Chapter III

Wrangell Island and Alaska Summers


Wrangell Island is about fourteen miles long, separated from the
mainland by a narrow channel or fiord, and trending in the direction
of the flow of the ancient ice-sheet. Like all its neighbors, it is
densely forested down to the water's edge with trees that never seem
to have suffered from thirst or fire or the axe of the lumberman
in all their long century lives. Beneath soft, shady clouds, with
abundance of rain, they flourish in wonderful strength and beauty to
a good old age, while the many warm days, half cloudy, half clear,
and the little groups of pure sun-days enable them to ripen their
cones and send myriads of seeds flying every autumn to insure the
permanence of the forests and feed the multitude of animals.

The Wrangell village was a rough place. No mining hamlet in the
placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw,
approached it in picturesque, devil-may-care abandon. It was a
lawless draggle of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines,
wrangling around the boggy shore of the island for a mile or so in
the general form of the letter S, without the slightest subordination
to the points of the compass or to building laws of any kind. Stumps
and logs, like precious monuments, adorned its two streets, each
stump and log, on account of the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted
with grass and bushes, but muddy on the sides below the limit of
the bog-line. The ground in general was an oozy, mossy bog on a
foundation of jagged rocks, full of concealed pit-holes. These
picturesque rock, bog, and stump obstructions, however, were not so