3-086-281 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

On the Way to Klondike: views of Wrangel, Alaska, and the Stikine-Teslin and Chilcoot Routes, 1898. 'The Outer Town, Wrangel. Gold-seekers travelling from the American and Canadian coast cities are landed, after an ocean voyage of seven hundred or more miles, at Wrangel, in the strip of Alaska which runs far down the British Columbia coast...An advance guard of some fifteen hundred miners went up the ice of the Stikine from Wrangel to Glenora this spring, having their outfits drawn by dogs, goats, burros, oxen, and horses. Wrangel is an old Russian settlement at the mouth of the Stikine, handed over to the United States in 1867, when Alaska was purchased. Goods belonging to foreigners are bonded over the thirty miles between the coast line and Canadian territory. The sleepy old village, prior to the beginning of the rush, was noted for its collection of grotesquely carved totem poles, the heraldry of the Indian families. Now a town is springing up with surprising rapidity, and the Siwash natives are being crowded from their ancestral homes beside the grey seas and mist-covered mountains wet with almost perpetual rains.' From "Illustrated London News", 1898.