This river is a short, turbulent, brawling stream, less than two hundred and fifty miles in length, but rising in the heart of a lofty and mighty mass of volcanic mountains. It receives a score of imposing glaciers, which almost rival those of Icy Bay in Cross Sound. The silt that these gelid rivers pour into its channel has given it a deltoid mouth of extended and most intricate area. Triangulations made by an officer of the Army last year declare that Mount Wrangel is the loftiest peak on the North American continent. The feet of this magnificent volcanic dome are washed by the forks of Copper River, which is eighteen thousand six hundred and forty feet below the apex of its smoking cap. Then the river at this point is more than two thousand feet above sea-level, so the vast altitude of more than twenty thousand feet for Mount Wrangel seems to be truthfully claimed. The soil which borders the abrupt banks of the Copper River is entirely composed of glacial silt and gravel. It is moist and boggy in the driest seasons, covered with rank growing grasses and dense thickets of poplars, birches, and willows, that line the margins of the stream. The higher lands, as they rise from the narrow valley, are in turn clothed with a dense growth of spruce-forest, which gradually fades out into russet-colored areas of rock-sphagnum as the altitude increases to that point where nothing but the cold and frost-defying lichen can cling alive to the weather-splintered summits of alpine heights above. Fish (salmon) are the chief reliance of these natives of Copper River; they depend almost wholly upon the annual running of those creatures. The difficulty of hunting is so great that the savage is content with shooting a few mountain sheep, a wandering moose or two, and, perhaps, a stray bear in the course of the year. Also, huckleberries and salmon berries are abundant on the sunshiny slopes of the high glacial river-terraces during August and September.