Part 28 (1/2)

His description of Miles Glacier was the first to be printed. This glacier fronts for a distance of six miles in splendid palisades on Copper River. This and Childs Glacier afford the chief obstacles to navigation on this river, and Mr. A. H. Brooks reports their rapid recession.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright by E. A. Hegg, Juneau

Courtesy of Webster & Stevens, Seattle

LAKE BENNETT IN 1898]

The river is regarded as exceedingly dangerous for steamers, but may, with caution, be navigated with small boats. Between the mouth of the Chitina and the head of the broad delta of the Copper River, is the only canyon. It is the famous Wood Canyon, several miles in length and in many places only forty yards wide, with the water roaring through perpendicular stone walls. The Tiekel, Tasnuna, and other streams tributary to this part of the Copper also flow through narrow valleys with precipitous slopes.

The Copper River has its source in the mountains east of its great plateau, whose eastern margin it traverses, and then, pa.s.sing through the Chugach Mountains, debouches across a wide delta into the North Pacific Ocean between Katalla and Cordova. It rises close to Mount Wrangell, flows northward for forty miles, south and southwest for fifty more, when the Chitina joins it from the east and swells its flood for the remaining one hundred and fifty miles to the coast.

The Copper is a silt-laden, turbulent stream from its source to the sea.

Its average fall is about twelve feet to the mile. From the Chitina to its mouth, it is steep-sided and rock-bound; for its entire length, it is weird and impressive.

By land, the distance from Katalla to Cordova is insignificant. It is a distance, however, that cannot as yet be traversed, on account of the delta and other impa.s.sable topographic features, which only a railroad can overcome. The distance by water is about one hundred and fifty miles.

In the entrance to Cordova Bay is Hawkins Island, and to the southwest of this island lies Hinchingbroke Island, whose southern extremity, at the entrance to Prince William Sound, was named Cape Hinchingbroke by Cook in 1778. At a point named Snug Corner Bay Cook keeled and mended his s.h.i.+ps.

This peerless sound itself--brilliantly blue, greenly islanded, and set round with snow peaks and glaciers, including among the latter the most beautiful one of Alaska, if not the most beautiful of the world, the Columbia--was known as Chugach Gulf--a name to which I hope it may some day return,--until Cook renamed it.

A boat sent out by Cook was pursued by natives in canoes. They seemed afraid to approach the s.h.i.+p; but at a distance sang, stood up in the canoes, extending their arms and holding out white garments of peace.

One man stood up, entirely nude, with his arms stretched out like a cross, motionless, for a quarter of an hour.

The following night a few natives came out in the skin-boats of the Eskimos. These boats are still used from this point westward and northward to Nome and up the Yukon as far as the Eskimos have settlements. They are of three kinds. One is a large, open, flat-bottomed boat. It is made of a wooden frame, covered with walrus skin or sealskin, held in place by thongs of the former. This is called an oomiak by the Innuits or Eskimos, and a bidarra by the Russians. It is used by women, or by large parties of men.

A boat for one man is made in the same fas.h.i.+on, but covered completely over, with the exception of one hole in which the occupant sits, and around which is an upright rim. When at sea he wears a walrus-gut coat, completely waterproof, which he ties around the outside of the rim. The coat is securely tied around the wrists, and the hood is drawn tightly around the face; so that no water can possibly enter the boat in the most severe storm. This boat is called a bidarka.

The third, called a kayak, differs from the bidarka only in being longer and having two or three holes.

The walrus-gut coats are called kamelinkas or kamelaykas. They may be purchased in curio stores, and at Seldovia and other places on Cook Inlet. They are now gayly decorated with bits of colored wool and range in price from ten to twenty dollars, according to the amount of work upon them.

There is a difference of opinion regarding the names of the boats. Dall claims that the one-holed boat was called a kayak by the natives, and by the Russians a bidarka; and that the others were simply known as two or three holed bidarkas. The other opinion, which I have given, is that of people living in the vicinity at present.

Each of the men who came out in the bidarkas to visit Cook had a stick about three feet long, the end of which was decorated with large tufts of feathers. Behring's men were received in precisely the same manner at the Shumagin Islands, far to westward, in 1741; their sticks, according to Muller, being decorated with hawks' wings.

These natives were found to be thievish and treacherous, attempting to capture a boat under the s.h.i.+p's very guns and in the face of a hundred men.

Cook then sailed southward and discovered the largest island in the sound, the Sukluk of the natives, which he named Montagu.

Nutchek, or Port Etches, as it was named by Portlock, is just inside the entrance to the sound on the western sh.o.r.e of the island that is now known as Hinchingbroke, but which was formerly called Nutchek.

Here Baranoff, several years later, built the s.h.i.+ps that bore his first expedition to Sitka. The Russian trading post was called the Redoubt Constantine and Elena. It was a strong, stockaded fort with two bastions.

There is a salmon cannery at Nutchek, and the furs of the Copper River country were brought here for many years for barter.

Orca is situated about three miles north of Cordova, in Cordova Bay.

There is a large salmon cannery at Orca; and the number of sea-birds to be seen in this small bay, filling the air in snowy clouds and covering the precipitous cliffs facing the wharf, is surpa.s.sed in only one place on the Alaskan coast--Karluk Bay.