THE YUKON RIVER AND ITS TRIBUTARIES.

"What the Amazon is to South America, the Mississippi to the central
portion of the United States, the Yukon is to Alaska. It is a great
inland highway, which will make it possible for the explorer to
penetrate the mysterious fastnesses of that still unknown region. The
Yukon has its source in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and the
Coast Range Mountains in southeastern Alaska, about 125 miles from the
city of Juneau, which is the present metropolis of Alaska. But it is
only known as the Yukon River at the point where the Pelly River, the
branch that heads in British Columbia, meets with the Lewes River, which
heads in southeastern Alaska. This point of confluence is at Fort
Selkirk, in the Northwest Territory, about 125 miles south-east of the
Klondyke. The Yukon proper is 2,044 miles in length. From Fort Selkirk
it flows north-west 400 miles, just touching the Arctic circle; thence
southward for a distance of 1,600 miles, where it empties into Behring
Sea. It drains more than 600,000 square miles of territory, and
discharges one-third more water into Behring Sea than does the
Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. At its mouth it is sixty miles
wide. About 1,500 miles inland it widens out from one to ten miles. A
thousand islands send the channel in as many different directions. Only
natives who are thoroughly familiar with the river are entrusted with
the piloting of boats up the stream during the season of low water. Even
at the season of high water it is still so shallow as not to be
navigable anywhere by seagoing vessels, but only by flat-bottomed boats
with a carrying capacity of four to five hundred tons. The draft of
steamers on the Yukon should not exceed three and a half feet.

"The Yukon district, which is within the jurisdiction of the Canadian