[Illustration: Indians spearing Salmon in Bulkley Cañon]
"Queen Charlotte Sound," writes Ella Higginson,[1] "is a splendid sweep of purple water.... The warm breath of the Kuro Siwo, penetrating all these inland seas and passages, is converted by the great white peaks of the horizon into pearl-like mist that drifts in clouds and fragments upon the blue waters. Nowhere are these mists more frequent, nor more elusive, than in Queen Charlotte Sound. At sunrise they take on the delicate tones of the primrose or the pinkish star-flower; at sunset, all the royal rose and purple blendings; all the warm flushes of amber, orange, and gold. Through a maze of pale yellow, whose fine, cool needles sting one's face and set one's hair with seed pearls, one passes into a little open water-world where a blue sky sparkles above a bluer sea, and the air is like clear, washed gold. But a mile ahead a solid wall of amethyst closes in this brilliant sea; shattering it into particles that { 205} set the hair with amethysts instead of pearls.... It is this daily mist-shower that bequeaths to British Columbia and Alaska their marvellous and luxuriant growth of vegetation, their spiced sweetness of atmosphere, their fairness and freshness."
[1] _Alaska; the Great Country_, by Ella Higginson. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Forty miles north of Prince Rupert is Dixon's Entrance, that marks the international boundary between the Canadian and Alaskan waters. Some haunting impress left upon the air by the great navigators who made their pioneer voyages in these intricate waterways--Perez and Valdez, Duncan, Vancouver, Meares, Caudra--their dauntless courage and their perils fling spectra on the passing winds and waves. The scenic effects grow more and more sublime as the steamer advances. At a distance of about seventy-five miles north of Prince Rupert the traveller comes in sight of a remarkable series of mountain terraces, rising more than six thousand feet into the air, with sheer walls and castellated summits.
The first call at port after Prince Rupert is at Ketchikan, seven hundred miles from Seattle, with a population of some two thousand people, the distributing point for the mines and fisheries of Southern Alaska. On its crescent-shaped harbour and with its eternal guard of mountains, with its lake and its falls and its wonderful gorge, three miles distant into the woodlands, it is a picturesque town, and with its electric lighting and steam heating it leaves little to be desired for comfortable residence. Between Ketchikan and Wrangell are { 206} the Wrangell Narrows, a channel where ethereal vapours, many-hued, like tropical flowers, are breeze-blown in the air; and the long, green moss, on the trees on either side, sways like drapery. Miss Scidmore, writing of Wrangell Narrows, thus pictured it with her fascinating pen: