capital. Like all unsuccessful ventures, however, in this progressive
age, it has been speedily forgotten, and the brilliant success of the
Atlantic cable has driven it entirely out of the public mind. Most
readers are familiar with the principal facts in the history of this
enterprise, from its organisation to its ultimate abandonment; but
only a few, even of its original projectors, know anything about the
work which it accomplished in British Columbia, Alaska, and Siberia;
the obstacles which were met and overcome by its exploring and working
parties; and the contributions which it made to our knowledge of an
hitherto untravelled, unvisited region. Its employees, in the
course of two years, explored nearly six thousand miles of unbroken
wilderness, extending from Vancouver Island on the American coast to
Bering Strait, and from Bering Strait to the Chinese frontier in
Asia. The traces of their deserted camps may be found in the wildest
mountain fastnesses of Kamchatka, on the vast desolate plains of
north-eastern Siberia, and throughout the gloomy pine forests of
Alaska and British Columbia. Mounted on reindeer, they traversed the
most rugged passes of the north Asiatic mountains; they floated in
skin canoes down the great rivers of the north; slept in the smoky
_pologs_ of the Siberian Chukchis (chook'-chees); and camped out upon
desolate northern plains in temperatures of 50° and 60° below zero.
The poles which they erected and the houses which they built now stand
alone in an encircling wilderness,--the only results of their three
years' labour and suffering, and the only monuments of an abandoned
enterprise.

It is not my purpose to write a history of the Russian-American
telegraph. The success of its rival, the Atlantic cable, has
completely overshadowed its early importance, and its own failure
has deprived it of all its interest for American readers. Though its