very much in the way, for there were no wagons or carriages there.
There was not a horse on the island. The domestic animals were
represented by chickens, a lonely cow, a few sheep, and hogs of a
breed well calculated to deepen and complicate the mud of the streets.

Most of the permanent residents of Wrangell were engaged in trade.
Some little trade was carried on in fish and furs, but most of the
quickening business of the place was derived from the Cassiar
gold-mines, some two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles inland,
by way of the Stickeen River and Dease Lake. Two stern-wheel steamers
plied on the river between Wrangell and Telegraph Creek at the head
of navigation, a hundred and fifty miles from Wrangell, carrying
freight and passengers and connecting with pack-trains for the mines.
These placer mines, on tributaries of the Mackenzie River, were
discovered in the year 1874. About eighteen hundred miners and
prospectors were said to have passed through Wrangell that season of
1879, about half of them being Chinamen. Nearly a third of this whole
number set out from here in the month of February, traveling on the
Stickeen River, which usually remains safely frozen until toward the
end of April. The main body of the miners, however, went up on the
steamers in May and June. On account of the severe winters they were
all compelled to leave the mines the end of September. Perhaps about
two thirds of them passed the winter in Portland and Victoria and the
towns of Puget Sound. The rest remained here in Wrangell, dozing away
the long winter as best they could.

Indians, mostly of the Stickeen tribe, occupied the two ends of
the town, the whites, of whom there were about forty or fifty, the
middle portion; but there was no determinate line of demarcation, the
dwellings of the Indians being mostly as large and solidly built of