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
Government and in which the bulk of the gold has been found, has a total
area, approximately, of 192,000 square miles, of which 150,768 square
miles are included in the watershed of the Yukon. Illustrating this, so
that it may appeal with definiteness to the reader, it may be said that
this territory is greater by 71,100 square miles than the area of Great
Britain, and is nearly three times that of all the New England States
combined.

"A further fact must be borne in mind. The Yukon River is absolutely
closed to navigation during the winter months. In the winter the
frost-king asserts his dominion and locks up all approaches with
impenetrable ice, and the summer is of the briefest. It endures only for
twelve to fourteen weeks, from about the first of June to the middle of
September. Then an unending panorama of extraordinary picturesqueness is
unfolded to the voyager. The banks are fringed with flowers, carpeted
with the all-pervading moss or tundra. Birds countless in numbers and of
infinite variety in plumage, sing out a welcome from every treetop.
Pitch your tent where you will in midsummer, a bed of roses, a clump of
poppies and a bunch of bluebells will adorn your camping. But high above
this paradise of almost tropical exuberance giant glaciers sleep in the
summit of the mountain wall, which rises up from a bed of roses. By
September everything is changed. The bed of roses has