would seem to be-progress but a retrogression. When you breakfast at 8 o'clock in the east I will breakfast at 5 o'clock, according to your time. Well, 1 8 Through Wonderland this however, is only an apparent victory of the race between steam and the Creator* It is not the time-piece in our pocket that determines the universal hour of day or night the sun of the heavens does. The sun up there, and God up higher, rule about everything. We must accommo- date ourselves to the things ordained from above; when we gauge ourselves accord- ing to the limitations of man's narrow en- vironments, we soon will have come to the end, we every day must find a new be- ginning. IN THE STREETS OF CHICAGO. When you approach Chicago by train you are in it a long time before you get there. Anyhow what is this Chicago ? A monstrous miracle on earth. In 1829 it had no existence; in 1840 it had 447 in- habitants: in 1845 it had 12,088; in j86o it had 109,263, and in 1895 it has a little less than 2,000,000 souls ! Now, taking the city in a lump, and analyzing its peo- ple, you will have to decide that they arc not of a Boston-caste they lack the cul- ture and refinement that comes of genera- tions of moulding. Here all is money, and it is a bee-hive for that. When these fat capitalists have reared the third gcner- to Alaska. 19 ation of children, and inculcated the love of the arts, refinement and higher educa- tion, then this wonder-city will have donned the garb of more classic beauty in its social and business intercourse. I feel this difference in the whole atmosphere that pervades Chicago and I feel that I am safe to venture the truthfulness of my impressions. Alas! to what heights it aspires in its sky-scraping buildings how corpulent with vulgar stuffing it seems there is such a cannibal-zest in its appetite for money. Other great cities have existed upon the earth, and poets have sung of them but no poet can find inspiration in this seething furnace of activity Chicago now is big, rather than graceful; it is rich, rather than learned its poet may sing some day. IN THE SLAUGHTER HOUSES. I have just come from the stock-yards, and as this is one of the many of Chi- cago's greatest things on earth, I may have fallen into this caustic way of moral- izing. From the poet Tasso to hog-stick- ing, is a descending scale, and my aesthetic feelings had to give away to the more materialistic. So here I am in a mile 2o Through Wonderland square of yards and buildings devoted to the slaughter of cattle, sheep and hogs. Lowing bleating grunting how I used to like to hear those sounds on the quiet farm; but here it is the plaintive call of helpless animals, that grace so often the undulating landscape and they seem to call to be saved from the doom which right here gathers much pathos to itself. But we must see this Armour-Swift- igth century way of slaughtering and pulver- izing hogs. Really there is science about it, and to see it, you walk in pools of blood. It is a little like a threshing machine, into one end of which you stick the wheat, and it comes out at the other all bagged for the market. A Vulcan of a man, all gory with blood, dispatches the pigs as fast as they glide manacled before him ; the overhead railroad catches them up from the scalding trough, and they roll along, and as they go their zig-zag way, men elevated on benches do each their part, scraping, cutting the head, disem- bowelling and in five minutes one pig has railroaded to the cooling room, and in one hour four hundred and fifty are suspended there, and in one year four hundred thou- sand go that way to the lower rooms to be id Alaska. 2f converted into ham, sausage, lard, fertilizer, etc., and, presto change ! where are* they ? So it mattefs not, whether Chicago kills beef, plays base-ball or builds a world's fair, it does all on the biggest scale. Nelson Morris whittles a stick all day long as he goes from place to place through his packing houses. Some few years ago he blackened boots, and now he has the largest ready capital of any mil-' lionaire in the city. Think of it-^*in 1538 Ferdinand de Soto brought the first swine from Cuba to Florida in America. Iri 1627 they ran wild in Virginia, and the" Indians killed them for game. Now behold! the immense industry they have created iri this city alone. I admit that Chicago is great its grain warehouses that ship 4,000,000 bushels a day, and its stock- yards that send out pork and beef to the world, are but the indication of its bigness- in every way. It is business to see over one hundred vehicles back to the curb of a single market-house; it is business to see 1 the thoroughfares teeming with thousands of people and resounding with a bedlam of noises; it is business to see the little store-man measure and weigh his sales with alacrity but dust and sweat and 2 Through Wonderland sooty quarters, such as the majority of people have in a large city, would not tempt me, even for more than a compe- tency. The man of a little town, who has a home, worth three or five thousand dollars, is somebody in a large city he is nobody. Only men of brains* and of a kind, and millionaires, ride on the popular wave of a city- full. HOW MINNEAPOLIS APPEALS TO THE POETIC AND ARTISTIC FEELING, lit MINNEAPOLIS, JULY 15, 18*95. My first impressions of this flour-city of the northwest was a revelry of sentiment. Its artistic and poetic beauty set aside all statistical and material study, and for the first day I lived in it as in a dream of love. Robed in gorgeous summer attire, it is a city fair to look upon. It is the Edin- burgh of America. There is a queenly grace that pervades its realm of business, and its wide paved roadways and broad stone sidewalks, overshadowed by eight and ten story buildings, carry on their activities with an air of refinement. With me it was love at first sight, and I am ready to sing its praises. Scarcely settled in the West Hotel, which is one of the objects of pride to the Minneapolitans, I was made to taste one of those surprises of western hospitality which have come to be so far-famed. A 24 Through Wonderland Staunch Lutheran, who chanced to know of my pilgrimage, came equipped with carnage and royal persuasion, and soori lodged me within his own brown-stone palace. Mr. J. A. Bohn and his goodly wife are princely host and hostess, and their untiring attention to one whom they had never met was a gracious flattery to the meagre reputation that had made him known to theiru AN EVENING DRIVE IN FAlRY LAND. You never will have discovered Minne^ apolis until you drive over its boulevards by night. We are off to the lakes, which like a necklace of gems encircle the bosom 'of the city. Our wheels roll over one of the finest driveways of America ; it will be a road thirty miles long when completed* On either side of the broad track are con* tinuous blocks of grass, shaded by treesj and a walk along the edge of it. Now it is 8 o'clock of the evening and the sun is just going down. The air is balmy, and the pleasure-seekers afe gliding by iri streams of vehicles. Whither this inter- mingling mass of humanity ? Mere is a paradise of the bicycler- there afe i?,ooo of them in Minneapolis, and as many Women are out as men to-night, spinning to Alaska. 25 along. On horseback, in carriages, on wheels, by foot they are all bound for Lake Harriet. We have now passed Lake of the Isles and Cedar, and we drive along Calhoun. Its road-edge is a continuous fence of willows, trimmed down to a chain of arched fans with openings between, to view the lake. Sails are sporting to the winds far out, and swimmers bound from bended boards in arched gracefulness. These lakes, encircled by the boulevards, and winding under thousands of acres of woodland, are only a part of the area comprising the magnificent natural park of the city. All Minneapolis covers more ground than London. VANITY FAIR AT HARRIET. I do not wonder now, that the city is out to Lake Harriet. From a distance you hear through the groves the strains of music and the deep undertone of humanity. Now you turn the curve as the electric glare directs you, and a scene of magnificent beauty breaks upon your view. Lake Harriet ! Down there is the pavilion, built into the waters, and over and around it, and out along the bend of the lake, electric lights of varied colors cast an elongated sheen red, white, blu e 26 Th) ough Wonderland and gold, over the water. As we approach , vehicles many, are hitched to poles, and vehicles more, battle for passing! Men and women, beaus and maidens, walk, chat, laugh, in and out, up and down and everywhere the bicycle. Her Majesty's- ship of immaculate white, with masts and flags aloft in the blue sky, is moored to the pavilion, and is a veritable stage, look- ing upon an amphitheatre of seats for 5,000 spectators. The New York Opera company is performing "Pinafore" to- nightand the attractions change every week. Intermissions are announced on flash-lighted canvas, and the refreshment tables are filled. But this is not a motley crowd of the noisy sort. Only soft drinks are served, for the patrol-limit regula- tion restricts the saloons entirely to the business portion of the city. Over two hundred boats, white without, are inviting patronage. How pretty they look as they glide over the blue surface around the Pinafore ship ! Over yonder is the "Raz- zle Dazzle,'' draped with the Oriental splendor of tinsel round and round it goes with hilarious enjoyment. Ponies and urchin-riders exercise on another track. In and out shoot the electric cars, to Alaska. 27 and crowds go and crowds come by a safety system of elevated exits all this to view, frofn a little distance, is a vision of Fairy Land. Lake Harriet is the re- sort of the refined masses, and Lake Min- netonka, with its mammoth hotels, is the Elberon of the aristocracy. AT LONGFELLOW'S MINNEHAHA. If you Jiave read Hiawatha, you will want to see, above all, the falls of Laugh- ing Water. Come not with me, if you have not sentiment I mean to read 4 'Hiawatha's Wooing" in time-keeping to the music of that overflow, and I would have a willing ear. Now alight over yonder down this way there ! there ! it is. Almost, I imagine to have come to the sacred glen of the Dacotahs almost, like a lover's venture, do I recount my pilgrimage here " With the moccasins of magic, At each stride a mile he measured; Yet the way seemed long before him And his heart outrun his iootsteps; And he journeyed without resting, Till he heard the cataract's laughter, Heard the Falls of Minnehaha Calling to him through the silence. " Pleasant is the sound !" he murmured, "Pleasant is the voice that calls me." Now, see, right there, Hiawatha came to buy his arrows. Alas ! a lover's secret; 28 Through Wonderland perhaps he came to see some dreamy eyes. Bend! we dip, and take of the waters of Minnehaha. How sweet the drfnk ! To the good luck of Hiawatha's wooing we drink. Laughing, yet that falling cata- ract, in the basin-washed gulf below it seems to intone the words of that Indian lover "Yes, if Minnehaha wishes; lyet your heart speak, Minnehaha !" And the lovely L,aighing Water Seemed more lovely as she stood ttoere Neither willing nor reluctant As she went to Hiawatha,. Softly took the seat beside him, Whilst she said, and blushed to say it r "'I will follow you, my husband." MINNEAPOLIS, THE FLOUR CITY OF THE GREAT NORTHWEST. IV. BISMARCK, N. D., JULY 16, '95. St. Paul and Minneapolis are styled the twin-cities of the Northwest. They are far apart in spirit, and an acrimonious jealousy divides them. It is playfully in- timated that it is not safe for a preacher in Minneapolis to take his text from St. Paul. It is a figure of speech to indicate the intensity of rivalry. A government enumerator had to be called upon to take the census in 1890 ; and now the indica tions are that Minneapolis is 50,000 ahead, having about 200,000 inhabitants. But in less than a decade the commercial city and the manufacturing city will have en- tirely built up the fifteen miles between them; they will join hands in peace, and be baptized under the name of Minne- paulus. Then there will be one straight avenue through them both of thirty miles length What a city! 3O Through Wonderland . When you have seen the palatial resi- dences along the paved streets so many hundreds of them costing from $50,000 to $500,000 each, you naturally will want to know where the money came from to build them. If an architect wants to find lofty, unique and even daring styles of stone-architecture, he need only come to Minneapolis. If the florist would know how to lay out lawns and decorate them with pleasing and original designs, he need to come here. Its 175 churches are imposing ; its high-schools and State uni versity are marvels; its West hotel cost $1,500,000 ; its court house $3,000,000 ; and the many other public structures, in- spired by the social, commercial or politi- cal enterprise are of equal pretensions. If you would study city sewerage, street paving, benevolent, school and patrol systems, you will find the highest type of attainment here. But I do not wish to generalize in this way. A VISIT TO THE SAW-MILLS. Geographically Minneapolis is the nat- ural headquarters for Northwestern lum ber interests ; it is situated on the southern edge of the vast pineries and has the magnificent water-power of St An- to Alaska. 31 thony Falls. A ride up the grand Miss- issippi took me along miles of lumber villages, and at last brought me to the model saw-mill of C. A. Smith & Co. I had a letter of introduction he and part- ner Johnson are Lutherans. Now my conception of a saw-mill never rose much above the crude water-wheel that disported its prowess in the back- wood stream, and by its sweet repose of surroundings afforded a splendid study for the painter. But here all artistic inspira- tion is annihilated, and you wonder at the materialistic progress of the times. Think of a saw-mill that cuts up 500,000 feet of lumber in twenty four hours ! Down the Mississippi river the logs come floating from the northern forests of Minnesota, coaxed into this great water- course through inland streams ; and labeled, are sent down for hundreds of miles, like herds of cattle, to the special owner. Now right here at this point of the mill you see single logs floated to a pronged chain, revolving up an incline, carrying Mr. Timber along through a trough, like the hogs are lifted at Armour's, ready to be slaughtered. Above, you see a sort of sleight-of-hand performance with that log. 3 2 Through Wonderland The eye follows quickly every process. Amid chain-work and tracks, shooting length-wise and side-wise, that log comes within reach of an iron arm called the 1 'nigger" which bobs out of the floor, and by an acrobatic feat, throws it over into the arms of a truck that quickly flies past a saw. Behold ! one side is shaved off. Back and forward the truck shoots again, with the log reversed as quickly as the baker turns the pretzel, and the other side is sliced off the saw going two miles in a minute. Tossed like a stick to another chain-truck, the log instantly is one of six to shoot through a family of saws, and on the other side falls apart a load ol boards. They have no time to inspect themselves, but shoot through the plane, land on tooth-chains beyond. A switchman, in a box above, guides them in the opposite direction into an elongated shed, where they drop according to length, into bins below, and so are sorted by their own will, loaded, car-tracked out, and stacked on the 80 acres of lumber- storage. What magic ! Amid the whirl of machinery and belts, I am guided down to the shingle apartment. Waste logs drop within reach of experts, who by to Alaska. 33 several turns have a bundle of these roof- ing slats cut and packed, made out of ap- parently worthless wood. Firewood slides this way, and falls into ready wagons, and saw-dust is carried by a series of chains that way, and lands below by the boilers. No waste ! The saw-dust feeds eight boilers, and to look within, you see fire- flakes fly like a million fire-bugs, generat- ing the i,ooo-horse power of the engine which drives the immense mill. After in- specting the building where the Compo- board is made, which is a wonderful pro- cess to displace lathing and plastering of walls in houses, by having this composi- tion surface of 3x9 feet nailed on, ready to paper, I left in amazement at the mechani- cal genius of the age. A legerdemain performance was a wonder to me as a boy but all this is more than the mysteries of a Hermann or a Keller. Think of an annual lumber product of 300,000,000 feet, and how much of this goes, not only into flooring and roofing of buildings but is converted right here, by other mills, into carved furniture, that graces the palaces of the wealthy and of royalty. 34 Through Wonderland IN THE FLOUR MILLS. In an opposite direction I found the flour milling district. Minneapolis has the largest flour mill of the world, and Mill A., of Mr. Pillsbury, is the eighth wonder of the world. In my own native town I daily saw little stacks of bags bear- ing the label of this make. But the old flour-mill by the dam, where we went a-fishing, was our ideal. Alas ! what a disenchantment of great things when you come to see a western mill, run by water, steam and electric power. Imagine it requires 40,000,000 bushels of wheat a year to satisfy the rapacious appetite of the thirty and more feeders of this city. The five Pillsbury-Washburn flour mills alone turn out in one day 22,500 barrels, and it takes 400 cars, or 20 trains 01 20 cars each, every day to take the wheat into, and the flour and offal, out of these mills. If all the cars used daily by the grinding concerns combined, were put in*a row, it would make a train ten miles long. I would like to give a detailed description of the machinery and activity of Mill A but it must suffice to say, that the 225 crushers and grinders ; the 18 pair of stones ; the tiers of wagon-box shakers : to Alaska. 35 the cone-like separators of oats and cockle from wheat ; the various feeders and sprinklers ; the peculiar flour coolers pre- vious to packing ; and all the whirl of belting, from five feet wide to a little inch, going round and round, six stories high is another miracle of mechanical science. Alas ! what a process, until we have flour according to the Pillsbury notion. It goes through all kinds of crushing, grind- ing, sifting, cutting, refining, and rises and falls twelve times up and down six stories, through tube-lifts, before it is fit ' * staff of life " for you and me. Then, to see the packing into barrels, and the twirling into cars it takes more agility than a Berks County farmer manifests at his bins, to load 9,500 barrels every day out of one mill. MEETING A FRIEND AT SOLDIERS' HOME. By Minnehaha Falls nestles the soldiers' home of the State of Minnesota. I 'climbed up the ravine to the hill, from which look seven fine buildings over the Mississippi river, the ' 'Father of Waters," on one side, and Minnehaha creek, the " Laughing Waters," on the other. The colors of the stars and stripes were dis- played everywhere even the ice-coolers 36 Through Wonderland and flower-pots were painted in red, white and blue. In one home thl? orders were posted " the bugler will sound the calls as follows : Sick call, 8 a.-m.; tattoo, 8.50 p. m.; taps, 9.00 p. m.; Sunday, inspec- tion, 8.30 a. m ." In the chapel, the memorial over the re- ligious altar read : "Minnesota is proud to honor The veteran soldiers of the Union. Their cause was sacred. Their sacrifice was sublime." Among the 315 boys in blue, I looked for one face with searching interest. Major George W. Grant, former postmaster of our city, and a member of my church, is quartermaster here I missed him, but he called upon me in the city. I bore him the greetings of his many Eastern friends, and I herewith return his kindly wishes. He is as seriously courteous as ever, of soldierly bearing is well and happy. I preached in Minneapolis, had a good all-round Western hand-shake, and I close this letter, far away on train, with the sweet remembrance of the kind hearts I met there. i AWAKING IN THE PRAIRIE LANDS OF NORTH DAKOTAH. V. MONTANA LINE, JULY 16, 1895. I turn in my sleep I awake. I find that I have on me a white sheet, a soft coverlet, and a double red blanket it is deliciously cool. I look above me, and I see myself reflected in a mahogany polished ceiling, covered over like an Esquimaux. I struggle out of the confusion of thought, and I soon discover that I have slept in a berth of the Northern Pacific rolling over rails toward the Yellowstone Park. I pull the shades up the full height of the windows and behold ! I see, for the first time, the prairies. I rehearse the words of Whittier as I lie there "We cross the prairies as of old The pilgrims crossed the sea, To make the West as they the Kast, The homestead of the free. We go to plant her common schools On distant prairie swells, And give the Sabbaths of the wild The music of her bells. 38 Through Wonderland How true all this sentiment ! Listen ! The wind whistles as through the rigging of a ship, and the far- stretch ing landscape looks like the desert sea. "Homesteads of the free, ' ' are here and there and yonder, some of mud- plastered sides and sand* strewn roofs, with a chimney smoking and curling as beautifully as from castle-hearth, No fences or walls between neighbors miles apart all is free ; only hillocks of velvety dress break the outline here and there, and clusters of trees relieve the span of monotonous perspective. Now I fly past the prairie village a few scattered frame houses, no streets, a store ; and this early morning, scores of wagons with two horses tied there, that came miles over the trackless desert to lay in the weekly supply- perchance to collect the letters from the old home in the East. Now there, on the rise, stands quite alone, the church, so unpretentious. But to the children of God, who track the direction of the Sabbath prairie-bell, those meagre walls sound just as sweet as cathedral arch, the music of "Nearer My God to Thee." And sure as the Quaker poet's prophesy " we go to plant her common schools on distant prairie swells," there To Alaska. 39 the little nursery of mental unfolding stands. But looking about -where are the homes of the children ? Ah! out here those who would learn go for it any dis- tance, and those who would worship God need not the paved walks, the speed of car and the altar by the door -they love church, to seek it twenty and fifty miles away. Already the flocks are seen in the blue grass nothing but grass. A thousand sheep, in a packed flock, I have passed just now, a fleecy cloud fallen down from the heavens on the early wet grass. The shepherd on horseback, his dog by his side, and a few cows to furnish him milk in his wanderings from home. Just see ! what airy freedom that maiden displays on horseback, as the cars steam by. Most likely she is conscious of the fact, that an early-rising traveller is peeping out by the flying sleeper to admire her expertness. Astride she sits, with both stirrups well mounted, hatless, and hair streaming, calico-frock, short over bare feet and coyly waving back, she guides her steed, in leaping recklessness, over hidden gul- lies and protruding knolls, on toward yonder herd of cattle. Thou child of 40 Through Wonderland freedom on desert plain how pretty thou does seem, with the rising sun to illumi- nate the innocent gracefulness, disporting on horseback against the winds ! But I must up I have done with sleep. I press the electric button under the side panel mirror, and the colored porter has come to withdraw the curtained canopy and reconvert my bed to a double seat. He at once adjusts my writing desk, and out of my traveling bag I get my writing pad and here, as if at my study-desk, I write these letters to you. I have two days' and two nights' lodgment in this cozy nook, and like a true artist paints from nature, so I describe the scenes as they roll without my window. The first call to breakfast ! Prairie temperature begets an appetite it is de- cidedly cool and the windows and ventila- tors are down. But what may we expect to eat in the desert ? Pity on you I will give you my bill-of-fare this morning. How royal-like to sit down to feast of this kind, in mirrored apartment on wheels, with no revolving fans overhead, but the grass-laden breezes of the prairies sweet- ening the smell of air and a colored waiter adorned with boutonniere bending to Alaska. 4 1 graciously over you. Now if I were not a preacher I would consider myself to be a king. Breakfast, Northern Pacific R. R., this side Bismarck, North Dakotah dining car. Steamed Clams. Fruit. Oatmeal with Cream. Fresh Fish. Codfish Balls. Salt Mackerel. Fried Mush. Corned Beef Hash, Calfs' I^iver with Bacon. Broiled Tenderloin Steak. Sirloin Steak. Ham. Mutton Chops. Bacon. Mushroom Sauce. Tomato Sauce. Fjggs Boiled, Fried, Scrambled, Shirred. Omelet- Plain, with Ham, Parsley, Jelly or Rum. Baked Potatoes. Brown Hashed. Fried Potatoes. Green Tea. English Breakfast Tea. Oolong Tea. Coffee. French Chocolate. Milk. Vienna Bread. Corn Bread. Rolls. Dry Toast. Gra- ham Bread Toast. Dipped Toast. Griddle Cakes with Maple Syrup. Children between the ages of five and twelve years, occupying seats, will be charged 50 cents. Passengers not served to their satisfaction will please report the fact to the dining car conductor at once. Breakfast 7.00 to 9.30, launch 12.00 to 1.30, Dinner 5.20 to 7.30. Meals 75 cents. The wine list on the other side comprises twenty-nine kinds of Champagne, White Wines, Clarets, liquors, etc. Cigars. Key West and imported 2 for 25C., 3 for soc., isc. and 25C. each. Cigarettes 2oc Playin g Cards 5oc Breakfast is my good meal, but I simply partook of breakfast, and I did not swallow the entire bill-of-fare. I had often 42 Thjough Wonderland heard of a ship on fire, but I never" thought of a train on fire. Before noon-- lunch the passengers were startled by the alarm " the dining-car on fire!" I did not fancy it, for next to my cushioned sleeper, the dining car lay nearest to my heart. On the waste prairies, and alJ your coveted meals gone up in smoke think of it ! I did not care for the car so much as for the pantry. Fortunately the engineer got on increased speed, and we soon shot into the little station Dickinson, where the track -plug turned on hose, and the fire was out. How I blessed Dickin- sonthe lunch was good. We are passing now through the ' ' Bad Lands" 'there is no inspiration here fof tny pen and so I will lay it down. A glacier slide, from the icy-north, once 1 upon a tim'e, wrought out those cone-like mounds that stretch far away like Ha- waiian hufs, amphitheatres, fortresses, cathedrals and pyramids. It is all desola- tion here even crows afe not seen. But you and I have passed through bad lands before, and felt unhappy in them too*. But as I am smiling, so may you, for I expect very soon to reach the good land! beyond. THROUGH THE WHEAT BELT AND THE COWBOY LAND. VI. LIVINGSTON, MONT., JULY 17, 1895. Before you get out of Minnesota, by the Northern Pacific railroad, you will pass through the great lumber region. The aroma of pine knots penetrates your car on the evening air, you think of the woodman's hut in the dense forests, of the music of his axe by day, and of the flavor of his stones by night. The Indian did better in clearing land of timber he kept fire around each tree till it burnt to death. When it fell, he burned it to such length as to make it convenient to roll the parts together and so he consumed them in a heap. But he regarded not the tree from a commercial standpoint it was good to shade his wigwam. An army of men are away from their families earning their bread in this wilderness. After har- vest the farmer goes also. 44 Through Wonderland THROUGH THE WHEAT BELT. I passed by the best portion of the great wheat-belt, in North Dakota, by night. In the Red river-bed lies the famous Dairy m pie farm, consisting of 25,000 acres under cultivation. Think of a stretch of wheat fields five miles square, and the winds playing over their golden surface to make them undulate in waves, like the rising and falling of the ocean I This was the sight that inspired Bryant "These are the gardens of the desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of Kngland has no name The Prairies ! I behold them for the first, And my heart swells, while the dilated sight Takes in the encircling vastness." Wheat fields ! Talk of them, you Penn- sylvania farmers, as you know them in your 30 and 50 acre fields- but here the pride of the husbandman roams over 600 acre patches. No fence ! as far as you can see, no such a thing as a fence. I would call such a farmer, as Dalrymple, a Nabob. By the headline of the farm poses the rider. On horseback he com- mands the binders. No less than fifty of these ponderous wind-mill machines are started out, and they are watched and di- rected like so many shifting cars. If one lo Alaska. 45 stops, all stop and that is loss of time and money fifty times multiplied. What a sight and rattle and devastation among the glory of the wheat fields 1 One binder alone cuts a swath twelve feet wide. When the open air threshing is done, Dalrymple will have bagged, with fifteen bushels to the acre, no less than 375,000 bushels of No. i hard spring wheat the best flour-producing grain in the world. The first wheat in America was sown by Gosnold on the Elizabeth Islands off the southeast coast of Massachusetts in 1602. The first sown in Virginia was in 1611. The earliest settlers raised it in 1648, and in 1626 the Dutch Colony took the first sample to Holland. Behold now, Minneapolis alone grinds up 50,000,000 bushels of wheat every year ! The poetry of the flail is gone. Cowper once wrote of that familiar sound we heard around the old barn : "Thump after thump resounds the constant flail, That seems to swing uncertain, and yet falls Full on the destined ear." Now it is the wonder-machine that does it all in one. In 1853 already, the New York Fair Machine Exhibition showed one of these field monarchs which 46 Through Wonderland threshed and winnowed the wheat, measured, bagged it ready for market, and recorded accurately the number of bushels, all by one continuous operation. AMONG THE COWBOYS. Now we pass through the grazing coun- try of Montana, and we come to the story of the cowboy. The engine whistles its shrill alarm every once in awhile, for herds of cattle are crossing the track and are threatening an obstruction. See ! how they scamper wild-like, on the right and on the left. Far away reaches the bunch -grass region, which cures in the dry air of summer and furnishes feed for winter. It is said to be more nutritious than the blue grass of Kentucky. Think of it ! a 100,000 head of range cattle are shipped every year to the Eastern market. This was a splendid winter for cattle, sheep and horses out here, and on Friday of July i Qth, 250 carloads of steers will be shipped from Dickinson. This is an early start and a good indication of a prosperous market. How sleek and fat these cattle look! I pass herds and herds. A range is not a palatial appointment by any means a one-story log cabin, a long-mud-covered to Alaska. 47 shed, a few sticks for a fence, and a host of children clinging to the top of them to view the passing train. There are finer ones but this is the average sample. The railroads own this land for forty miles on either side, and it is every man's land. All summer the steers roam in herds, and know no home and no man. Let a man on foot approach a big-horned steer, and he as soon would attempt to face a fero- cious bull. On horseback he is safe. In the fall the cowboy is sent out to search for miles around, and the ' ' round-up ' ' is made, when all cattle found are brought in promiscuously, and the owners select their steers by the brands upon them. Then, too, the calves have followed in with the mother-cow, and they are branded to roam abroad next turn-out. In winter the cowboy goes out to keep the herds at moving, else they hide in brush -lands, starve and freeze. The cowboy's life is a hard one. Dur- ing the month of the round-up he en- camps and fairly lives in his saddle. But he manages to have his fun. I notice rudely improvised race-tracks, and the in - tervals of rest bring him sports of horse- manship and midnight larks at far-away 48 Through Wonderland taverns. Ah ! he looks well astride a horse, with his broad-brimmed hat, his belted pistol and knife, his coiling rope, and long flowing hair. Over there the dust flies and six of them gallop along with a motion of grace that would attract attention in the finest city-park. The mud- hotel at Faldon amused me. It had such a pretentious sign over the log-hinged door. And yet I was told that aristocratic dealers from Chicago and St. Paul often have to lodge there, dividing their meals with the cowboy. It is one of the great prairie shipping places, easily reached from the inland. There is a law of honor among the range-people. If in shipment any strange cattle have strayed among them, they are loaded with the lot, the brand taken notice of, and by referring to the prairie-register the money of the steers is returned to the rightful owner. Cattle sell on feet at 4j^ cents per pound. At night in the dim outline as the engine set our pathway aglow with burning grass, I saw cowboys at rest with the horses tied along to stakes. I recalled a beautiful chapter in Washington Irving' s prairie life, which speaks so tenderly of his faith- ful desert-steed. Here and there sur- to Alaska. 49 prises of flower-patches catch your eye, and it must have been a picture like this, that made Hiawatha say : " "Tis the heaven of flowers you see there ; All the wild flowers of the forest, All the lilies of the prairie, When on earth they fade and perish, Blossom in that heaven above us." IN THE BELT RANGE MOUNTAINS. At Livingston, Montana, our sleeper was side-tracked at 3 o'clock of Wednes- day morning. I awoke early in silence and saw out of my berth window the snow-topped peaks that look down toward the Yellowstone. Before closed taxider- mist stores black bear and elk were play- ing to the limit of their ropes, and this wild aspect of things gave me the same sensations I experienced among the Alps. We tarry here to catch the east-bound over-land express, and then we will be off for the first great natural wonder of my trip the National Yellowstone Park. CLIMBING THE ROCKY MOUN- TAINS BY STAGE. VII. YELLOWSTONE PARK, JULY 22, 1895. You enter Yellowstone Park, and after six days you come out of it. and you tell the story of the Wonderland of the Worjd. This spot is a national reserva- tion sixty-five miles wide and seventy-five miles long -it is in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. You pass through Paradise Valley and enter by the Golden Gate, and that thought alone is inspiring to the pleasure-seeking pilgrims. It is hard, even now, to classify the impressions re- ceived, for they tumble along like the con- fused cascades we have seen. Even more have we witnessed -all the place seems but a covering of a seething, boiling cal- dron beneath the earth. No wonder the Indians had fear to tread this territory, for they had no other explanation of it but that the evil spirits inhabit it. And this superstition seems to find endorsement in the many names that savor of his satanic to Alaska. 51 majesty the " Devil's Slide " " Devil's Thumb " " Devil's Kitchen" " Devil's Frying Pan ' ' and the like. AMONG THE SHOOTING GEYSERS. I will reserve the story for another oc- casion to tell how the geysers shoot out their hot spray 200 feet aloft, and growl and roar with subterranean noises, then subside and wait for the next periodical mood ; how paint-pots bubble, as if imps were stirring the colored material to bring it to a proper consistency ; how the hot springs smoke over a stretch of 170 acres, and at a temperature of 190 Fahrenheit, shed their waters over towering terraces of alabaster, and steppes in shades of red, brightest scarlet and rose tint ; how pools of morning glory reflect in their limpid depths and heighten by their gentle vibra- tions the overhanging cloud, and fringe it with the ultramarine colors of the sea ; how volcanoes thump and thunder, dis- gorging volumes of mud ; how lakes and mountain heights have their steaming es- capes of the fires that burn for the ages be- low. Interspersed for miles, is the peace- ful beauty of valleys in which the water- falls mingle their music with mountain birds, and now through the gorges rush 52 Through Wonderland the wild streams, and yonder flows in the wilderness meadow the Gibbon river, full of the spirit of the hills " This swiftly-flowing river, This silver-gliding river, Whose springing willows shiver In the sunset as of old. They shiver in the silence Of the willow-clustered islands, While the sun-bars and the sand-bars Fill air and wave with gold." We follow the majestic Yellowstone un- til it brings us to its dizzy leap of 360 feet, and opens up to our vision the twelve-mile x chasm through which its contracted I! waters roll Alas ! for words to tell the U wonders of this Grand Canyon. Not \among the Alps have we seen its like. Transfixed upon Inspiration Point we stand, 1,500 feet aloft, and gaze upon the depth below, solemn as night, silent as death. Only two sounds we hear the river's melancholy moan, the eagle's shrill cry. Down there on several of the rocky tunnels are built the nests, four feet wide, and in them repose the young, eager to spread their wings, and, like their parents, demonstrate the mighty circles of American liberty. But beyond it all, and around it all, stand these pre- cipitous towers of stone, and between To Alaska. 53 them is cut the gorge, that is all aflame with color all is a sheet of crimson, draperies of green and brown a rainbow broken in pieces, and scattered up and down these spectral heights. Thomas Moran has sat down there to paint the vision, if you visit the Capitol city, see it- A STAGE DRIVE OF l6o MILES. To do the Park you must encircle it by stage. Before the Hot Springs hotel stand ready nine strong-built vehicles, and four heavy horses, to draw each over a divided circuit of 160 miles. The tourists to-day are 63 in number. They are well .% equipped for the journey -winter under- It garments, overcoat, duster or mackintosh/ / ' 8,000 feet above the level of the sea brings you nights of frost, and the moun- tain-peaks around you, all covered with snow, are the indicators of a cool clime. What expert Jehus, these stage drivers ! They handle their reins, and crack their whips like an artist, Most thrilling to whirl around these precipitous heights with a narrow margin to the wheel ! The yarns of the driver are often as highly colored as the Yellowstone chasm. In the lull of a slow climb I ventured to demon- strate to my youthful expert of four-in- 54 Through Wonderland hand, the usefulness of ministers in the* world. He seriously answered: "Yes, my father had intended making a minister of me also but he found me so truthful, that he thought he had better make a stage-driver out of me. " The witty re- tort made the coach*full roar at my ex- pensethey were a congenial set, my fellow tourists, At the Grand Canyon I preached to an audience representing al- most every State in the Union. I had the brawny stage drivers invited to worship, and they looked grotesque amid this gathering, But they were the most devout listeners, and one of them con- fessed that it was the first sermon he had heard in fifteen years on these hills, and the eighth sermon in his life-time. LIFE IN THE ROCKIES. The Government has cavalry soldiers stationed at different points of the tourist's route* They protect the geyser-forma- tions from relic-hunters, secure the woods from camp-fire, and guard the mountain passes for the stages. Special guards scour the wilds to arrest poachers. It is interesting to meet the "campers" on the lonely highways. City bred families, of a romantic turn, leave their homes of To Alaska. 55 luxury to rough it here. We pass such an Outfit. A mounted guide has by his side a dainty looking school girl of about six- teen. She is well mounted, richly gloved, and looks coyly from under her veil-drawn sun-bonnet. Surely she discountenances city complexion, and prefers the rustic bloom of the hills. Six pack-horses follow and a little colt i - all driven by the multier. They are laden down with canvas packs and look like a caravan of dromedaries. They run loose and follow the leader. An easy coach is a little pace behind, containing the residue of the family an aristocratic equipment. They break tent and squat where they please, and so have their flit- ting outing of the season. Fish from the streams, meats from the fifty-mile stations, with an occasional stolen game, supply the larder. As for wood to kindle the fire - well, there are billions of feet of waste timber lying on the hills. On a stretch of one hundred miles the road passes through a wilderness of pines that stand guard like stately sentinels all the way, and beneath them, as far as you can see, trees lie as thick as leaves, Amid all this waste is 56 Through Wonderland the paradise of the Rocky Mountain wild flower in almost every hue and variety. STORIES AROUND THE LOG-FIRE. At the mountain hotel the fire-logs are ablaze of an evening. A group of guests are joined by the local celebrities, and the scene is an inspiration for story-telling. Says a New Yorker to a Chicagoan in a word- combat of boast " Well, what superior thing have you about your fire equipment out there?" " We have, sir, something very superior in the way of es- capes," answered the Western man " we have an ingenious device of net, into which those endangered by fire will leap from the highest story, and will safely be caught without injury to body or soul." "Oh ! we can do better than that," in- terposed the New York man; " the other week the chief rushed to the fire, saw the situation, two men in the top-story window of a burning building ; he ordered the engineer to turn on the stream. When it reached up, he commanded the endangered men to sit on it, and by a second signal to the engineer, he gradually lowered the stream and so brought them safely down to the ground." A local fisherman broke in upon the laughter " It scarcely comes to Alaska. 57 up to my experience the other day I cast a line in the lake above. I soon had a tremendous bite, and when I pulled out the fish to land, the lake fell two feet." The soldier turned the current of incident to the more truthful experiences in moun- tain life. He told of the herds of elks he had seen in Hayden Valley, in groups of several hundred, and repeated the dis- covery of Captain Scott's party in March, 1894, when visiting the winter ranges of the game. They invaded the wilderness- domain on Norwegian snowshoes, and found a ' ' cache " of a poacher who just had finished slaughtering six buffaloes, by driving them into the snow. Buffalo heads are sold at $500 a-piece. He was arrested. Since then the law reads that hunting or killing of birds or animals in the park is prohibited fine$i,ooo, imprisonment not more than two years. Campers and tour- ists must have fire-arms sealed. AN EXPERIENCE WITH A BEAR. It was our good fortune to pass many of the animals of the Rockies in their wild state We came across seven bear, but it did not become exciting until in an evening-walk back of the Lake Hotel, we encountered a cinnamon specimen of 400 58 Through Wonderland pounds. We treed him, and from the middle limbs he growled down at us, and ground his teeth together like the clatter of two stones hit one upon the other. His black companion scampered over the hills, every once in a while looking back. Little did Mr. Bruin know who might be master of the situation. Had he but feigned to come down in a little exhibition of rage, he could have seen a foot race over rocks and through swamps without any regard to ministerial clothes or pro- priety. A whole dozen of bears fight around the hotel at night over the kitchen refuse barrel. The metropolis of the American trout- kingdom is Yellowstone Lake. It is filled with fish as London is filled with human beings. I never could have conceived that the fly could lure so many captives in a given hour. From the time of four o'clock to six, two boats of three men and one lady brought in 130 specimens of an average pound and quarter fish. It was considered a small catch. From the stage, along the Yellowstone-river you could see schools playing in the translucent water,- counting thousands to the mile. Beyond the first attempt, fishing up here is a to Alaska. 59 slaughtering business Trout that would sell at one dollar a piece in New York, are allowed to lie in strings of fifty and more by the boats for the bears to devour at night. On the brink of the Yellowstone Park 300 Bannock warriors are up in arms to avenge the slaughter of seventeen of their tribe. There were 133 fresh elk skins in their camp in violation of the Wyoming laws, Princeton University students on a geological tour were reported as lost but they have made their way to the Park. Per- haps it is providential that I leave these premises at this time anyhow the toma- hawk in history and poetry is good enough for me. AMONG THE INDIAN AND WIG- WAM OF THE WILD WEST. VIII. CASCADE MOUNTAINS, JULY 24, 1895. The evening star ! Alone by the car window I sit to-night. Around me he sleeper curtains are drawn and the pas- sengers have gone to rest. But I tarry I would commune a little with that bright luminary of the western sky and revel in the memories of my travels. Across the Atlantic that lone star had accompanied me, and now in my transcontinental tour it looks with a benign radiancy upon me again. Nigh 3,500 miles have I already journeyed, through prairies, plains and valleys, over mountains, rivers and lakes, of * ' kaleidoscopic variety ' ' and as darkness has come, that unchangeable friend ever shines upon my path. Thy constancy is sweet I will say my evening prayer toward thee, for not far above thee is my unchangeable God. Through the wilderness of forests I flit how silent the night ! But listen I By a lone pine-log to Alaska* 6 1 station we halt for a moment. Under the dim glare of a suspended lantern belated maidens and young men sing and make merry, and a harmonica accompanies their woodland song. The music of night stirs up the tenderest memories when far away. Again, my palatial overland cara- vansary moves on and now, good-night! IN THE LAND OF GOLD. I thought that we never would get across the State of Montana. The North- ern Pacific railroad traverses it for 800 miles. This corporation is a vast system and a great land-owner. From St. Paul to the Pacific coast it holds 36,000,000 acres of soil, and in Montana alone it has 17,000,000. You can't conceive of Mon- tana's area so well on the map but you tnay put all of the Eastern States into it, besides New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and have a little margin left for Maryland. It is the mineral State of the Union, and its output of gold, silver, copper and lead is about $4:5,000,000 a year. Helena is its capital, and though it has but 13,000 inhabitants, it is the richest city of its size in the world its assets are $25,000-, ooo, its bank surplus about $4,000,000, and its individual deposits 62 Through Wonderland nearly $9,000,000. In it lives the Irish Robert Cruse, who for twenty years was counted the fool of the town, for spending his daily mining wages "on a plant in which he had faith. At last the lesson of perseverance flashed upon the Western world he sold part interest to an English syndicate for $4,000,000, and now he is no longer a fool. Gold ! gold ! for half a century it has made men wanderers on the face of this part of the earth. Into these rocky gulches men trudged from the far eastern homes, and came to desert-spots, where never a garden grew a vegetable and no grass was seen. At night they had be- come princes and next day they again were paupers. In the fury of the rush they had found and then man, woman and child affected the western style of fashionable gambling and they lost. Millionaires and paupers in Montana are its greatest products. PASSING THE INDIAN WIGWAM. Ah ! the Indian that child of the forest. I knew him best in Longfellow. The only slight token of civilization that I found in him according to my early h Alaska. 63 mind, was his cornfield. The Hiawatha- poet draws the picture " All around the happy village Stood the maize fields, green and shining, Waved the green plumes of Mondamin, Waved his soft and sunny tresses, Filling all the land with plenty." Well, that which is the greatest staple crop of the country is of American origin, cultured among the Indians at the time of discovery by Columbus. It is growing wild in parts of Central America, but ac- cording to Humboldt, maize or Turkish corn was carried to the old continent from the new. Not the Indian of Buffalo BilPs show- but the Indian of the western wigwam, is what interests me to-day the Indian of the tomahawk and the pipe-of-peace ; of the war-dance and the deer-hunt the Indian on his native trail. At one time all this land was his hunting ground to- day he lives on reservations. It is one of the many illustrations of the law the sur- vival of the fittest. The " Blackfeet," * ' Flat-Heads, " " Missoulas, " " Yaki- mas," 4 ' Puyallups," and others I passed. Yonder scene brings up my school-boy fancies, when pictures of this wild man showed him in war-dress, astride his steed. 64 Through Wonderland A copper back ground of hill brings to bold relief seven riders of the savage tribe. Plumes and feathers, gaudy cloaks and wavy black hair, undulate with measured motion in the wind, as the cloud of dust rolls back and up from beneath the hoofs of their flying ponies. Ah ! there are your artists of horsemanship. Now here close by we pass the squaws slowly plod- ding down the hillside one by one. Hat- less they sit on horses, ladened with the family drudgery child in front, child on back, a frisky colt by their side, and a sneaky cur of a dog bringing up the rear. They smoke the pipe, as they go along; with the air of sleepy contentment. THE CIVILIZATION OF THE INDIAN, I am thinking of the civilizing process of the Indian. A wheat inspector by my side discourses of the Cceur De Lene, tk Heart of the Arrow/' a tribe into whose valley he often descends. He speaks of them as a lazy set, who ridicule the young' when they return from training school, and soon induces them to lay aside the civilized g.'irb and don again the savage blanket. This tribe have their reservation by the famous gold mine hills, and their rich land reaches fifty miles across. A to Alaska. 65 few years ago the Government gave over $1,000,000, or $i, too to each of the i, TOO men, women and children, for the cession of a strip of their productive lands. But the civilization of the Indian is no failure- -and missionary work is doing it, I had a talk with a full-fledged Indian preacher of the Yakima tribe, who was accompanied by a Puyallup representative, to go to Tacoma to meet an official to se- cure the removal of the agent of their reservation. He was cheating' in a high- handed way in managing the sales of product on the Indian farms. The Yakima Valley has the richest soil of the country, and this savage tribe of 2,000, have turned out to be farmers and horse- breeders. They have all of the modern machinery, plow their farms of 300 acres, and reap with the binder. But the lazy instinct employs the white man to do most of their work. Many of the Indian farmers have bank deposits of $2,000, and some of their farms are valued at $10,000. This Indian preacher was of the Methodist persuasion the Cceur De Lene are all Catholics. I asked him what name they have for God, in their language. He said it was a new name to their tongue, and they 66 Through Wonderland say God and Jesus Christ, as we do. He Was a tall red*face~ spoke English, as a child begins to walk and had no syco* phant air about him. The stern, hardened features of tbe savage were there, no polish or suavity of manners accompanied his talk, and when he was done with me, he even walked away without a courtesy, and never looked back again. It will take several generations of gospel grace until those harsh lines are eliminated from his face. All along the reservation districts where civilization has given houses to the Indian you will find that the " tepee " or wigwam still prevails. The Indian eats in the house, but prefers to sleep in the tepee, summer and winter. There he reclines on the earth, with feet toward the centre, and a smouldering fire, built by the squaw, to keep his feet warm. Alas ! how the glory of the Indian has passed away. The pale-face has left to him a place to breathe and live- but that is about all. IN THE RISING SEAPORT OF THE NORTHWEST. IX. TACOMA, WASH., JULY 26, 1895. At last we have come to Tacoma -situ- ated on the Mediterranean of the Pacific. From the hotel veranda, bearing the city's name, can be seen Mt. Rainier, sixty miles, away, rearing its snow-capped peak into the clouds, 14,444 feet high. Of it you may say " Mountain, thou image of eternity 1 Oh ! let not foreign feet inquisitive, Swift in untrained aspirings, proudly tempt Thy searchless waste 1 what half-taught fortitude Can balance unperturbed above the clefts Of yawning and unfathomable ice That moat thee round ; or wind the giddy ledge Of thy sheer granite !". I was glad to strike the State of Wash* ington, for it was rightly styled the " Pennsylvania of the Northwest." I shook off the dust of the alkali region and awoke to the sweet altitude of the Cascade heights. For eight minutes, buried in the two-mile Stampede tunnel, the engine steamed upon points of vision most wonder- 68 Through Wonderland ful ranges of timber-land! 160,000,- 000,000 feet of the finest timber in the world. Now I pass along the hop-fields, 60,000 bales of which afe shipped via Balti- more to Europe. The sulphur will soon smoke out of the barn-cupolas, and the bleached pfoduct will go out to the foreign marts to give the wild stimulus of beer. RESTING AT TACOMA HOTEL. I express my delight, now that I can brush off the dust of the prairie fields, and after one long stretch of two 1 night's car riding, can don my more conventional garb, and find myself a gentleman. And first of all my mail ! 1 have not heard from friends in the East since first I started upon my zigzag wandering amid the wilds. Here they are letters, all in a tremendous pile. How sweet these missives ! Had they wings to come hither so quickly ? Had they intelligence to find their way all across this continent ? Think of it but fifty years ago letters traveled hither by coach at the rate of four miles to the hour and now they traverse the land from ocean to ocean in the marvellous time of six days. I like this city. It is euphonious in name, and rises proudly on a hill* like To Alaska. 69 some cathedral dome. It aspires to be the greatest seaport of the Northwest and ex- tends its commerce to Liverpool and South Africa, to Yokohama and Hong Kong by sea, and from Pacific's West .to Atlantic's East by land. It boasts of wheat ship- ments -2,500,786 centals, and lumber shipments 62,300,000 feet, and sends its Yaki.ma fruit to Boston. A CITY FIFTEEN YEARS OLD, From a struggling lumber camp of 720 souls in 1880, Tacoma has attained to the wonder achievement of a city of 50,000 inhabitants in 1895. Its streets are laid in planks at $7 per fhousand feet, and has but one exception. Its business struc- tures are stone, and five and seven stories high, and it is slowly building another $1,000,000 hotel by its Puget Sound. This is all glowingly true, and to the eastern ear it is the beckoning voice of a western flight. But, young man, the boast of the west is also to be taken with reservation for these coast-cities of the northwestern Pacific have a tale of sorrow too. A great boom is often a bubble that will break -and Tacoma and Seattle and even Spokane will all have to gather their Jo Throiigh Vbonderland achievements, and start them afresh, on hewer and more conservative bases. YOUNG MAN, GO WEST. Very facetiously it is said ( ' Ever since* Columbus took Horace Gfeeley's advice and went West, youth and hope have faced in that direction." The West has its future but Greeley's future is more irl the yesterday tha'n in the to-morrow. A booming city is good enough for gamblers in real estate, to buy and sell over night, but every boom of the West has had its explosion and terrible reaction. Eastern capital comes out here, and generally stays too long^-too long in the booming high-water tide. The story has been told in these panic times^ it was intoxicated with its 10 per cent, investments, and tarried to come home shorn. I mean not to disparage the West but I wait for a conservative West. The West belongs to the whole country, and it is the East that has made the West- eastern capital, east- ern men. Most of the farms here that thrived on investments of the East have been settled by adventurers. If you give me the tenacious and plodding and indus- trious Berks county fariner, I am willing to believe in the farms here very To Alaska. but later only, under present outlook, will I say invest ! The man who is feed in a moderate" competency, I advise to stay East. The young man, who is willing to work, can do as well West as East, and no better. If he is shrewd and has capital, he may grow rich very soon but capital is as potent east of the Rockies and the- Miss^ issippi and the Schuylkill in the avenues of investment as in the West. There you have a homestead, and the charming history of family, and sweet amenities of birthright here all is stumps on the one side, and a new civilization on the other. Church-life is not the faith of the fore- fathers under the century trees of old Zion, and the* willowed graveyards bear" not the tombstone of a line of ancestry. People here select religion so largely along the line of the pioneer-spirit they have sacrificed all to make money. Through the church to business is much the thought. In coast cities, out of forty preachers, thirty-six often leave in five years, beyond that, four are the patriarchs. Once out, it is hard to get back easy enough to get West, not so easy to get East. Those who have come have done 72 Through Wonderland wonders in accumulation of wealth the majority have just lived. Wonderful West ! But first have money then come West. IN TACOMA STREETS. This city has a great future, but it is a type of booming- times. Five years ago building-lots sold at fabulous prices -now they sell at one-half. It is again in the upward-tide, and with it, rise its sister- cities. But it must be conservative. It had its rich men by great counts over night they became poor. Bricks then Were $10 and $12 per thousand, and now they are $6 -and bricklayers had $5 and $6 wages, now they are pleased with $3 and so the gradation runs. From a Union Employment Co.'s board I take the following' Wanted !" dishwasher, good place timber-feller, pay every week good man for ranch, $20 per month facket seller berry-picker, long job hook tender, good wages 10 saw-mill men, $1.50 per day cook for small crew, male or female 2 milkers, wages $20 to $25 per day wood choppers, 1 6-inch wood, 70 cents cord, tools furnished head sawyer, good wages knot sawyer, 10 cents per thousand swamper and to Alaska. 73 barker, $1.75 per day skid headman, steady work cord wood cutter, 75 cents per cord 5 brick yard laborers, $i.po per day and board 3 sailors for coasters, $30 per mos. hoke tender for a donkey or woods, $2-$2.5the kind of man the kind of church building. It is waste expenditure to place an inferior man at these local points. A good preacher is required, having social qualities and ex- ecutive ability, and tact. He is to match himself with superior talent in other pul- pits, and he must win people on social and humane grounds. The outlook of a. pre- tentious church-property is to be guaran- teed. Therefore more concentration of mission money is necessary to the cities which are the distributing points of peo- ple, as well as of churchly-standing. Other commissions have large edifices and so must you. The start must be a large lot and the rest will come. Rev, Zweizig, of Portland, has done a good work here on the grounds just defined. His sermons and public bearing have won the very best material for his congregation, and he has much deference shown him by outsiders on the street. His chapel and 1 14 Through Wonderland parsonage are built on a valuable corner- lot, 100x100, in the heart of the city, und these prospective assurances of success are, therefore, the shortest and cheapest cut to the end in view. As the city was wrapped in the smoke of the forest fires, I saw little of its perspec- tive in nature. It rains not, from July to September, to clear the atmosphere of such periodical disturbances but then the rest of the time it does nothing but rain. This fact is material for an all-round fund of jokes the weather, beastly wet and solemnly dry. The most palatial resi- dences are built of frame brick and stone would absorb the moisture in winter. Wood is the fuel. Pennsylvania coal at $18 a ton, Vancouver at $9, Oregon at $7.50, are too costly a luxury. The pro- fession of the old-fashioned chimney- sweep is therefore an established factor here -a leather liberty-cap singles him out on the street corner. Wood is piled up in the rough before houses, and steam saw-machines make the round to cut it to lengths at one dollar a cord, and Chinese follow to chop it for use at twenty five cents a cord. The postman drops his mail in the door slot, and signals the in- to Alaska. 115 mates with a ball-whistle, very gently, but heard any time with an exultant startle. The rounds of the mail-boxes are made by a sort of a chariot vehicle. The postman stands one foot from the ground, and drives from point to point, gathering the mail into a dasher-box of his sulkey. The trolley company has the contract of sprink- ling the streets along its route. One of its cars is transformed into an ingenious sprinkler. It speeds along and throws out elbow spouts of a 50 -feet span, playing like a fountain, drawing in the arms, spider-like, to escape wagons, bicycles, etc., and again throwing them out at will all the while speeding on and sprinkling. REFRESHED BY MARK TWAIN. By a courtesy I listened to Mark Twain, who filled the Marquani Opera House to overflowing. The inimitable and irrepress- ible Twain ! He is a picturesque man to look at on the stage, with grizzly hair, eyebrow and moustache a lazy cynic in the outflow of his drawling humor. He talked 90 minutes and virtually said noth- ing but the audience was in a constant roar. Well, such men are a blessing too for a laugh, breaking through a thick cloud of trouble, is worth its weight in Il6 Through Wonderland gold. Poor Twain has lost all his hard- earned fortune, $750,000, and now he is on a lecture tour around the world to re- trieve it. He repeats the experience of Sir Walter Scott -I hope he may succeed as well as he. I attended divine service in a $180,000 church on Sunday night popular preacher, fine music. I was not edified, but I was instructed. It is well often to learn how not to do things, as well as how to do them. The preacher was a decided success but the sermon was not. To en* hance the spectacular performance in the pulpit, he announced at the close of the sermon that the professor at the organ would give a scenic interpretation of Moses by the mount, and so show to advantage the beauties of the new instrument. The electric lights were turned down, and the audience sat in darkness, whilst the key- board and professor only were visible. The distant tramp of the hosts of Israel soon were heard and the trumpet calls gradually grew more and more distinct, as the $10,000 organ disgorged it's stops one by one. Now the mutterings of thunder roll up fiercely louder and louder ; sud denly the electric lights blink from the 7, of Rio Janeiro, of Washington, D. C., may have greater endowments but none has such a clear sky as that which overhangs Mt. Hamilton, 4,443 feet above sea-level I never had such an appreciation of the science of astronomy as when standing amid these appliances and these records of achievement. Anyhow, it is the oldest science of man it was most natural for him to become acquainted with the stars at once. The Psalmist was a star-gazer, he slept as a shepherd under the midnight heavens. We know more of the number and magnitude and distances of the heavenly bodies but with all our instru- ments we are no nearer knowing every- thing than the ancient was. In olden 2O2 Through Wonderland times the study of the stars was a re- ligion, and those burning orbs had become gods, good and evil. But now the scientific astronomer has displaced the Egyptian and Chaldean sage with his superstition, and we study the heavens as the hand- work of God. The eternal fixedness of those stars ! From century to century their fires never went out, and though the earth has had many changes, the stars above seem immutable through the ages. Suddenly you see a fiery flash, and it seems as if the largest of the hosts of Heaven had fallen. It was no star only a meteor it was in comparison only as the dew-drop to the ocean. My first look on that night was through the 12-inch equatorial. The telescope brought me Venus. Now it is the morn- ing, then it is the evening star. To the naked eye it is only a little planet, and the telescope discloses it more brilliant but who would think it was nearly the size of the earth 7,800 miles in diameter, and its nearest point 27,000,000 miles away from us. Next we lowered the telescope and captured Saturn. That is the most won- derful and magnificent spectacle of the to Alaska. 203 solar system. It is 1,000 times the size of the earth, and is 906,000,000 of miles away from the sun. And the telescope brought it so near that I could see its marvellous formation. I wonder what Galileo thought when he first saw it? There are three broad, flat, thin, concen- tric rings that surround it, lying in the same plane, and barely separated. Yet the first ring is 21,000 miles wide, and is separated from the next ring by 1,790 miles. The second ring is 34,000 miles away, and is away from the planet 20,000 miles. Each ring rotates separate from the planet, and Saturn is accompanied by eight large moons. Now when this sys- tem of planets is viewed under motion, when moons rise and set half moons and full moons what a nocturnal spectacle to behold ! But with silent awe I stepped into the large dome, and there saw the thirty-six equatorial, the large telescope. What scientific 'knowledge ! what mechanical ingenuity it required to build ! It reached up to the open roof and looked for Hercules the largest nebulae in the northern sky. The naked eye saw a lonely star but the telescope showed 204 Through Wonderland that star to be a thousand suns, with each sun a system of planets, such as ours has. What feelings are stirred as that mighty instrument is moved across a span of sky, all powdered with stars ! but at last you find that one star to be "a cluster in Hercules." That midnight ride down the steep de- clivities was dangerous but my thought was lost in the continuous gaze to the starry heavens I only looked up. I had felt a little proud of my long journey, and the wonders I had seen but now I was humble. I calculated supposing I wanted to take a trip to Saturn, a planet in our system, going on the train that might bring me from Philadelphia straight to Mt, Hamilton. Well, at the rate of 30 miles an hour, I would have to travel a million times that distance and I would get there after 2,000 years. Our sun is more than a million times as large as the earth and yet one star in Pleiades is equal in glory to 1,200 suns. On and on rolled the four-in-hand adown Mt. Hamilton's side. I feared nothing but my heart was full of gratefulness for the telescope. With the microscope at hand, it can't make of us skeptics. If to Alaska. 205 the one shows us that the worlds above us are infinite, the other shows that the worlds below us are also infinite. Are those worlds inhabited ? Let that be a thought now what an easy analogy to prove the reality. Then I thought of the one central throne around which all suns and systems revolve, and from the dark- ness around me, a voice seemed to say 4 ' Canst thou by searching find out God ? Canst thou find out the Almighty to per- fection ? It is high as Heaven, what canst thou do ? Deeper than hell, what canst thou know?" But I comforted myself with the assurance this God who made all things, is even my Father. XXV. THE GARDEN OF THE GODS, WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER, Beneath the rocky peak that hides In clouds its snow-flecked crest, Within these crimson crags abides An Orient in the West. These tints of flame, these myriad dyes. This Eastern desert calm, Should catch the gleam of Syrian skies, Or shade of Egypt's palm. As if to bar the dawn's first light These ruby gates are hung ; As if from Sinai's frowning height These riven tablets flung. But not the Orient's drowsy gaze, Young Empire's opening lids Greet these strange shapes, of earlier days Than Sphinx or Pyramids. Here the New West its wealth unlocks, And tears the veil aside, Which hides the mystic glades and rocks The red man deified. This greensward, girt with tongues of flame f With spectral pillars strewn, Not strangely did the savage name A haunt of gods unknown. Hard by the gentle Manitou His healing fountains poured ; Blood-red, against the cloudless blue, These storm-tossed Titans soared. to Alaska. 207 With torrents wild and tempest blast, And fierce volcanic fires, In secret moulds has Nature cast Her monoliths and spires. Their shadows linger where we tread, Their beauty fills the place ; A broken shrine its votaries fled A spurned and vanished race. Untouched by Time the garden gleams, Unplucked the wild flower shines, And the scarred summit's rifted seams Are bright with glistening pines. And still the guileless heart that waits At Nature's feet may find, Within the rosy, sun-lit gates, A hidden glory shrined. His presence feel to whom, in fear, Untaught, the savage prayed, And, listening in the garden, hear His voice, nor be afraid. A STUDY OF THE CHINAMAN THE DANGER OF IMMI- GRATION, XXVI, READING, SEPT. 30, 1895. Lay down the map of the world, and there is no land marked on it, to which the finger of God points as conspicuously as to America, Write across it Oppor- tunity ! It really would seem as if God's last plan for the human race were to be worked out here. It has been the Mecca for the pilgrimage of the nations of the earth it has been the scene of the greatest immigration in the history of the world. In that way the land was first possessed, and the early immigrant is our ancestor. He was, how- ever, of God's elect for the new world, and the command was " defile not there- fore the land which ye shall inhabit, wherein I dwell/' When we speak of the early immigrant, we speak of our fore- fathers. They were of the best stock in Europe. When they came they brought To Alaska. 209 with them the Sacred Book, the sanctity of the Sabbath, the Christian civilization. They came hither for conscience sake and for a new home, to be fostered under the care of a liberty-loving government. They made the history for the first pages of the new Republic, and they set the example of the genuine American citizen. They possessed the land for a heritage to their children and we are their offspring. They wrote their names on rocks, and in- termingled them with the waters and valleys and mountains, that they might be among us forever. They impressed their character and religion and heroism upon our civil institutions, and transmitted country and government to us with God's mandate " Defile not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit, wherein I dwell.'* But the immigrant of to-day is of a new type, and he does not bear the same salu- tary relation to America. He has become the burning question of political economy, the subject of special legislation, and the theme of injured patriotism in the rostrum and the pulpit. The danger with Ameri- cans to day is, that they revel too much in the self-complacent thought of our country's inherent greatness, and are 2i o Through Wonderland blind to the perils that are at work among the foundations upon which its hope of perpetuity rests. One of its greatest dangers lies in immigration. We had hoped that the old country would, ere this time, stem the tide of the outgoing masses. But the same expellent forces are yet at work over there. The poor man has been offered no better chance for himself and his children ; he drudges along as of old, and pays in- creased ' ' blood-tax ' ' for the army. Many would escape the Socialistic, Nihilistic, Imperialistic revolutions of society and state, and more would flee the slavery of enlistment. The New Land more than ever charms the crowded masses by the wide prairie-fields, and extended river beds, with the chance of plenty of room, and more to eat, and so they come. Then, too, the railroads and steam-lines vie with each other to carry the immi- grant the cheapest passage from Europe to America is no longer $100 the steerage passenger pays only $8 from Liverpool. With such liberal transportation, the honest hard-working peasant may come, and the hundreds of thousands of the to Alaska. 211 tramp and criminal class do come. There lies the evil. THE PERILS OF IMMIGRATION. The typical immigrant to-day is the peasant and the criminal. Whatever may be your theory of a wholesale transplant- ing of the foreigner, a true observer must admit that the tide comes in too fast. That we have room enough is not the question we can place one billion people ; but America with all its missionary forces cannot remould this foreign element fast enough and assimilate it into its genius of government. TJie question at our door is shall the stranger foreignize us, or shall we Americanize the stranger ? In seven years we had more arrivals from foreign shores than we had people in colonies. Lord Salisbury had the charity to think of America, very much as the Russian Czar does of Siberia- a fit place for the troublesome element of so- ciety. He said in a public speech, " the best way to reform Ireland is to export the Irish to America." So in 1887 no less than 56,670 Irishmen came over. In the same year 45,977 Englishmen, 81,864 Germans and 300,000 of other nationalities arrived in Castle Garden. At our present 212 Through Wonderland rate of increase, we will in 1900 have in this country over 18,000,000 foreigners, and at least 22,000,000 children of foreign parentage, or 40,000,000 out of 80,000,- ooo inhabitants, who are not Americans, to American sympathy born and bred. Rome as a centralized government might have been able to manage such a homoge- neous element thrust upon its shores but we are a local government, with state- rights, in which the people are the repre- sentative rulers ; and where inhabitants are not bound together by local sympathy, and by a community of ideas they cannot assimilate, and who therefore cannot maintain such a kind of government. Of course the large proportion of this foreign mass, is not only new among us, but very anomalous. Its influence upon society is one of the great danger-points. Among us is the citizen of foreign-birth who is found in the learned professions or successful business walks. Notwithstand- ing his Christian protest, we have to fear the Europeanizing of our Sabbath. This tendency is not of the children of the early immigrants. Facts show us that the crim- inal records preponderate largely toward the foreign population. Analyze the To Alaska. 213 hoodlum element of your cities, and trace their birth. The inmates of your prisons and work-houses and houses of correction are seventy-six per cent, foreign-born. Of the unfortunate insane in this State, 5,000 of the 6,000 are of foreign extraction, and as our laws admit this burden of other lands, you and I pay the taxes for it. Look at the political evil our rabble- ruled cities. The total foreign population of New York City is eighty per cent., if you include children. In 1900 there will be 25,000,000 foreigners west of the Miss- issippi. The vote of the great western and eastern cities is a marketable one the immigration vote is bought in blocks, and Presidents are made and unmade by it. We have the Mormon vote, the Irish vote, the German vote, the Catholic vote, the Socialistic vote and you can write immigration on all of them. They cast their ballots with the great parties of the country, one or the other, and they go in the mass but there is a party-bid for them. The problem of protection to American labor lies at the door of Castle Garden. The greater the immigration, the greater the protection to the employer, and the 214 Through Wonderland smaller the protection to the employee. The only direct corrective for the perils to our country by immigration lies with Con- gress. Give us a law of restriction a law of plain Saxon honesty, and simplicity of interpretation. Under this law pass another iron-clad one a law of discrimi- nation. If foreigners henceforth come to us we want to say what kind shall come. One other law pass, and we are saved. Expect every foreigner to be Americanized if he would be an American citizen ; make him give an intelligent answer, at least to the meaning of the Fourth of July, when he gets his naturalization papers and de- mand of him to be a resident seven years before he casts his vote. The son of an American born may graduate with honors from the highest college in the land at 18 years of age, and must wait three years more before he dare vote, whilst the ignorant Hun or any other casts his ballot for the ruler of the country almost as soon as he sets foot on our shore. Restrict ! Discriminate ! and let the immigrant vote when he is American enough to vote. THE CHINAMAN AS IMMIGRANT. My journey to our western land led me to the study of the Mongolian as an imnii- To Alaska. 215 grant particularly the Chinaman. That there should be such a distinctive thing as a " Chinatown," is already typical of the disintegration of the cementing idea of a country of self-government. So we have little Mormons, little Irelands, little Scan- dinavians, little Germanics, and the like scattered up and down in America. This is natural, but unfortunate for by this foster-spirit of separateness, the foreigner cherishes to carry his language and cus- toms, and nationality, as a distinct factor, into our politics and government. The Hollander is not reckoned among the im- migrants for he settled the Dutch Colony at Albany, and then stopped migrating. The Scandinavians are perhaps the best type of immigrants all through, who come with the great mass to our shore. The Chinaman is least to be feared, for he cares nothing for America, only for the American dollar. He is not a menace to American institutions, only to American labor. This is the land of oriental vision. But for restriction of Chinese immigration, hordes of those 360,000,000, would have swept upon our western shore. As it is, there are now 75,000 Chinese in California 216 through Wonderland alone, of which number 20,000 are in San Francisco. It has become the fashion to disparage the Chinese as a people of resources and ability, and to praise the Japanese as their great superiors. The success of arms and the advantage of a borrowed civilization is the cause of this popular opinion. Under Gocl's providence, China is the supreme thought of every European power to-day. The road of a Christian civiliza- tion only leads by way of Japan into China and of China, among Oriental na- tions, the historian will yet have to write " the last shall be first. " The Chinese has his great scholar and his wonderful literature therefore great mental capabilities. He has skill, and is inimitable in his original arts. Industry, patience and love of detail make him suc- ceed anywhere. He is self-possessed and has wonderful adaptability. The Japanese is a great imitator the Chinese is some- thing more he is the Yankee of the Orient. But he is not liked on the Pacific coast, for he has gotten to be very omni-present there. Though legislated against, he is yet universally employed. As a servant, to Alaska. 217 he is the wood-cutter, street-cleaner, house menial, hotel help, and its most expert chef. He is more than a laundry man ; he is in the salmon canneries of the Columbia river has the best truck gardens outside of cities owns the fruit wagons into the Yosernite, runs the largest butchering business is the expert grape gatherer, because of nimble fingers builds rail- roads, and repairs roads, attends in the barber-shop and at the public bath he is apt, industrious and patient everywhere. But the Chinaman will hardly help to embellish America, to expand its resources or to enrich it. He does not come to stay. He sends all his money back to China, even the dead bones of his friend. Nor can you Americanize him. The highest Chinese official may don the civilized garb but his family will not. You can't easily Christianize him. His religion is the worship of ancestors, and its practices are interwoven with his trade and amusement. He is shaved religiouslv, and takes his bath religiously. To Christianize China you must first recon- struct the whole fabric of Chinese govern- ment, custom and life the Chinese Japa- nese war means more than the settlement 2i8 Through Wonderland of differences between two nations it means the Christian civilization of those nations. The recent massacre of missionaries in China is evidence of the obstacles in the way toward Christian civilization, under the existing- society enslavement of that people. All these bloody troubles were started by the scholars and nobility, and not by the common people. Tracts and publications have called them out ; the massacre of Tient-Tsin was provoked by the book, ' ' Deathblow to Corrupt Doc- trines/ 1 Magazines of Shanghai con- tained illustrated articles showing how foreigners cut up Chines bodies and boil them down into patent medicine. Mission- aries are called " pig-goat devils, and the literati of China have styled the Christian religion ' ' the faith of the crucified hog." Missionaries are charged with stealing babies, scooping out their eyes and hearts and selling them for $50 a set. The eyes are used, they say, to charm silver out of lead, and only Chinese eyes can do this. Circulars, by the thousands, were distributed inciting to kill the Chris- tians, and they were illustrated to show how it should be done they are being to Alaska. 219 burned tied to crosses and being whipped they lie on the ground and Chinamen pour slops into their mouths through fun- nels. Their teachings about our religion is something most ludicrous, and is meant to incite to great passion therefore the recent massacre at Ku Cheng. History repeats itself, and this mighty empire must be upturned, hierarchy and all and that is the remote cause of this war it is opening China to Christian civilization. My visit to Chinatown in San Francisco has indelibly fixed itself upon my mind and heart. I have already described it elsewhere. It matters not where you find the Chinaman on the earth; in their heathen state, they have a mighty wall around them they are a mysterious colony, and altogether to themselves and for themselves. That night spent in their temple, amusement hall, gambling hells, and places of weird oriental life, was something like Dante's visit to the nethei world. In underground ways, the starrec guide led me by the light of a tallow dip and when those opium -dens of vice wen opened, there gleamed through the smoke made heavy by the dim glare of littl< lamps, a pair of eyes from six bunks, tha 22O Through Wonderland looked like the spectre-eyes of hell itself. How their sallow cheeks sunk in as they took their long draughts from the opium- pipe ! Each whiff sent out a fresh layer of strangely-scented smoke to be added to the already dense cloud. There they lay 'till morning thick smoke their cover enjoying their opium feast ' till paralyzed into sleep. Alas ! these are the depths of vice to which a soul can sink. A beast hardly falls as far as a human being. Now, whatever the condition of China and the Chinamen, it lies within the possibility of a Christian civilization to lift both up to ennobling greatness. That this heathen is among us may be a Providence too it is not what he brings to us, but what we give to him, that may help to work out the divine plan for the oldest, largest and most benighted race of the orient. OUR COUNTRY EAST AND WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI. XXVII. READING, OCT. 7, 1895. The fathers of Massachusetts Bay once decided that the country west of Boston would never be very much populated. How little man understands man's own re- sources ! How little he knows of God's plan in the earth ! America is meant to decide many things for Christ's Kingdom in the centuries to come. Yes, there never was such a history of marvellous settlement of a country. In ten years the West made strides equal to fifty years east of the Mississippi. But electricity and steam entered as elements into this achievement. It is strange to record that our home-missionaries were the first to awaken interest in the possi- bilities of the region beyond the great rivers. Now look at it all. Not includ- ing Alaska, we have 2,970,000 square miles of land. Of this 1,500,000 is arable land. The United States is worth to-day 222 Through Wonderland $70,000,000,000, the land is worth $22,- 000,000,000, the railroads, $10,000,000,- ooo. To give a comparative idea of the greatness of this country, we need only to state that we might put all the inhabitants of the United States into Texas alone, and yet not have as dense a settlement as Ger- many has. Of our country we may say " the land is as the garden of Eden before them." We have got the land surely. It has been at making for many billions of years. The soil has been upturned by volcanic action, and refined by the great lakes and rivers, and washed down from the high mountains. The high water lines on the Salt Lake mountains, the glacier effects oi the canyons and ' ' bad-lands, ' ' and the mineral mixtures of many valleys indicate to us how this land was made. At one time we heard of "the great American desert. " We might as well expunge it from the map, for Utah has no greater waste land than Arizona or Nevada, or any other portion. Think of the active resources of this new country ! About 17,000,000 horse power of engine, locomotive and steam- boat is used to-day. The workingman by to Alaska. 223 these has more conveniences than the king and queen of a hundred years ago. In 1893 we use d $3,089,000 worth of manu- factured and grown things. We sent $640,000,000 worth to other countries* We spend $1,000,000 a day for building. Now if you just begin to calculate what these figures imply. You can't begin to enumerate in how many ways these figures set the wheels at work. The plows, and flails, and cars, and ships, and mines to furnish fuel, the lumber marts, and saw mills were all busy in a thousand ways that money was made. We gain wealth at the rate of $7,000,000 a day. One of the characteristics of the West is its largeness. There is a mighty horizon overhanging that country, and everything patterns after it mountains, rivers, ranches, railroads, crops, herds, business undertakings large ideas and large im~ aginations. Three things have to be solved for the West how to keep large land-grants out of the hand of speculators how to reclaim the arid regions by irri- gation, and how to find a larger market for the increased products. The fertility of soil is there, the grand scenery also, 224 Through Wonderland and the climate it has the outlook for the most healthful communities in the world. The young man who looks toward the West to find his fortune must, however, first sit down to count the cost. The wild speculative bubble is broken out there and the West is getting to be conservative a dollar is beginning to be worth only a dollar, the same as in the East. To go into a city, the same rules of success in business hold there as here you must have prosperous times and you must know how to do business. If the tilling of the soil invites you, a little capital is needed, for rented farms are less desirable West than East. To get along one can't de- pend on a fancied genius or luck but work is required, and the hardest kind of work. Intellect and business capacity and wide-awake enterprise are on the ground long ago, and one must watch these to run the race in their line. If you are a man of sentiment you must be willing to leave your memories behind. The old homestead is not out there, the patriarchal churchyard does not rest on the hillside, the generations of friends and relatives do not make the To Alaska. 225 community for your weddings and funerals everything is new except God's land. The religious character of the West is a great study. There are those from the East who have taken their faith with them, and a large influx of emigrants intermingle, who also once were religiously impressed. But now there are new environments for God's church and people. How we are moulded and remodeled by our environ- ments ! As you roll along over the conti- nent you now strike the great wheat belt, and the absorbing topic for all that region is, " wheat." You ride through the lumber region, and cattle region, and fruit region, and mineral region, and get to the great fisheries and railroad termi- nals, and there is nothing that has such a thorough hold upon the thought of the people as the respective industry of those parts of the country. Everything is on a grand scale through the ranch and gold regions only the church is a small thing. We do not find the church to boom up into anything conspicuously until we reach the city. The western city is a marvelous thing on the earth. It attained its growth as over night. It is filled with the progres- 226 Through Wonderland sive spirit of the age. It has large uni- versities of learning, and its asylums and institutions of charity, together with its art and library buildings, are of the most pretentious kind. Here and there cities have churches of the most elaborate style. But when we come to analyze the re- ligious spirit of the west we must do it with charity. Liberalism has intermingled with the religious thought of the west- and it is hard to build up a new church and make it burn with enthusiasm. The theatre in many cities is open as well as the church on the Lord's day. There is no rowdy roughness on the streets because of this it is a refined liberalism, which is all the harder to overcome. Among the masses there is an uneasy feeling, and nowhere do you find as numerous street-preaching as in the West The Salvation army abounds, the Adelphia Mission parades with instrument and song, with colors and bannered mottoes ; the Adventist woman sends out her plaintive warning night after night ; the cowboy preacher has his tent, and the Indian woman preacher her tent and so the yearning soul is groping amid the unsettled currents of religious experience and to Alaska. 227 seeks to find something for the void. There are master preachers in pulpits of the far West, but the response given to their work is yet too cold for any one minister to stay there a very long time. The prophesy perhaps is a correct one that the West will dominate the East. It has twice the room, and great resources, and when the centre of population once crosses the Mississippi, the political con- trol of this country will go with it. The church mission-work for us lies largely in the West. If it will be so great a part of this land, it ought to be something great for the Lord. But with all this praise for the far West, the Eden-spot of our land is not found until you enter again the State of Pennsylvania. The landscape out there is something grand for a picture high mountains, great rivers and sunsets over wide plains. But the lovely pastoral scenes belong to the East there is a home- feeling in them that is indescribable. Here are the hills, and the meadows, the little streams and the scattered woodlands and the all-prevailing farm-house, town and city. There is nothing in the West to equal the garden spots of Lancaster 228 Through Wonderland county, Lebanon Valley, Berks with its Oley and little Conestoga. How blessed in scenery we are ! Contentment ought to be written over our dwelling-place. More than all, with the beauty and plenty, that dwell with us, we too have the favor of God among us. Everywhere the church-spire points heavenward, we are in a settled land, and have fixed opinions of God. YELLOWSTONE PARK IN RET- ROSPECT. XXVIII. READING, OCT. , 1895. We live over our travels, again and again. Sweet is the contemplation of something that gilds the past sweet retro- spect ! We rock in the cushioned palace on wheels, and like a golden-lined dream, is our journey to the West. We go in thought, and out-do the speed of steam. Already we have come to St. Paul, 1,300 miles away, and yet a 1,000 miles more, and we have come to the Yellowstone It is but a little spot of earth, lying in the north-west corner of Wyoming, over- lapping into Idaho on the west, and Mon- tana on the north sixty-five miles wide, and seventy-five miles long. It nestles in the heart of the Rockies, with valleys 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, and mountain-peaks, 10,000 and 14,000 feet high. It is known as one of the greatest water-sheds on earth. From the north 230 Through Wonderland and north-west, the Madison and Gallatin and Jefferson fork into the Missouri, which enters into the Mississippi, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. From the east, the Yellowstone flows in a devious course of 1,300 miles, and casts its volume into the Missouri. From the west, the Snake, in a coil-like trail, steals its way to find the mighty Columbia, and buries its life in the Pacific. From the south, the Green, rushes in crazy ways, precipitates through Colorado canyons, and plunges into the suicidal grave of the Gulf of Cali- fornia. . This weird and enchanted spot is only of recent discovery. The rumors of west- ern hunters first awakened curiosity by stories of wildest fancy. But in 1870, Gen. Washborn was escorted to the inner wilds by Lieut. Doane of the United States army, and in 1871-72, Prof. F. V. Hayden, United States geologist, made a thorough discovery of it, under the sanc- tion of Congress and largely by his efforts, it became a national reservation. A ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN. Some day this place will be one of the few natural zoological gardens of our country. How the noble animals in their To Alaska. 231 wild state have become exterminated ! But they too know, as well as man, a good thing- when they find it, and by instinct they tarry within these protected confines and beast and bird increase in numbers. Here you find almost on intimate terms, the bear and deer, and elk and antelope the mountain -lion, sheep and goat the buffalo, and all the smaller animals. No less than 200 bufFalos, with their calves, linger in the valleys, a species of Ameri- can animals just scarcely saved from ob- livion. The buffalo, and the Indian once owned the prairie-world of the West Alas ! now you seek to find them. It is styled a Park but I would disa- buse your mind of a misconception you have in drawing your picture of the place. It has no garden-walks or plots of flowers, or statuary, or fountains, such as the name of park indicates to us. It however is a reservation of Wonderland, just as nature made it, and is inspired by a genius that eclipses all design of a practiced art. The place is preeminently a delight for the artist and student. They grow humble here they find their limitations here. It is grand and magnificent, in its snow- capped mountains and dark canyons ; it is 232 Through Wonderland picturesque in its splendid water-falls and strangely-formed rocks ; it is beautiful in its sylvan-shores of noble lakes and mir- rored sky-effects ; it is phenomenal in its geysers and hot-springs and mountains of sulphur. It is a great volcanic region. No wonder the Indians feared it as the home of the lower spirit-world. All that region, drained by the Yellowstone and the Co- lumbia rivers, was once the scene of terrific volcanic action. On mountain tops, 1 1,000 feet high, hundreds of these nucleii these volcano vents can be seen to-day. Their shape and escaping steam tell us of the very remote Pliocene period when these fires flamed and disgorged their anger. You put on an ancient look, and talk of the tertiary period by traces here and there. Now, you stand in the closing stages of the mighty upheavals that had their beginnings in that remote time these geysers and hot springs are only the escape valves of the waning ter- rors beneath. But a little time, as God reckons time, and they will all have died away. to Alaska. 233 TO MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS. At Livingston you awake in your Pull- man car, and behold for the first time the snow-capped heights of the Rocky moun- tains. To Cinnabar is a ride of fifty-one miles, and there you enter the outer gate of the Park. It is a picturesque car-ride Paradise Valley lies along your way. Incidentally you notice the Devil's Slide, which precipitates 2,000 feet adown a mountain-flank, like a slippery toboggan, between two walls of trap-rock 150 feet apart. It demonstrates how easy his Satanic Majesty makes it in life for any and God's awful majesty* solemn as death. It seems as if those painted battlements up there were the waving banners of the hosts of Through Wonderland the earth, and as if this downfall of water Were the stream of blood from all the battlefields. But it is not. You gain confidence by looking at it alone. It has Victory written on its wavy folds, and that it goes on, and molests not the mosses and ledges and grasses at its feet, is evidence that it is on a mission of peace. Rise, let us go hence and ask us not, never to forget. YOSEMITE VALLEY, IN RETRO- SPECT. XXIX. READING, Nov. , 1895. In travel, you make all things you see your treasure for a whole life. You store up memories and visions and sensations that can never be taken from you, and at will, long after, you walk among them with almost the same reality, as you go up and down your house to inspect delightful possessions there. With the flash of a thought I traverse 3,500 miles over a zig- zag route, and I stand again in the awe- inspiring valley of the Yosemite. Surely, it is among the greatest scenic wonders of America I shall never forget it. You start from the Palace Hotel of San Francisco, and journey 250 miles to the southeast. It woutd be 150 miles " as the crow flies, " to this unique spot of the Sierra Nevada, in California. The place so designated, circumscribes an area seven miles long and one-half to one mile wide. 244 Through Wonderland The name Yosemite is pronounced Yo= sem-i-te, an Indian word, which means . targe Grizzly Bear. The old name of the Valley was Ah-wah-hee, but a chief of the tribe inhabiting the spot, distinguished himself by slaying an enormous grizzly bear,, and he was intantly styled, Yosemite, in honor of the valorous combat and gradually the tribe was known by this name, and the valley too. The Indians infesting this hidden strong- hold of nature were a thieving set, and armed soldiers had to follow them up to their unknown retreat. It was in such an expedition of 1 85 1 that the grandeur of this spot was first discovered to the white man. In 1855, the first tourists visited the valley, under the guidance of J. M. Hutchings, who gathered illustrations for the maga- zine he published in California. He has since become the standard authority for Yosemite. In 1864, Congress set the place aside as a national reservation, and gave it to the State of California in trust. STAGING IT INTO YOSEMITE. The cars take you no further than^Ray* mond, where you will have to mount to the four-in-hand stage, for the 75 miles of inward journey. You will want to be To Alaska. 245 properly equipped -old clothes, and warm, an overcoat, a dusters-arid a goodly stock of patience. You see, the way leads up into the mountains almost imperceptibly but very soon you will roll along an eleva- tion of 6,500 feet high* Do not count oil fain, very seldom the cloud-sprinklers drive 1 across your path at this season. But be prepared for dust, and hardships they belong to the achievements of a Vosemite Visit. A youilg officer of the United States army was my companion, I shall not for- get his discomfiture, he had such a fastidi^ ous sentiment hovering over his person^ ality. He had made the acquaintance of an aristocratic maiden at the fashionable Del Monte, during the month of the soldier's encampment there, and a love dream possessed his thoughts, and it was a fitting time to visit the beauties of nature,, and to listen to the music of waterfalls ~* there was much poetry in his heaft. He started from San Francisco, where he laid aside his regimentals of blue cloth and gold buttons, and put on a new outfit fresh fronl the store. He bade his girl good-bye, and in this dainty fashion he took his seat by my side on the stage to visit the Yosemite, A slouch hat and a cheap duster were my 246 Through Wonderland protection J felt myself clean outdone in appearance by my soldier-friend, he cer- tainly did look very handsome in his creased trousers, close-fitting coat, fresh derby, and brand new shoes. But the coach rolled on, and the dust began to roll up the wind was too tantalizing, it chased clouds of dust after us. I looked askance to my friend, again and again, and I soon saw the glory of his appearance receding. He brushed with his hand, took off his hat to inspect, blew a breath of indignation upon it, and wriggled uneasily in the con- scious transformation of his pride. He several times wondered what his girl would think of him now. It is not in me to be mean but somehow it is natural to wish to be upon par with your neighbors, and I really had a secret satisfaction in know- ing that there was not a mite of difference in our appearance. At the first stop, we made an inspection before the mirror, and we both looked like Christmas cakes rolled in flour. I admired the driver. There were many things along the stage's course to attract curious birds, graceful squirrels, trailing snakes, wild-running bear, varying scenery, changeful sky, shady ravines, To Alaska. 547 cascading- streams but I could not get done admiring that driver. He is in the closest sympathy with nature, through whose life his path of duty has led e him these many years. He knows the time of day to the minute, by simply looking at the sun* He knows the habit of every living thing by the way. Then too, he is such a good story-teller. His ruddy color, and long grown beard, set well upon his honest face, and his strong frame fit into his seat, as if he and the vehicle were chiseled out of a solid whole. He is an artist he gathers the multitudinous ribbons between his left-hand fingers, with the grace of a lace weaver, and wields the whip with his right-hand, in such a majestic sweep, and treads the breaks into such pleasing creaks of mountain music, that you can't help but bow to his superiority. It is altogether to your advantage to admire him it is a part of his pay. Even a cobbler wants you to say "it's a neat job " and why not say that stage-driving can be an expert thing. That tourist missed it with " Bishop," the veteran Colorado-stageman, The im- patient traveller would remark that it was slow business, and poor horsemanship, climbing at the snail-like pace up the 4 Through Wonderland heights " when will we get up, driver ? n Bishop said nothing he saved the endur- ance of his horses, until he came within Feach of the top. He dismounted* fixed the breaks, readjusted the reigns, to which the traveller added the new complaint, that { ' less breaks might help us to get down" hill more speedily." The drivef was in his seat again-^with a purpose well set on his stfong face ; from the heights now yawned dangefous declivities, and a nar- row road wound around them. Crack ! Went the whip, up started the mountain steeds, and headlong dashed the stage ; faster and faster down along the curves go those horses under the snap of that whip, and the stage scarcely escapes the Verge of the overhanging ledges "for God's sake, hold up driver, we are going to the ! ' ' and the penitent tourist just catches a hold from swinging-off on a tan- gent, and the driver gives another whack at the flanks of those horses, presses with master precision on the breaks, and pulls the reins within a hair-breadth of the next dizzy curve. The traveller leaps wreck* lessly overboard for his life, arid Bishop, like a mad Jehu, dashes on down the hill, and never stops 'til he draws up his pant- to Alaska. 249 ing steeds before the mountain-lodge. ' 'No passenger to-day, Bishop ? ' J hails the host. * * Left him a mile behind will be along soon, ' ' was the triumphant answer. Every man to his business even a stage driver knows his business best it is not well to interfere, THE BRIDAL CHAMBER OF THE KING. I walk now as in a dream through that valley, I feel again as if I had set my feet within the bridal-chamber of the most holy King. When I halted on Inspiration Point above, and looked down, I saw beautiful avenues of green, and the river Merced, clear as crystal, flowing between. Here spread out grass-covered meadows among mountains 8000 to 10,000 feet above the level of the sea. All around this valley of 1141 acres rose walls as if to construct the rock-ribbed temple of the Most High. Over it all hung a haze, as if priests walked among its aisles and were swinging the censer of incense. I, too, -strolled through the precincts of this val- ley, and I almost stepped as if in fear of desecration. You imagined the Indian bathing in the river, and stirring his acorn meal on the sylvan glade. You entered the Stoneman House, as if you had 250 Through Wonderland alighted in a world where the Creator him- self had tarried long to chisel temples of art, never to be inhabited by man. The morning is a surprise to you, as you view your surroundings from the hotel veranda. The one particular feature of the narrow valley is the verticality of the walls of the mountains, and their great height. The geologist will stand in this scooped-out ravine of the Sierra and won-, der what kind of glaciers they must have been, that ground down, rounded out, and polished off, these mountain sides how many ages ago, it all happened! Up there you see Cloud's Rest, and the fleecy ne- bulae arise from its peak, as if awakened by the early sun. The Royal Arches span 2,000 feet, as if greeting Aurora from an- other direction. The North Dome has donned the German military-hat, ready or duty, and the Half Dome confronts it in personal majesty. This latter granite mountain for a longtime had a rope dang- ling from its top, one mile up in the sky. A Scotchman, George G. Anderson, by name, at the risk of his life, and, after three months of persevering effort, all alone, fas- tened a rope over its smooth back, inclin- ing at an angle of 43 degrees, and slanting to Alaska. 251 975 feet in length. The rope is frozen away, and no one since has dared to re- peat the feat. Over there is the omnipresent El Capi- tan the monarch of vertical mountains. Its facade impresses one with awe and majesty. If it were to fall forward, it would cover 1 60 acres of ground. It is 3,300 feet high, and it would take 30 Palac Hotels to reach the top. This way are the Cathedral Spires, 2,579 * eet m gh> and for 700 feet above, standing alone. Beautiful Bridal Veil Falls J whose lacy waves are lifted wide apart by the wind, 900 feet aloft. We linger over its rainbow, that the sun paints upon its crystal folds every cloud- less evening. Come out early to the dreamy Mirror Lake, No other spot on Dearth holds the reflection of three moun- tains 4,200 feet, 5,000 feet, 6,000 feet high a little lakelet. Return from your trail to the Vernal Falls and Nevada Falls, and express to us your feelings, if you can. Stand before Yosemite Falls, precipitated from a height of 2,650 feet, and demonstrate to us your admiration. Climb up to Glacier Point, 3,257 feet altitude and describe the pano- ramic sweep of forty miles. You call for 2 52 Through Wonderland the bard and ask him to tune his lyre, and as he sings, you note his words in a ten-- aciotfs memory "Mid massive domes of the Sierra's column's', Where power supreme to the eye is shown, Where an awe-inspiring fastness sofemns The mind with force of the great Unknown, There lies a gem a thought of beauty, Which the mountains guard, as the depths the s Where peace is law and joy is daty- Yosemite! Its granite walls but the eagles follow To dizzying heights in the distant sky, No eye can see from their crests the hollow^ Where in peace the beautiful valleys lie, No foot has trod its sky-linked turrets ; The heaven's purple enmantels them, The crystal snows atone are for its Diadem, These massive walls remain: unheeding The frosts of winter, the summer's sun,, Alone unmoved by every pleading By Nature voiced, since Time begun. The winds, the storm, the rage volcanic,, In vain to move their structure yearns ;' Jove's lance with seething hate satauic Futile burns. The golden rays of sunlight, turning' The icy bolts of the vaults of snow, Shone in, and, 'neath their kisses burning,, The gems were wooed to a crystal flow,- " River of Mercy " for all things near it, Dispensing life with its song of glee, White as a virgin's unsoiled spirit, lyight and free. to Alaska. 253 Swifter than winds or the flight of swallow, The milk white wares of this river foam On toward the granite-guarded hollow, Where bloom and joy find a welcome home ; With plunge and shout, like distant thunder, It leaps from the brow of that mountain wall. It spins and weaves and bursts asunder In its fall. White rockets flash from the column's cover, Their courses marked by a silver mist ; Caught by the winds the spray-wreaths hover, In folds of light by the sunbeams kissed ; Veiling the river's lips which thunder, With sprays bejeweled and clouds high rolled Beauty most rare I Magical wonder, Shot with gold I Vision divine, unmoved and nameless, Thy wonders remain why ages fret ; Thy power unfettered and even tameless, Thy Bows of Promise forever set ; Now by the gold of the sunlight painted, Now by the rays of the Night's pale bride; Matchless work of all things created Deified ! Throne of the continent J Queen of all splendor 1 Creation supernal I Work wholly divine ! When touched by thy presence the cold heart grows tender, And reels with a joy as though drunken with wine. Transcendent valley with sky-woven ceiling, Rivers that murmur, white-lipped falls that roar, Records divine, His wonders revealing More and more, Kyle. IN THE MARIPOSA GROVE. XXX. Since I have visited the Vosemite, I have stood among the trees of our eastern groves. I have ceased to wonder at our monarchs of the forest, for I have stood under the Sequoia giants of California. A visit to this wonder-grove belongs to the excursion into Yosemite Valley, but it leads at least twenty-six miles another way. The big trees were first discovered in the Spring-of 1852, when a hunter brought the news into camp. His companions would not believe his story r and so by resorting to the trick of having seen two enormous bear, he led the eager hunters into the Calaveras, and surprised them with the un- expected game the big trees. Then they were made famous by extended notices in American and English papers. Eminent botanists at once sought to place this new species, and by the rules of botanical nomenclature they were called Sequoia Gi- ganta. It may be remembered that Se- quoia was the name of the Cherokee In- to Alaska. 255 dian, who, early in this century, invented an alphabet and written language for his tribe. They are peculiar in their habits, for these trees belong exclusively to California, never grow over seven thousand feet above sea-level, and form groves, intermixed with other trees. The Mariposa Grove is a grant, under the charge of the Yosemite Commissioners, and covers four sections, or two miles square. Perhaps the highest trees in the world are the Australian species the Eucalyptus Amygdalina, many of which reach to the height of four hundred feet.. The tallest Sequoia is three hun- dred and twenty-five feet but that would be twice the size of any church-steeple in my native city. One of these trees, twenty- four feet in diameter, was by hard labor cut down, and the base of it was smoothed into an ample dancing floor. Do not imagine a dense hemlock forest, when you come among these trees, in which you grope among sombre shadows, and listen to weird sounds of lowering branches, as in the woods of home. Sun- light plays among their trunks, for these giants must have elbow room. The pines and firs stand guard at a distance but 256 Through 'Wonderland though mighty, they seem like dwarfs, when approaching near to odious com- parison. You must not let your expectations an- ticipate your discovery these trees, like the Niagara Falls, grow on you by slow acquaintance. It is really laughable, when you get your ball of twine out, and begin to unravel it for a measurement around the girth of ( ' Grizzly Giant. " It is like walk- ing about a good-sized house, fully one hundred feet. How mighty these rough ribbed cinnamon-colored trunks \ You tarry, and the true majesty and grandeur of their wasted and gnarled and wrinkled sides loom upon> your understanding. How old ! You count 3^,000 and 4,000* years along the line of history, and you discover that they were babes in the cradle, when the Goths an3 Vandals waged sav- age wars in Europe. They were old men already when Columbus landed on these shores. They might tell the story of the Revolution, as an episode thousands of years after they were born-. Alas ! How- many unknown races of Indians built their fires under their shelter 1 Some say, a mountain is stone a tree is wood. Poor souls ! who have no sentiment. I would To Alaska, 257 think, before ever I would lay an axe to the trunk of a tree. These are not the ' ' speaking- oaks of Dodona ' ' to give oracles to priests but I reverence the Se- quoia giant. His hoary head does seem to indicate stored-up knowledge, .and I re- spect ancient history, even if it be hid in silence, within the bark of an old tree. ALASKA IN RETROSPECT. XXXI. READING, DEC. , 1895. Euphonious name- Alaska ! Should the traveller have become old, when the mental faculties oft-times become feeble, next to his childhood days, he would re- member the pleasures of his Alaska-trip. Books are good enough to read, even books of travel but you never can form pictures of things and places described in them, as the eyes paint them upon heart and mem- ory. Now, I do not need the panoramic canvass to unroll before me those scenes, they come and go as quick as thought flies, and the color, music, and life all cling to them as nature gave them. O, memory, thou art a jewel! Some men have riches to their old-age, and some the retrospect of a. mis- spent life but the traveller, in dreams and in waking state, revels amid the pleasant recollections of a life spent among the wonders of man's work, and the creations of God's genius on earth. To Alaska. 259 The natives styled their land " Al-ay- ek-sa," meaning, ' * great country. ' ' It is a great country, covering nearly all the States east of the Mississippi. It was first dicovered by Vitus Behring, in 1741, and afterwards by Captain Cook, who sailed up as far as Sitka, in 1776. The complica- tions of war-rumors induced Russia to part with it, and it seemed a doubtful invest- ment when Secretary Seward closed the bargain with Prince MaksutofT, on October 18, 1867, and gave to the Russian-Ameri- can Company $7,200,000 for the nearly 600,000 square miles of land. It cost at the rate of 2 cents an acre ; it very soon had paid for itself, and promises to enrich our Government by untold resources. Think of it the centre of United States possessions lies 800 miles out in the Pacific Ocean. The primitive race inhabiting this vast empire have a history lost in the shadows of antiquity. Like the morning sea- mists, so are their oral traditions. But they have not entirely relinquished the habits and customs of their barbarous ancestors Their canoes are pictures of grace, when gliding over the waters their model is of the earliest design. They go to Through Wonderland the hunt and to war with the same weapons as of old they eat and live like their crude progenitors. They have the same aristo- cratic notions and the same burial customs as their fathers had. The native tribes have similarities and contrasts in their physical condition. The coast-people have an Asia- tic cast of features, and seem to have come from Japanese stock. The Eskimos are similar to the Eskimos of Labrador. All the natives of Alaska have massive heads, but delicately formed hands and feet. Their complexion is a nut-brown, and they have high cheek bones, dark eyes, and straight black hair. They are mostly fish-eaters, though inland, the native also lives on game and land products* IN A MISSIONARY'S HOME. The Goonennar Indians are a sample of crude life they live along. the borders of the Yukon. They are a strangely cold natured people. A friend enters their vil- lage after months, and is not greeted any- where. He walks stolidly ahead, then removes pack and arms, squats down to the fire, and his host acknowledges his presence by a pot of fish and he breaks silence. The conversation deals of the hunt, and never a sickness or death is re- Td Aldskd. 26 i ferred to, for the Indian has more interest in the price of a bear or fox-skin than irt the death of his mother; The gastronomic taste of these people" is something marvellous. The canoe will shoot out on a fishing expedition. The fations are a secondary matter. When hungry, the Indian will harpoon a salmon^ bite off a mouthful from jilst above the nose, and fling it back to the water. The fish swims on as if wanting nothing of his anatomy ^swims as complacently, as the morsel in the gastfonomic depository of the Indian. If you wefe to land on some focky island where the sea-gulls lay their eggs, you might be choicy in selecting the good out of the bad for your use. But the old Indian would resent your fastidiousness and strike good and bad into the same pan to mix an omelet to his liking. Fish-heads made odorous by several weeks exposure in a wooden-trough, are only pfoperly ma- tured, and declared fit to eat. After all it is only a matter of taste, and cultured taste often is no betted than barbarous taste. I doubt if the Indian would fancy our way of transforming sweet pure milk, into a frozen lump of live worms and odor- ous smear, labeled Rocquefort or Zweit* 262 Through Wonderland Jzer cheese. We don't like antiquated fish-heads, but we do relish antiquated cheese. They roast their meat in big long strips, and stuff as much of it into the mouth) as inflation admits, and cut off each bite close to the lips with their knives. They hardly would have use for a table d'hote equipment, where five pair of knives and forks, and as many spoons, are called into requisition it demonstrates, after all, how many things we need which we don't need. However low down in the grade of civilization, there is a religious pos- sibility for these people. Rev. Dr. Shel- don Jackson, General Agent of Education for Alaska, reports that there is a school population of over 8,000. There are 1,934 of this number enrolled in the 31 schools. The contract schools are supported con- jointly by the Government giving $20,000 and the missionary societies giving nearly $70,000. The latter include the Presby- terian, Moravian, Episcopal, Methodist, Congregational, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic churches. A visit to the Presby- terian Industrial School of Sitka demon- strates the transforming power .of religion over the soul of a human being. Along to Alaska. 263 with the Word, the Indian boys are here taught shoemaking, house-building, furni- ture-making, coopering, baking, garden- ing, and the care of cattle ; the girls are taught cooking, baking, washing, ironing, sewing, dressmaking and housekeeping. *How nicely housed, clothed and fed they are ! Here are children brought from their wild homes, many miles away and they frequently talk of their parents in a home-sick way ; they look out of these scenes of comfort, and pine at times, for the bare earthen-floor of the Siwash-home, and for the sports in the woods and on the waters, that made them the children of liberty. Mr. William Duncan is the Missionary apostle of Alaska. When our boat arrived at New Metlakahtla, I was most eager to see this veteran, who spent a life-time among these aborigines to raise them to Christian manhood. Behold ! out of this wild spot, a town of 800 Indian souls has grown. Everything is native handiwork, and the Indians are the council and police of the town. A church is in the centre of the place, of no mean embellishment, and can seat 1,000 persons. The schools and dwelling houses, are neat, and though the 64 Through Wohderhnd streets here and there are not cleaned of the brush^wood, there are some macada- mized sidewalks. The women weave cloth for garments, and the men work in the saw and planing-mill, and the salmon cannery, which puts out 6,000 cases offish in a sea* son. They are an imitative people, and as compared with the North American In* dians, they come to civilization and do not recede from it. Dr. Duncan lives alone in his rudely furnished house^a consecrated souL What a study is this man, and his surroundings! This is his interesting story; I came to these shores forty years ago. I began to learn the Indian tongue. One day, there was a rap at my door. An Indian chief Centered to my call, he sat down and very soon broke the silence with the question^ * * have you a letter from the Great Spirit ?" I answered him "yes!" I Opened the Bible, and told him, "as soon as I have learned your tongue, I will come to tell you of the love of His Son, who came down here to save you." Sometime later, I took my boat, and Sailed down the waters* The eagle-eye of the Indian saw away off the gliding vehicle^ and he shouted "white man in boat to Alaska. 265 the prophet has come." There was joy and great preparation on shore. The houses were put in order, the women and children adorned themselves, the flag was hoisted, and the signal given. I landed, entered the house of public gathering, and sat by the door as the seat of honor. Soon the curtain to aside rustled. The Bear came out on all fours, raised himself in the centre of the room, looked up the chim- ney, and intoned "the heavens have changed!" Next came out the Deer, looked up the chimney, and said "the heavens have changed !' ' Then came out the Chief, and looking up, he emphasized "the heavens indeed have changed!" My story of the Cross was listened to, and many accepted the new order of things. So it follows that the good news of the missionary are spread. The tribes visit each other. Their canoes are tied to shore overnight, and around the evening fire they talk. The conversation is not of the chief, how many slaves he has buried under the tent door, how many deer captured in the hunt but of Jesus Christ, this new story of how the Great Spirit's boy came down to save. From what a depth these peo- ple need to be delivered ! The chief fears 266 Through Wonderland death, and he kills some slaves to go ahead to prepare the journey. When parents get too old, the children kill them to get them out of the way. The girl is not of as much value as the boy. The mother often ties the little one to a sapling by the shore to drown it when the tide comes in. A boy and girl are fre- quently adopted in a home. When the wife dies, the husband marries the girl; when the husband dies, the wife marries the boy. OTHER MEMORIES OF THE TRIP. Fort Wrangle is a melancholy outpost. But here we met for the first time the To- tem-pole, that gorgeous insignia of Alas- kan nobility. Each family assumes some bird or animal as its emblem the raven, eagle, wolf, bear or whale. These badges bind the tribes together. Members of the same badge do not marry, though of dif- ferent tribes. They marry with different badges, though of the same tribe. A son takes his mother's ensign until he marries, when he assumes that of his wife's family. So the "wolf" marries the "whale." On the wife's pole only the genealogy is en- graved. In a feud between families, the man must always range himself on his lo Alaska* 267 wife's side. The raising of such a genea- logical tree is a dear luxury, and it must be of a height not above the standing of the owner. A pot-latch is a series of feasts for the occasion, lasting often several days, and the whole tribe is invited. To the delicacies is added an intoxicating compound distilled from molasses and wa- ter, prepared by kerosene lamp and hol- low sea-weed. The ceremonials satisfy the pride, but after the payment of $1,000 to $3,000, he looks upon his one-hundred foot escutcheon in abject poverty. The Shaman is the medicine man. His pole is aristocratic, and his income, for his weird incantations over the sick, the largest. When he appears to drive out the evil spirit from the sick he is dressed in beaded buckskins, liberally fringed with charms over his rich blanket, and a wooden rattle in his hand. Before a blazing fire he goes through his incantations, and his song rises in power, like the cawing of the sa- cred raven, and his actions are dramatic and distressing; and the beating of the drum and voices of his audience drive the scene to an exhausting climax where he motions the evil spirit through the aperture 268 Through Wonderland of the roof. The chorus dies away in song like this: Anu joo chay na tay na koo na hee; Ah ah ah, yeah; yeah ah ah ah. Interpreted it means, I have looked the village through and found none practicing witchcraft. He falls to the earth groan- ing. He is all potent all life is in his hand. The greatest scenic spectacle of the Alas- ka trip is the Muir-Glacier. I shall never see its equal again in search of natural wonders. The sail through the ice-bay, 30 miles long and 8 to 12 miles wide, is full of anticipation. But who can describe all of the sensations when anchoring a mile away from the verital ice-mountain itself. Why, it would take 1,000 Mere de Glase to make one Muir Glacier. It has nine main streams of frozen ice to feed it, and these have seventeen sub-branches, with twenty-six tributaries, to crowd into one solid mass two miles wide. There are four sub-glacial streams, and five moraines above, and a buried forest to its side. Of its imposing grandeur and exciting action I have already written but m eagerly done, if done at its best. 70 Alaska. 269 An iceberg struck my poetic fancy, which floated like a dream by our depart- ing boat. In its delicate beauty and gro- tesque form, it awakened the fanciful and drew me near to it. But I remembered that great dangers are often clad in gor- geous dress. It so happened that the schooner Elwood was recently lured to the brink of a watery grave up here by the peaceful innocence of an iceberg. Captain Chester desired to take ice on board from Muir Glacier, but on his way he espied a berg ten times the size of his boat, and he conceived the idea of anchoring by its side and chopping off a load. He did so be swung around and fastened his lines to the monster. The tide was at its full at the time, and all was safe. One chunk after another was hoisted over the gang-plank. Toward evening, however, the tide had been falling, and the iceberg rested heavily upon the reef beneath, and it gradually tipped over to the other side. The berg continued to careen, and very soon, with a grinding roar, it rolled off the reef and started to revolve. In an instant the berg shot up a jagged spur from beneath and lifted the whole vessel out of the water and set it on high. Panic-stricken, they got 270 Through Wonderland out of harm's way in the lifeboat. There the ship lingered, poised aloft, groaning in its anchor and chains. Something must happen something must give way ! The tide fell more and the schooner rose higher. Crash ! The vessel moved in the icy crevice. Crash ! and the schooner took a forward lurch, dashed down grade and plunged into the sea like a rocket. She shipped a heavy sea, but stumbling and tugging viciously amid entangling ropes and chains and anchor, the ship came right side up and she just escaped as by a mira- cle she was safe. I lingered around the ruins of Baranoff Castle, at Sitka. It once was the home of royal splendor, and by its isolation, enjoyed the diversions of courtly revelry. A romance so sad attracted me, more than the memory of its buried splendors. It concerned the beautiful niece of Baron Romanoff. She had been brought from Russia to separate her from her lover oi in- ferior birth, and was to be forced into a mar- riage with a nobleman whom she thoroughly disliked. When the wedding festivities were on, the bride was missed. They looked here and there, and in the deserted banquet hall the unhappy girl was found, to Alaska. 271 with a dagger thrust through her heart. How came the deed to be done ? Was it the jealous bridegroom ? Did her lover sail over the waters, and in the nick of time snatch his own from the grasp of the hated rival ? Did she hold the pointed blade herself to her agitated bosom ? She was dead the wedding was over. Since then, the legend has it, that the witching hour of midnight hears the swish of her ghostly bridal gown, and inhales the linger- ing perfume of orange-blossoms as she moves with spirit-step from room to room. XXXII. MY COUNTRY IN RETROSPECT. My Country 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing; Land where our fathers died, Land of the pilgrim's pride, From every mountain side Let Freedom ring. My native country, thee, Land of the noble free Thy name I love; I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills; My heart with rapture thrills Like that above. Let music swell the breeze, And ring from all the trees, Sweet freedom's song; Let mortal tongues awake, Let all that breathe partake, Let rocks their silence break, The sound prolong. Our father's God to thee, Author of Liberty, To thee I sing; Long may our land be bright With freedom's holy light; Protect us by thy might, Great God, our King.