CHAPTER XIV IN GREEN ALASKA 1899 On Unalaska's emerald lea, At morn, at noon, in pallid night, To the Lapland Longspur WHILE chewing the cud of sweet content at Slabsides, keeping an eye on the vineyards, and nibbling the while at his pen, there came to Burroughs, in the spring of 1899, a disturbing proposition - an invitation to join the Harriman Expedition to Alaska. Two strongly opposed desires tossed him back and forth curiosity about new lands, and love of his own haunts; but curiosity won the day, and, turning the key in the door of Slabsides, he fared forth. His Journal for May 23d shows his mingled feelings: Join the Harriman expedition to Alaska today in New York. Pass my place on the Hudson at 4 p.m. Look long and fondly from the car window upon the scenes I am about to be absent from till August. The sun is shining warmly. I see the new green of the vineyards. Wife is waving her white apron from the summer-house. I sit alone in my room in the Pullman car and am sad. Have I made a mistake in joining this crowd for so long a trip? Can I see Nature under such conditions? But I am in for it. The railway magnate E. H. Harriman and his family were joined on this expedition by some forty scientists, authors, mining experts, and archæologists John Muir, authority on glaciers and mountains; Dr. B. E. Fernow, on trees; Dr. George Bird Grinnell, on the Indians; Mr. Louis Agassiz Fuertes, the bird-portrait painter; Mr. Frederick Dellenbaugh, the explorer; Mr. R. Swain Gifford, the landscapepainter; and many others eminent in various fields. As historian of the expedition, Burroughs's impressions were written from day to day.' First published as The Harriman Alaska Expedition, by Doubleday, Page & Co., later, somewhat altered, as 'In Green Alaska' (Far and Near). He said of the narrative: A thing has to stay in my consciousness for a while and develop there before I can reproduce it satisfactorily. If I could have waited six months or more until I felt moved to write, I might have brought forth something more creditable. But they made me go about it deliberately, before I had carried it long enough. That is not my way of writing- I go to Nature for love of her, and the book follows, or not, as the case may be. If, in this case, one misses something of the author's interpretive quality, he is still held by the graphic account of the observer. As the chronicler looked out upon the country west of the Mississippi, he knew those endless vistas of prairie land were not for him, whose need was always to nestle in the lap of Mother Nature, and feel about him the arms of the near horizon. Yet as the liquid song of the Western meadowlark filtered through the roar of the rushing train, he longed to roam over the treeless plains. Like a moving panorama is his note-book of the scenes: Now he glimpses the summits of the Rockies, ghostly and dim. 'We are crossing them without seeing them they duck down and slip beneath us.' Along the Green River, Nature dreams of canyons, before her wish is fulfilled in the Grand Canyon. In the Bad Lands of Utah he finds the earth presenting a gashed, quivering look; and he finds Multnomah Falls 'the most thrillingly beautiful bit of natural scenery' he ever beheld. From Boise City, Idaho, he wrote to a friend in Poughkeepsie: I am already over 3000 miles from you and probably not yet half way to the end of our journey.... It is a feast of beauty and sublimity, sometimes almost a debauch.... Our train is made up of seven coaches.... Over forty persons in our party—a fine lot of men. I like them all. My roommate is B. E. Fernow from Cornell. He is a forester, and a good fellow.... I like Mr. Harriman and his family of six children two of them grown girls. . . . To one of his young friends at Vassar, in late May, he writes engagingly: Wonders are cheap in this land. On Saturday we drove sixty miles in stages over the great sage-brush plains to visit the famous Shoshone Falls, a rival of Niagara. Two Niagaras here, one of rock, and one of water. Take down your map and look up the Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, and see me standing there on top of a volcanic table-land, looking down 1000 feet on the falls, and wishing you and my boy were with me. Can you see my rapt gaze? Can you see me peering over the fathomless but fascinating brink of the awful chasm? Can you see me plucking wild flowers of strange beauty, then turning quickly to see or hear the strange new birds? As we roll over the plain white capped mountain peaks from 60 to 160 miles off play hide-and-go-seek with us. The day is bright and cool, the air exhilarating, the company enthusiastic. Some are on horse-back, some in coaches, some in buggies, all are full of fun and frolic. I sit on the top of a coach with three young women, daughter and friends of Mr. Harriman - how happy they are, I fancy you as one of them. Well it was a great day in a series of great days. Yesterday we came down the Columbia from the Falls and again my soul was captured by a waterfall. Oh, the siren, how she sang and came near detaining me when the waiting train summoned us aboard. Not water but the spirit of water, of a clear mountain brook playing with the wind and with gravity on the face of a cliff 600 ft. high. The rock covered with a greenish golden moss; the pool at the base hidden from view by rocky walls. How shy, how withdrawn, how delicate! How inconceivably beautiful it all was! It warmed me like a great symphony. How I longed to go back there and spend a day, or a life. Such a combination of rock, and color and water I never again expect to see. I have kept well and fairly happy but there have come times, as I knew there would, when I wished myself home again. The company is a fine one but I do not mix easily with a lot of men; women like me better than men do, and understand me better. Men are worldly and seldom dreamers, as I am. I like Gifford, the artist, and two or three others, best; we affiliate; we love things.... To Mrs. Burroughs, on June Ist: This morning we found ourselves at Victoria, on Vancouver's Island.... We have a fine steamer [the George W. Elder] and it swarms with life like an Atlantic liner. We took aboard sheep, steers, cows, hens, chickens, turkeys, and a vast lot of supplies of all kinds. We have cherries and strawberries as long as they will keep. .. My old trunk looks just as it did when I started. I put on my thick underwear this morning. I will write again the next stop. [J. B. to M. S.] We are waiting here [Victoria] for a telegram from Washington, allowing us to land on Seal Island in Behring Sea. I have a fine large state-room all to myself on the upper deck. John Muir is next door. This is a British city about the size of Poughkeepsie, but is finer and solider built. It rains here most of the time, as it does in England, but no snow to speak of. Here we leave civilization and plunge off into the Pacific.... While I have tickled the back of the Continent; have rubbed and chafed its very backbone, now we shall scratch its flippers in the Pacific and maybe its long proboscis in the Aleutian. I think I am the most untraveled man in the crowd. Many of them know all this Alaskan and Western world as well as I know Julian's Rock. And they are fearfully and wonderfully learned. The Botanists and Zoologists talk in Latin most of the time, and the Geologists have a jargon of their own. I keep mum lest I show my ignorance. Oh, these specialists, who cannot see the flower for its petals and stamens, or the mountain for its stratification! Throughout the voyage, jocose rhymes, posted anonymously in the smoking-room, or read of an evening in the social hall, contributed much to the enlivenment of the voyagers. 'Westward Ho!' written by Burroughs, shows with what good spirits he embarked, though bound to make propitiatory overtures to the ship: Bow westward, faithful steamer, We're bound for Arctic waters, Then hie away through Bering Strait, But in waltzing with the sea-gods, Oh, don't forget our prayer! Dr. Frederick V. Coville gives this incident of one of their evenings in the ship's saloon: The Captain had sent to the saloon a stoker and a deck-hand who could do stunts. One of them sang a troubadour's song, the other gave a lively dance on a hatch-cover, brought in for the purpose. Not to be outdone by any one from the forecastle, members of the scientific staff volunteered stunts. John Muir did a neat doubleshuffle, immediately followed by Mr. Burroughs, who, to the astonishment of everybody, stepped forward to the hatch-cover and gave an admirable clog-dance, evidently a hang-over from boyhood 379 days an astonishing exhibition of agility in an old man with white hair and beard. In 1921, when Dr. H. H. Laughlin, interested in studying John Burroughs from a biological point of view, after a brief interview, wrote a scientific paper about him, he made one assertion which he could hardly have made had he been familiar with the author's work; namely, that Burroughs was 'strangely indifferent,' if not 'insensitive,' to color-was, 'perhaps, even color blind'! The erroneous inference must have grown out of the fact that Mr. Burroughs told Dr. Laughlin he felt but little interest in the brilliant sunsets of La Jolla, California, where the interview took place mark accounted for by his illness and depression at the time. One doubting the susceptibility of John Burroughs to color should read 'In Green Alaska'; read his description of the phenomenal sunsets there; of the sapphire icebergs, the brilliant flowers, the purple mountains. A passage or two, taken at random, will suffice to refute the notion that he was insensitive to color: a re I have often seen as much color and brilliancy... but never before such depth and richness of blue and purple upon the mountains and upon the water. When the sun went down the horizon was low, and but a slender black line of forest separated the sky from the water. All above was crimson and orange and gold, and all below, to the right and left, purple laid upon purple, until the whole body of the air between us and the mountains in the distance seemed turned to color. Nothing had prepared us for the color of the ice... of the bergs that rose from beneath the water - its deep indigo blue. Huge bergs were floating about that suggested masses of blue vitriol. Green, white, and blue are the three prevailing hues, all the way from Cook Inlet to Unalaska; blue of the sea and sky, green of the shores and lower slopes, and white of the lofty peaks and volcanic mingled and contrasted all the way. cones His sensitiveness to sound was equally marked. He said that the roar made at the Treadwell mines, on Douglas Island, by the crushing of quartz rock, tore the air to tatters, and stunned and overwhelmed the ear — that Niagara would be a soft hum beside it. The Muir Glacier he thought the most impressive spectacle to be found on this continent. It held him with strange fascination; and with John Muir at his elbow, permitting no one |