Part I
_The Trip of 1879_
Chapter I
Puget Sound and British Columbia
After eleven years of study and exploration in the Sierra Nevada of
California and the mountain-ranges of the Great Basin, studying in
particular their glaciers, forests, and wild life, above all their
ancient glaciers and the influence they exerted in sculpturing the
rocks over which they passed with tremendous pressure, making new
landscapes, scenery, and beauty which so mysteriously influence every
human being, and to some extent all life, I was anxious to gain some
knowledge of the regions to the northward, about Puget Sound and
Alaska. With this grand object in view I left San Francisco in May,
1879, on the steamer Dakota, without any definite plan, as with the
exception of a few of the Oregon peaks and their forests all the wild
north was new to me.
To the mountaineer a sea voyage is a grand, inspiring, restful change.
For forests and plains with their flowers and fruits we have new
scenery, new life of every sort; water hills and dales in eternal
visible motion for rock waves, types of permanence.
It was curious to note how suddenly the eager countenances of the
passengers were darkened as soon as the good ship passed through the
Golden Gate and began to heave on the waves of the open ocean. The
crowded deck was speedily deserted on account of seasickness. It seemed
strange that nearly every one afflicted should be more or less ashamed.
Next morning a strong wind was blowing, and the sea was gray and white,
with long breaking waves, across which the Dakota was racing
half-buried in spray. Very few of the passengers were on deck to enjoy
the wild scenery. Every wave seemed to be making enthusiastic, eager
haste to the shore, with long, irised tresses streaming from its tops,
some of its outer fringes borne away in scud to refresh the wind, all
the rolling, pitching, flying water exulting in the beauty of rainbow
light. Gulls and albatrosses, strong, glad life in the midst of the
stormy beauty, skimmed the waves against the wind, seemingly without
effort, oftentimes flying nearly a mile without a single wing-beat,
gracefully swaying from side to side and tracing the curves of the
briny water hills with the finest precision, now and then just grazing
the highest.
And yonder, glistening amid the irised spray, is still more striking
revelation of warm life in the so-called howling waste,—a half-dozen
whales, their broad backs like glaciated bosses of granite heaving
aloft in near view, spouting lustily, drawing a long breath, and
plunging down home in colossal health and comfort. A merry school of
porpoises, a square mile of them, suddenly appear, tossing themselves
into the air in abounding strength and hilarity, adding foam to the
waves and making all the wilderness wilder. One cannot but feel
sympathy with and be proud of these brave neighbors, fellow citizens in
the commonwealth of the world, making a living like the rest of us. Our
good ship also seemed like a thing of life, its great iron heart
beating on through calm and storm, a truly noble spectacle. But think
of the hearts of these whales, beating warm against the sea, day and
night, through dark and light, on and on for centuries; how the red
blood must rush and gurgle in and out, bucketfuls, barrelfuls at a
beat!
The cloud colors of one of the four sunsets enjoyed on the voyage were
remarkably pure and rich in tone. There was a well-defined range of
cumuli a few degrees above the horizon, and a massive, dark-gray
rain-cloud above it, from which depended long, bent fringes overlapping
the lower cumuli and partially veiling them; and from time to time
sunbeams poured through narrow openings and painted the exposed bosses
and fringes in ripe yellow tones, which, with the reflections on the
water, made magnificent pictures. The scenery of the ocean, however
sublime in vast expanse, seems far less beautiful to us dry-shod
animals than that of the land seen only in comparatively small patches;
but when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped
and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other
stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe
appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
The California coast-hills and cliffs look bare and uninviting as seen
from the ship, the magnificent forests keeping well back out of sight
beyond the reach of the sea winds; those of Oregon and Washington are
in some places clad with conifers nearly down to the shore; even the
little detached islets, so marked a feature to the northward, are
mostly tree-crowned. Up through the Straits of Juan de Fuca the
forests, sheltered from the ocean gales and favored with abundant
rains, flourish in marvelous luxuriance on the glacier-sculptured
mountains of the Olympic Range.
We arrived in Esquimault Harbor, three miles from Victoria, on the
evening of the fourth day, and drove to the town through a magnificent
forest of Douglas spruce,—with an undergrowth in open spots of oak,
madrone, hazel, dogwood, alder, spiræa, willow, and wild rose,—and
around many an upswelling _moutonné_ rock, freshly glaciated and furred
with yellow mosses and lichens.
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, was in 1879 a small
old-fashioned English town on the south end of Vancouver Island. It was
said to contain about six thousand inhabitants. The government
buildings and some of the business blocks were noticeable, but the
attention of the traveler was more worthily attracted to the neat
cottage homes found here, embowered in the freshest and floweriest
climbing roses and honeysuckles conceivable. Californians may well be
proud of their home roses loading sunny verandas, climbing to the tops
of the roofs and falling over the gables in white and red cascades. But
here, with so much bland fog and dew and gentle laving rain, a still
finer development of some of the commonest garden plants is reached.
English honeysuckle seems to have found here a most congenial home.
Still more beautiful were the wild roses, blooming in wonderful
luxuriance along the woodland paths, with corollas two and three inches
wide. This rose and three species of spiræa fairly filled the air with
fragrance after showers; and how brightly then did the red dogwood
berries shine amid the green leaves beneath trees two hundred and fifty
feet high.
Strange to say, all of this exuberant forest and flower vegetation was
growing upon fresh moraine material scarcely at all moved or in any way
modified by post-glacial agents. In the town gardens and orchards,
peaches and apples fell upon glacier-polished rocks, and the streets
were graded in moraine gravel; and I observed scratched and grooved
rock bosses as unweathered and telling as those of the High Sierra of
California eight thousand feet or more above sea-level. The Victoria
Harbor is plainly glacial in origin, eroded from the solid; and the
rock islets that rise here and there in it are unchanged to any
appreciable extent by all the waves that have broken over them since
first they came to light toward the close of the glacial period. The
shores also of the harbor are strikingly grooved and scratched and in
every way as glacial in all their characteristics as those of new-born
glacial lakes. That the domain of the sea is being slowly extended over
the land by incessant wave-action is well known; but in this freshly
glaciated region the shores have been so short a time exposed to
wave-action that they are scarcely at all wasted. The extension of the
sea affected by its own action in post-glacial times is probably less
than the millionth part of that affected by glacial action during the
last glacier period. The direction of the flow of the ice-sheet to
which all the main features of this wonderful region are due was in
general southward.
From this quiet little English town I made many short excursions—up the
coast to Nanaimo, to Burrard Inlet, now the terminus of the Canadian
Pacific Railroad, to Puget Sound, up Fraser River to New Westminster
and Yale at the head of navigation, charmed everywhere with the wild,
new-born scenery. The most interesting of these and the most difficult
to leave was the Puget Sound region, famous the world over for the
wonderful forests of gigantic trees about its shores. It is an arm and
many-fingered hand of the sea, reaching southward from the Straits of
Juan de Fuca about a hundred miles into the heart of one of the noblest
coniferous forests on the face of the globe. All its scenery is
wonderful—broad river-like reaches sweeping in beautiful curves around
bays and capes and jutting promontories, opening here and there into
smooth, blue, lake-like expanses dotted with islands and feathered with
tall, spiry evergreens, their beauty doubled on the bright
mirror-water.
Sailing from Victoria, the Olympic Mountains are seen right ahead,
rising in bold relief against the sky, with jagged crests and peaks
from six to eight thousand feet high,—small residual glaciers and
ragged snow-fields beneath them in wide amphitheatres opening down
through the forest-filled valleys. These valleys mark the courses of
the Olympic glaciers at the period of their greatest extension, when
they poured their tribute into that portion of the great northern
ice-sheet that overswept Vancouver Island and filled the strait between
it and the mainland.
On the way up to Olympia, then a hopeful little town situated at the
end of one of the longest fingers of the Sound, one is often reminded
of Lake Tahoe, the scenery of the widest expanses is so lake-like in
the clearness and stillness of the water and the luxuriance of the
surrounding forests. Doubling cape after cape, passing uncounted
islands, new combinations break on the view in endless variety,
sufficient to satisfy the lover of wild beauty through a whole life.
When the clouds come down, blotting out everything, one feels as if at
sea; again lifting a little, some islet may be seen standing alone with
the tops of its trees dipping out of sight in gray misty fringes; then
the ranks of spruce and cedar bounding the water’s edge come to view;
and when at length the whole sky is clear the colossal cone of Mt.
Rainier may be seen in spotless white, looking down over the dark woods
from a distance of fifty or sixty miles, but so high and massive and so
sharply outlined, it seems to be just back of a strip of woods only a
few miles wide.
Mt. Rainier, or Tahoma (the Indian name), is the noblest of the
volcanic cones extending from Lassen Butte and Mt. Shasta along the
Cascade Range to Mt. Baker. One of the most telling views of it
hereabouts is obtained near Tacoma. From a bluff back of the town it
was revealed in all its glory, laden with glaciers and snow down to the
forested foothills around its finely curved base. Up to this time
(1879) it had been ascended but once. From observations made on the
summit with a single aneroid barometer, it was estimated to be about
14,500 feet high. Mt. Baker, to the northward, is about 10,700 feet
high, a noble mountain. So also are Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt.
Hood. The latter, overlooking the town of Portland, is perhaps the best
known. Rainier, about the same height as Shasta, surpasses them all in
massive icy grandeur,—the most majestic solitary mountain I had ever
yet beheld. How eagerly I gazed and longed to climb it and study its
history only the mountaineer may know, but I was compelled to turn away
and bide my time.
The species forming the bulk of the woods here is the Douglas spruce
(_Pseudotsuga douglasii_), one of the greatest of the western giants. A
specimen that I measured near Olympia was about three hundred feet in
height and twelve feet in diameter four feet above the ground. It is a
widely distributed tree, extending northward through British Columbia,
southward through Oregon and California, and eastward to the Rocky
Mountains. The timber is used for shipbuilding, spars, piles, and the
framework of houses, bridges, etc. In the California lumber markets it
is known as “Oregon pine.” In Utah, where it is common on the Wahsatch
Mountains, it is called “red pine.” In California, on the western slope
of the Sierra Nevada, it forms, in company with the yellow pine, sugar
pine, and incense cedar, a pretty well-defined belt at a height of from
three to six thousand feet above the sea; but it is only in Oregon and
Washington, especially in this Puget Sound region, that it reaches its
very grandest development,—tall, straight, and strong, growing down
close to tidewater.
All the towns of the Sound had a hopeful, thrifty aspect. Port
Townsend, picturesquely located on a grassy bluff, was the port of
clearance for vessels sailing to foreign parts. Seattle was famed for
its coal-mines, and claimed to be the coming town of the North Pacific
Coast. So also did its rival, Tacoma, which had been selected as the
terminus of the much-talked-of Northern Pacific Railway. Several
coal-veins of astonishing thickness were discovered the winter before
on the Carbon River, to the east of Tacoma, one of them said to be no
less than twenty-one feet, another twenty feet, another fourteen, with
many smaller ones, the aggregate thickness of all the veins being
upwards of a hundred feet. Large deposits of magnetic iron ore and
brown hematite, together with limestone, had been discovered in
advantageous proximity to the coal, making a bright outlook for the
Sound region in general in connection with its railroad hopes, its
unrivaled timber resources, and its far-reaching geographical
relations.
After spending a few weeks in the Puget Sound with a friend from San
Francisco, we engaged passage on the little mail steamer California, at
Portland, Oregon, for Alaska. The sail down the broad lower reaches of
the Columbia and across its foamy bar, around Cape Flattery, and up the
Juan de Fuca Strait, was delightful; and after calling again at
Victoria and Port Townsend we got fairly off for icy Alaska.
