The future importance of Skagway depends largely on the success of the White Pass and Yukon Railway. Of this, however, there is practically no question. Skagway has a population of more than two thousand; and it is splendidly equipped with cable, telephone and telegraph services; with electric lighting; with good schools and churches; and with shops and stores furnishing an adequate assortment for all needs of utility and of taste and beauty; it has a very attractive resident region, and its gardens are already famous. During the Klondike excitement of 1897-98, Skagway was the base of operations for many thousands of prospectors who thronged this region. It is especially attractive to the devotees of ethnological science, as it is near some of the more interesting Indian villages, and it has supreme attractions for the artist. The glaciers of Davidson and Mendenhall are near, and nowhere are the enchantments of a summer in the far northlands more alluring and spellbinding to the lover of flowers and fragrances, of stars and sunsets, of the beauty that flashes from solid mountain walls of opal pinnacles and glittering palisades, in an atmosphere prismatic in colour--nowhere are there more lovely "lands of summer beyond the sea" than in and around Skagway.
It has been more or less generally supposed that the climate of Alaska was inevitably severe and fairly arctic in its character. On the contrary, the mean temperature of Juneau for July is fifty-seven degrees and the thermometer often ranges from { 216} seventy to even ninety. Thus the mean temperature of Juneau for July is only one degree less than that of San Francisco for August. The equability of the temperature in Southern Alaska is a feature of importance. The entire land, in summer, is covered with a dense vegetation.
One of the great marvels of nature in the Alaskan and Yukon regions is that of the matchless spectacle of the Northern Lights. Not even the glacier can rival Aurora Borealis. It is Robert Service who is the bard of the mystic illuminations that are fairly before the eye of the reader of that scintillating poem, the "Ballad of the Northern Lights."
"And soft they danced from the Polar sky and swept in the primrose haze; And swift they pranced with their silver feet, and pierced with a blinding blaze. They danced a cotillion in the sky; they were rose and silver shod; It was not good for the eyes of man, 'twas a sight for the eyes of God.