Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II CONSTRUCTION OF FIRST SECTION When our Surveyors reached Skaguay in May, 1898, they were dumped ashore, like everybody else, on a gravel flat, which filled the narrow valley between two snow-clad mountain ranges towering six or seven thousand feet above their heads. The gravel flat was called Skaguay and already overcrowded with human beings living under the conditions described in the previous chapter. Our men with difficulty found room to pitch their tents and establish themselves. All they had to do was to find the best way through those mountains to Lake Bennett, and to find it quick. Except the trail, the entire country was a wilderness of steep mountains, averaging higher than Mont Blanc does above the surrounding valley levels. The sides of these mountains were so thickly timbered to the snow line with small spruce that half a mile an hour was good progress for an active man, and of course no levels could be run or preliminary surveys made without clearing the line of sight. The densest ignorance prevailed as to the topography of the country. People knew where the White Pass was, and that was all. (Some of them didn’t know this and strayed into False Pass. ) The relations of the mountains to one another in a range or where the waters in the streams had their source, no one knew or cared. Yet our men had not only to find a way through this 40 miles of mountain wilderness for our locomotives, but it was important to find the best way, and to find it mighty sudden. Five surveying parties took to the hills and vanished for weeks, and in the end we had five complete surveys covering both sides of the Skaguay River and of the White Pass as far as the Summit. The distance as the crow flies is only 14 miles from the Summit to the sea, but making the most o…
