Looking at the map, one would imagine that an easier gateway to the heart of Alaska would be afforded by the valley of the Salmon River, which enters the ocean some few miles to the eastward of King Phillip Sound, but there are formidable difficulties.  The stream bursts the last rampart of the Coast Range asunder by means of a canyon down which it rages in majestic fury and up which no craft can navigate.  Then it spreads itself out through a dozen shallow mouths across a forty-mile delta of silt and sand and glacial wash.  As if Nature feared her arctic strong-box might still be invaded by this route, she has placed additional safeguards to the approach in the form of giant glaciers, through the very bowels of which the Salmon River is forced to burrow.

In the early days of the Klondike rush men had attempted to ascend the valley, but they had succeeded only at the cost of such peril and disaster that others were warned away.  The region had become the source of many weird stories, and while the ice-fields could be seen from the Kyak coal-fields, and on still days their cannonading could be heard far out at sea, there were few who had ventured to cross the forty-mile morass which lay below them and thus attempt to verify or to disprove the rumors,

It was owing to these topographical conditions that Cortez had been established as the point of entry to the interior; it was because of them that she had grown and flourished, with her sawmills and her ginmills, her docks, and her dives.  But at the time when this story opens Alaska had developed to a point where an overland outlet by winter and a circuitous inlet, by way of Bering Sea and the crooked Yukon, in summer were no longer sufficient, There was need of a permanent route by means of which men and freight might come and go through all the year.  The famous North Pass & Yukon Railway, far to the eastward, afforded transportation to Dawson City and the Canadian territory, and had proven itself such a financial success that builders began to look for a harbor, more to the westward, from which they could tap the great heart of Alaska.  Thus it was that Cortez awoke one morning to find herself selected as the terminus of a new line.  Other railway propositions followed, flimsy promotion schemes for the most part, but among them two that had more than paper and “hot air” behind them.  One of these was backed by the Copper Trust which had made heavy mining investments two hundred miles inland, the other by Curtis Gordon, a promoter, who claimed New York as his birthplace and the world as his residence.