treaty is concerned, its terms were not kept on the part of the United States. In 1863, another treaty was negotiated which greatly reduced the reservation established by the treaty of 1855, and among the lands yielded in this case the Wallowa Valley was included. A number of the chiefs refused to sign this treaty, and would never afterward recognize it as binding, but always repudiated it, refusing to accept any of its benefits.

These bitter feelings finally culminated in the Nez Percé war, by which a tribe of Indians that had always made the proud boast that no white man was ever slain by the hand of a Nez Percé, were driven to open hostilities, resulting in a serious war between the Nez Percés and the troops of General Howard in Idaho, a series of engagements between the Nez Percés and troops under General Gibbon in western Montana, and the pursuit and capture of the Nez Percés by troops under my command as related in a preceding chapter of this volume, and their final return, eight years later, reduced in numbers and in a wretched condition, to their country where they have since peacefully remained.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

OUR ALASKAN POSSESSIONS.

DISCOVERY OF ALASKA BY BEHRING-THE FUR HUNTERS-THE RUSSIAN COMPANIES AND THEIR SUCCESSOR-SALE OF THE COUNTRY TO THE UNITED STATES - THE TRANSFER-VAST SIZE

OF

ALASKA-CLIMATE-MOUNTAINS-MOUNT ST. ELIAS GLACIERS - MUIR
GLACIER-EXPEDITION OF LIEUTENANT SCHWATKA-CHARACTER OF THE

EHRING'S famous voyage and the discovery of Alaska is the history of a series of privations and disasters. He set sail from Okhotsk in 1740, in a vessel called the "St Paul." He sighted and named the magnificent mountain St. Elias. Behring was finally wrecked on an island which now bears his name, and died there December 8, 1741, without ever attaining any benefit from his valuable discoveries. The vessel was little more than a wreck, but out of its ruins the crew managed to build a little shallop in which they set sail on the 16th of August, 1742. They finally reached civilization bearing with them a large number of valuable peltries, which stimulated the prompt fitting out of many new expeditions for Alaska.

These fur hunters ventured out from their headquarters at Kamchatka and by 1769 a large area of Russian America was well known to them. Prior to the establishment of the control of the Russian American Company over the whole of Alaska, more than sixty distinct Russian trade companies had been organized and had plied their vocation in these waters. In 1799 this last named company received a charter which conferred upon it very great privileges, but also burdened it with many obligations. It was obliged to maintain at its own expense the new government of the country, a church establishment, a military force, and at many points in the country magazines of provisions and stores to be used by the Imperial government for its naval vessels.

As time wore on it was found that Russian America did not prove as profitable to the home government as it ought, and in 1844 the Emperor Nicholas offered to sell the whole country to the United States for the mere cost of transfer if President Pierce would maintain the United States line at 54° 40' and shut England out from any frontage on the Pacific. In 1854 it was again offered to the United States, and yet again in 1859, but with no result. But in 1867 Secretary Seward effected the purchase of the whole vast territory at the rate of about half a cent an acre. Figures show that from the very beginning Alaska has been to us a paying investment. The first lease of the two seal islands returned into the treasury a sum equal to the purchase money ($7,200,000). The gold mines have since added an equal sum to the wealth of the world, while the salmon fisheries in the six years from 1884 to 1890 yielded $7,500,000.

As soon as the treaty was ratified, immediate military possession was decided upon. The commissioners on behalf of both the United States and Russia, met at Sitka in October, 1869. Three men-of-war and two hundred and fifty troops were present on the afternoon when the Russians joined the United States officers at the foot of the government flagstaff. Double national salutes were fired by the men-of-war and a land battery as the Russian national flag was lowered and the American flag was raised. As soon as the United States took possession of Alaska all the Russian inhabitants who were able to travel left the country, their government giving them free transportation.

In 1877 the last garrison in Alaska was vacated, and a few months later the Indians had destroyed all government property outside the stockades, and threatened a massacre. Hearing of the desperate plight of the Americans the captain of an English ship which happened to be at Esquimault at the time, hastened to their assistance, and remained until a United States revenue cutter and a man-of-war arrived.

Alaska is nine times the size of New England, twice the size of Texas, and three times as large as California. It stretches for more than a thousand miles from north to south, and the Aleutian Islands encroach upon the eastern hemisphere, placing the geographical center of the United States on the point midway between the eastern and western extremities a little to the west of San Francisco. The island of Attu is two thousand miles west of Sitka, and it is as far from Cape Fox to Point Barrow as from the north of Maine to the southern extremity of Florida. The coast line has a length of more than 18,000 miles; greater than that of all the States bordering on the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico combined.

The climate and physical features of southeastern Alaska very much resemble those of southern Norway. While St. Johns, Newfoundland, is surrounded by icebergs in summer and its harbor is frozen solid in winter, Sitka, ten degrees farther north, has always an open roadstead. The thermometer rarely registers in winter as low as ten degrees below zero. It is the isothermal equal of the District of Columbia and Kentucky, skating being a rare sport for Sitkans. When William H. Seward was making his trip around the world he wrote from Berlin: "We have seen enough of Germany to know that its climate is neither so genial, nor its soil so fertile, nor its resources in forests and mines so rich as those of southern Alaska." The lofty mountain ranges and the Japan Current give southeastern Alaska a greater rainfall than that of Norway, the annual rainfall in Sitka averaging eighty-one inches. There have been wet seasons there in which there were respectively two hundred and eighty-five and three hundred and forty rainy days; but all this moisture favors a luxuriant vegetation and keeps the foliage fresh during the greater part of the year.

Thunder storms are almost unknown, and there are beautiful auroral illuminations during the long winter nights. There have been only two great hurricanes since the transfer of the country, one occurring immediately after that event and the other in 1880. Fine grass springs naturally on any clearing; coarser grasses grow three or four feet high, and clover thrives unheeded. Hay has been cured there since as early as 1805, and some varieties of vegetables have been raised. In summer there is usually about a fortnight of really very warm weather, and the days at that time of year are eighteen hours long.

The greater part of Alaska is exceedingly mountainous. The most celebrated of all her lofty summits is Mount St. Elias, the central peak of a crescent-shaped range of mountains on the southern coast of Alaska. This mountain lifts its glittering white head more than 19,000 feet above the level of the sea. The whole of this great peak is not often seen at one time, as a perfectly clear atmosphere is very rare in that region. The vapor from the warm ocean current is condensed into clouds as it strikes the frozen sides of the mountain, keeping it perpetually cloudcapped. Its summit is a bold pyramid placed on a rugged mountain mass, and surrounded by foot-hills each one of which is of sufficient size to be widely noted were it in any country where colossal peaks are not so common. The mountain can be distinctly seen one hundred and fifty miles at sea, and at that distance it appears to tower up with all the grandeur and beauty that ordinary mountains have when viewed from a short distance.

Some of the most magnificent glaciers to be found on the globe fill the gorges of the Alaskan mountain ranges. The Malaspine Glacier is one of the largest known. It is one vast, slowly-moving prairie of ice, and from the mountain spurs projecting into it one may look down upon it from a height of two or three thousand feet without being able to discover its southern limits. The outer border is covered with earth and supports a dense growth of vegetation, and in some places thick forests of spruce trees. These evergreen forests, with undergrowths of ferns and flowers, growing on living glaciers hundreds of feet thick, are among the most interesting features of Alaska. The entire region is remarkable for the glaciers which abound in the valleys and along the coasts. The Muir Glacier at Glacier Bay is one of the best known, its face being a solid wall of ice, two miles wide. Another glacier situated on the Stickine River is forty miles long and five miles wide. The Miles Glacier, so named by Lieutenant Abercrombie, who discovered it during his exploration of the Copper River country, is one of the largest and most interesting of these wonders of nature.

Some idea may be formed of these colossal glaciers by imagining a valley between two ranges of mountains packed solidly with ice, formed from the packed and semi-liquid snow of mountains from forty to fifty miles back from the rivers or bays into which the glaciers empty. Although actually in constant motion, the movement is so slow that it is imperceptible except from final results. The continual fall at the end of the glacier of masses of ice from the size of a man's hand to that of a block acres in extent, produces a noise like the constant roar of thunder, and is frequently heard eight or ten miles away. The glaciers that empty into bays and navigable rivers produce icebergs that are usually four or five times as deep below the surface of the water as they are above. These masses of ice are forced back against the faces of the glaciers when the tide is coming in, and are held there firmly until it goes out, when they again go rolling on their course to the sea. As the huge masses fall from the face of the glacier they produce a motion of the water which is sometimes dangerous to vessels in the immediate vicinity, and when the ice floe is moving out with the tide it sometimes becomes necessary for steamers to seek shelter behind some promontory.

The beauty and grandeur of these scenes is equal to anything that I ever witnessed. There is only one feature of nature that compares with it in grandeur, although of an entirely different character, and that is the geysers in the Yellowstone Valley. During our visit to Alaska it required