In 1899 it was my good fortune to have one more Alaska day with John
Muir at Skagway. After a year in the Klondyke I had spent the winter of
1898-99 in the Eastern States arousing the Christian public to the needs
of this newly discovered Empire of the North; and was returning with
other ministers to interior and western Alaska. The White Pass Railroad
was completed only to the summit; and it was a laborious task, requiring
a month of very hard work, to get our goods from Skagway over the thirty
miles of mountains to Lake Bennett, where we could load them on our
open boat for the voyage of two thousand miles down the Yukon.

While I was engaged in this task there came to Skagway the steamship
_George W. Elder_, carrying one of the most remarkable companies of
scientific men ever gathered together in one expedition. Mr. Harriman,
the great railroad magnate, had chartered the steamer, and had invited
as his guests many men of world reputation in various branches of
natural science. Among them were John Burroughs, Drs. Merriam and Dahl
of the Smithsonian Institute, and, not least, John Muir. Indeed he was
called the Nestor of the expedition and his advice followed as that of
no other.

The enticing proposition was made me by Muir, and backed by Mr.
Harriman's personal invitation, that I should join this distinguished
company, share Muir's stateroom and spend the summer cruising along the
southern and western coasts of Alaska. However, the new mining camps
were calling with a still more imperative voice, and I had to turn my
back to the Coast and face the great, sun-bathed Interior. But what a
joy and inspiration it would have been to climb Muir, Geicke and Taylor
glaciers again with Muir, note the rapid progress God was making in His
work of landscape gardening by means of these great tools, make at last
our deferred visits to Lituya and Yakutat bays and the fine glaciers of
Prince William's Sound, and renew my studies of this good world under my
great Master.

A letter from Muir about his summer's cruise, written in November, 1899,
reached me at Nome in June, 1900; for those of us who had reached that
bleak, exposed northwestern coast and wintered there did not get any
mail for six months. We were fifteen hundred miles from a post-office.

In his letter Muir wrote: "The voyage was a grand one, and I saw much
that was new to me and packed full of interest and instruction. But, do
you know, I longed to break away from