Tales From Skaguay

Bellingham Bay Reveille
August 27, 1897

SKAGUAY, Aug. 17, 1897

Dear Wife,-We have been here three days and we have packed our provisions five miles up to the foot of the mountain. You never saw such a rush as there is around here, the road is lined with camps the full five miles we went.

There must be 6000 people camped here. I went up the trail yesterday six miles. It is an awful rough trail, every outfit that has gone through yet has lost half of their horses killed, or crippled so that they would have to kill them. The trail is one solid line of horses and people coming and going and the worst is coming back empty for one has to give the trail to the people going in loaded. Sometimes a person will have to wait in a place an hour or more to let them pass. I think where we are camped now at the foot of the mountain we will be about twenty days. We will pack about nine miles and back the same day to where we are now camped. We will take about one hundred and twenty-five pounds to the horse and pack what we can ourselves. We have packed now three days and are all about played out. More than half of the people that come here back out and sell their outfits when they see the mountain, but a good many of them intend to stay here this winter and going the spring.

The first day I got here I was offered five hundred dollars for two of my horses. If I only could have known what I know now I could have made a big thing on bringing a band of horses here, any kind of a horse is worth two hundred dollars here but I think that will only last the next month for they will have to kill them this winter, hay is worth sixty dollars a ton, feed $2.50 a sack. You can see glaciers here of ice from three to four thousand feet of solid ice and mountains of ice floating in the salt water. Teams are making form fifty to one hundred dollars a day here hauling outfits. Scows are making from one to five hundred dollars a day landing freight from the boats. The pack-horses are standing here while I am writing this letter, waiting on me, so I will close and pack up. I will write you when I make a trip through to the summit of the mountains, and tell you haw we are getting along. Archy Hammel and his wife got through to the lake and have started down the river, he was lucky, got a boat the day he got over. He is one of the first over the trial.