Early settlers


Early settlers
	"My vision played a trick on me And set my eyes a-roaming free Till once again I glimpsed the Wonder Blazes…" ~ Frank B. Camp, Alaska Nuggets, 1922
Descriptions of the aurora were composed by the adventurers, fur traders, gold miners, and settlers who followed the polar explorers into the Arctic.
These often fanciful accounts of the aurora were left by these early settlers, who perhaps penned them by lantern or candle light in the long darkness of the northern winter. In his Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska (1868), Frederick Whymper described the aurora as a "snake of electric light." Miners sometimes imagined that the light, which seemed to emanate from a point in the distance, was gold vapor rising from gold mines. Poet Robert Service reflected this view in his "The Ballad of the Northern Lights,"			A snake of electric light click for larger image
				Helpful links Robert W. Service original homepage
			Miners imagined the aurora was vapor rising from gold mines click to see larger image
	"But I'll tell you now - and if I lie, may my lips be stricken dumb-- It's a mine, a mine of the precious stuff that men call radium It's a million dollars a pound, they say, and there's tons and tons in sight You can see it gleam in a golden stream in the solitudes of night….

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