a moose, the outside world heard of the great discovery. Such pilgrims,
attracted by the news, as succeeded in reaching Dawson in the autumn
of 1897 found that all creeks rising on the slopes of The Dome and all
other creeks at that time proven to be worth the working, had already
been staked by the old-timers who had followed the advance guard from
Circle City and Forty Mile. Feverish stampede followed on feverish
stampede to new ground. That putting down four stakes in a creek-bed
anywhere in the region was equal to drawing a fortune from a bank
became the gospel of the hour, which received its authority from the
original attitude toward the “pup” of the men who had staked Eldorado.
A man needed only to come into a saloon with a pack on his back, and,
being tired, appear silent and mysterious, to excite the suspicion that
he had made a “strike.” “Only an affidavit” of having found “color” was
necessary to have a discovery claim recorded, and a discovery always
meant a stampede. Having received a hint from a friend, or overheard
a whispered conversation in the street, a pilgrim would rush off for
a distance of more than a day’s travel, without food or blankets,
trusting to luck to feed him and keep him warm. Death was often the
result.
Having staked the remaining creeks in a radius of from thirty to
sixty miles of Dawson, some of the new-comers rested in their cabins,
eating their winter’s supply of food. Others found employment on
the work-claims; and still others departed over the ice to escape
starvation and to thrill their neighbors at home with the information
that they owned claims. As the humor of the saloons went, there
remained for the oncoming host of May and June an expanse of unexplored
territory sufficient to keep a hundred times their number busy
prospecting for a century, but no gold at all, unless they could find
it for themselves.
V
MINERS AND MINING
REAPING THE GOLD HARVEST--THAWING AND SLUICING--MINERS AND THEIR
THEORIES--THE DOME--EXPENSIVE TIMBER--EMPTY POCKETS BUT DOLLARS IN THE
DUMPS--THE FIRST MILLIONNAIRES--COLOR IN THE PAN--ONCE A PROSPECTOR
ALWAYS A PROSPECTOR--FIGURING FORTUNES--CAPITALISTS IN DEMAND--THE
FORTY HAPPY KINGS ON ELDORADO.
It was just on the eve of harvest-time when I first visited the creeks.
In a day or two the flow of water from the gulches where the snow lay
thickest would make a head sufficient to wash the yellow grain out of
the dumps. Along the four miles of Eldorado, or its full length, and
the ten miles of working claims on Bonanza, lines of flumes and their
dependent sluice-boxes--the lumber for which had been drawn on sleds
from Dawson by husky dogs, or cut with whipsaws--formed a network
around the string of cabins occupied by claim-owners and their workmen
and around the piles of clayish-colored dirt, thawed out inch by inch
during the short winter days, which contained virgin wealth amounting
to ten million dollars. The hill-sides, once covered with timber, were
bare of all except stumps and scarred by broad streaks from top to
bottom, showing where logs for building the cabins and for feeding the
fires in the drifts had been slid down.
If you descended by the shafts beside the dumps to the drifts, you soon
comprehended that reaping the harvest, once you have a claim, is not so
easy as picking wild cranberries. It is dogged work to build fires day
after day, running the risk of suffocation and permanent injury to the
eyes by the smoke, and pulling up the dirt, bucketful after bucketful,
by means of a windlass, with the thermometer forty below zero--and the
prospect of cooking your own dinner. The rising steam from the thawing
pay-dirt of the drifts, which fills the valley with mist, adds the
discomfort of humidity to the biting cold. Though the man who turns the
windlass may have to beat his hands and dance about to keep warm, he is
never in positive danger as is his partner below, who, in returning to
relight one of the series of nicely arranged piles of wood which have
failed to ignite, is likely to be suffocated, or, barring such slips
as this or any consequent accident, is sure to suffer continually from
soreness and smarting of the eyes, if not to have them permanently
injured by the smoke.
In one spot of three or four square feet on Eldorado, the nuggets are
so thick that you can pick them out by hand as a farmer’s boy picks
potatoes out of a hill. In juxtaposition there may be as many more
square feet which are not considered worth thawing and sluicing; and
so the angles of the drifts seem like the path of a man of vacillating
mind trying to make his way to the light in darkness. From two to three
feet above the real bedrock is the false bedrock, a stratum of stone
broken into angular fragments, apparently by some great force passing
overhead. Between the two is the best paying-dirt, and occasionally
here is found, perhaps with particles of gold sticking to it, the tusk
of a mammoth who was the ruler in the valley before the days of the
moose.
In the angular fragments of the false bedrock the miners who are
fond of making out the reason of things over their cabin-fires, with
diversified reading in newspapers or even a dip in a text-book of
geology at school as basic knowledge, find support for their favorite
theory as to how the yellow particles came to their resting-place.
Gold had never been found before in such incongruous surroundings.
Therefore, they contend, it must have been borne from its point of
precipitation by some force worthy of the situation and of Alaska,
where nature has a gift for seemingly paradoxical performances done on
a Brobdingnagian scale. What else but a glacier was equal to the feat?
It had scattered wealth in its progress like some good Lady Bountiful,
crushing with its great weight the false bedrock between whose
fragments the dust had fallen by force of gravity to the true bedrock.
Another, a smaller and perforce a more confident school of thought,
holds that an ancient volcano “coughed” the dust out of the bowels of
the earth.
[Illustration: On the Creeks.]
For my part, inasmuch as the geologists themselves have come to no
certain conclusion, I hold that all the gold which has been found
in the Klondyke and Indian River districts was smelted in a great
pot in The Dome and has leaked out of its cracks. Then, as a fitting
corollary, I desire that one day an old forty-niner, as sturdy and as
fine as an old weather-beaten oak, shall discover the pot and find
a leverage strong enough to lift the cover off it; whereupon, a good
guardian, gently reserving enough of his millions to give him a certain
annuity for life, he may spend the rest in ’Frisco after the manner
of his own choosing as quickly as he can. But I am certain--such is
the irony of fate--that, instead of him, the happy man will be an
Oklahoma “boomer,” the father of several strapping daughters, who never
panned a handful of dirt before he mortgaged his all in order to buy
a Klondyker’s outfit. He will set his daughters up in the capitals of
Europe, where they will marry continental noblemen, while the whole
family will be miserable for life.
In candor, I must say that with mine as with most theories there are
facts which go to contradict it. The claims on the upper reaches of the
creeks, which have their origin on the slopes of The Dome, are much
richer than those on the lower reaches, where the dust is finer and
more travel-worn as well as more scattering. But in the head-waters
nothing has yet been found which is worth the working. So either all
the gold leaked out some time before this force that carried it ceased
to operate, or the mythical person who has charge of the pot mended
the cracks, or, possibly--and this is my hope--the fortunes which have
already been brought to light were only an overflow, the palpable
result of the chemist in charge of the vessel having misjudged its
capacity.
By the fifteenth of May the drifts were filled or partly filled with
seepage which had frozen below a depth of a few feet, where the
temperature is never above freezing. Work in them was at an end by
the first of May, when the surface earth had begun to thaw a little
at midday. Then the plane, saw, and hammer took the place of the pick
and shovel. If they had used rosewood at New York or London prices
the miners could not have built their flumes and sluice-boxes out of
more expensive material than that they had in the warping, knotty fir
boards which were condescendingly sold at $250 a thousand by the three
saw-mills in the country. Once the flumes were laid to the gulches and
to the dams in the creek itself, the sluice-boxes were properly laid
on the dumps which were to be washed first and the gates between the
two were made tight, the community was ready to reap the reward of a
winter’s toil as soon as the sun should thaw the drifts of snow on the
mountain-sides sufficiently to make a sluice-head of water.
There followed a brief period of inactivity like that between sowing
and harvest for the farmer. Every man had his opinion of how much the
output of all the creeks would be, and the estimates varied from six to
fifteen millions. Within the big world of speculation there were the
small worlds of the groups of cabins which clustered around that of the
owner of each claim on Eldorado and Bonanza. For the laymen who had
taken portions of claims to work on shares and for the claim-owners,
especially those who had employed the workers on their claims at daily
wages, it was an interval of some anxiety. They would soon know in what
measure the estimates that they had made from specimens of pay-dirt
panned out in buckets of water in their cabins during the winter would
be verified. Men who had more than a hundred thousand dollars in their
dumps possibly had not five dollars in cash in their possession.
The members of no community had ever been submitted to a greater burden
of usury. They bore it with rare good-nature. What else were they to
do? they asked. They needed money for wages, for food for their men,
and for lumber, and those in town who had money knew the value of it.
The regular rate in the winter was ten per cent. a month, and some of
the so-called millionnaires who had owned nothing except an outfit two
years before were owing as much as $25,000 on from three to six months’
time.
A spirit of optimism and good cheer prevailed. A sun bath, lounging in
a home-made chair on the stoop of a cabin (perhaps with a pair of moose
horns forming an ornamental back), was a luxury better appreciated in
the Klondyke than in a temperate clime. Sometimes a breeze, with a
faint odor of fir-trees and of the many wild flowers which spring up in
tropical luxuriance in the spring, came down the valley. Over the hills
were young birches which yielded a delicious sap for the tapping. There
was even gratitude to the tyrant windlass of the winter days in that it
had supplied exercise, given an appetite, kept the blood circulating,
and prevented the scurvy, which is to be dreaded only by the man who
lounges in his cabin, does not wash himself, does not cook his food
properly, and endeavors generally to imitate the bear. Nearly everyone
could hope, if he did not expect, that his claim or his lay would turn
out as well as he had estimated. At all events, he would have some
spending money. He knew that the early boats from Lake Le Barge would
bring in many luxuries just at the opportune moment when the “clean-up”
was about finished and he might go to “town.” He smacked his lips in
anticipation of the day when he would have all the eggs that he could
eat, regardless of their cost.
One day the sun suddenly beat down with great fierceness, which was
unabated for several days. Then the water came gushing down the flumes
in greater quantity than was needed, and the men picked up their picks
and shovels again and began peeling off the dirt on the dumps and
tossing it into the sluice-boxes. The warmth was prolonged through the
night, so that the dirt continued to thaw as fast as they could strip
it off, and on many claims--whose owners had foresight or were in luck,
as one pleases to put it--there were two shifts working all the time
except when, once or twice a day, the boxes were being “cleaned” of
the accumulation of gold and the sand which sinks with it between the
cleats. The snowdrifts were melting as if they were under a blowpipe.
Even the tiny streams of the gulches become torrents, dams had to be
opened, and some sluice-boxes floated away from their moorings. Only
too soon was the loss of the wasted energy brought home. With the
snow gone and rains and the seepage from the thawing surface the only
source of water supply, the currents dwindled until many claims had
not a single sluice-head. The claim-owners on the tributary Eldorado,
with as much dirt to wash as the main stream Bonanza, particularly
had cause to resent the prodigality of nature in expending all of its
ammunition at once. Instead of having finished their washing in June as
they had confidently expected, all through July they were measuring the
head of water from hour to hour with the care of a physician feeling a
patient’s pulse.
When the “clean-up” of a day’s shovelling was made, you might feast
your eyes on the consummation of the harvest. The water was shut off
and the cleats in the boxes were lifted and rinsed, leaving a residue
which glistened with yellow particles. Just a small stream was turned
on by the man at the water-gates, who was probably making the most
of his rest from shovelling by smoking a pipe of cut plug, and then
turned off again, or on a little more or off a little less, while the
most expert miner on the claim pushed the speckled sand-pile back and
forth with a common brush-broom until all the foreign particles had
floated off, except a sprinkling of the heavy black sand which is
invariably the companion of placer gold.
Three or four or five thousand dollars--perhaps ten or fifteen or
twenty thousand if the “clean-up” be on Eldorado--which is three or
four or five double handfuls, is put into a pan with an ordinary
fire-shovel. The sight is bound to make your blood run faster and to
color your reason with an epic enthusiasm. That little yellow pile, you
know at a glance, will stand the test of chemicals. It must also accept
the concrete responsibility for all the disappointments, sufferings,
and deaths of the pilgrims on the trail and the worries of their
friends and relatives at home. Once you have seen a “color” in the
bottom of a pan with the black sand following it around like a faithful
servant, you can never again be deceived by the glitter of any false
gods. You would know it if you saw it between cobblestones on Broadway,
or if it were no larger than a pin-head at the bottom of a trout-pool.
It is small wonder that once a man is a prospector, in good faith,
not a child of a wild stampede, he is always a prospector. There is
an heroic aspect, the more charming in contrast to the complexity of
civilization, in going from creek to creek which have no place on the
maps of geographical societies, taking a pan of dirt here and a pan of
dirt there, breathing fresh air, a zest given to your exercise by the
hope of success.
For the moment, the yellow pile makes you feel like seeking a claim of
your own and harvesting its treasure for yourself. But when you look
at the miry path along the base of the mountain by the creek-side, and
think of following it with a pack on your back until it is no more, and
a wilderness begins; of passing on over the mountains until you come
to what you consider a likely place, and thawing through thirty feet
of earth at a rate of a foot a day in the hap-hazard possibility of
finding “pay-dirt,” you conclude that the poetry of the thing can be
better appreciated by sitting on someone else’s dump.
Besides, as one who did a little prospecting on his own account and is
proud to say that he found a few “colors”--which is just what anyone
else can do in the Klondyke region--I observed that the recent arrivals
of Nestorian prospectors who took a delight in quoting to you from
Emerson when their hands were reeking with clay and their gray locks
were sticking through the crowns of old hats, do not like Alaska,
though free to admit its material opportunities. They could not be
weaned from the temperate climate and the skies of California, and were
determined to return to their old stamping-grounds, where any honest
prospector can get a grubstake from a speculative city man, and needs
nothing more to make him happy and free.
After a few days’ washing the hopes of most of the laymen were
shattered; and so far as their peace of mind was concerned, the
worst of it was that they had only their own lack of foresight to
blame. They had learned that even in the Klondyke men do not make a
practice of giving fortunes away to strangers--except to music-hall
artistes--though, as in the centres of civilization, they often
negotiated a bargain with an air of self-sacrifice which is an
assumption of as much.
Such was the attitude of many of the claim-owners below the discovery
claim on Bonanza and of a few above who had prospected their claims
well enough to have some idea of what was in them. They concluded to
let out their ground to be worked on shares, two men to each section,
which is called a lay. Many, especially those who had come in with
the little pilgrimage that reached Dawson in the autumn of ’97, were
enraptured over the chance of getting a portion of a claim on the
original creek and not far from “discovery,” at that.
The number of applications quite exceeded the number of lays to be
let, and all through the winter the laymen on Bonanza were the envy
of their fellows. The samples which they washed out in their cabins
had the peculiarity of bringing promises up to original expectations,
because the laymen had the weakness of selecting the samples from their
best dirt. When the man who was in the drift came to one of those
rare spots in the pay-streak of Lower Bonanza where he could see the
tiny particles shining in the wall of earth like golden hoar-frost,
he gleefully called out to his “pardner” at the windlass to take it
into the cabin so they could see how much it ran to the bucket. In
the evening the happy children, upon the result as a basis, quite
overestimating the amount of dirt they had in their dumps, figured
out small fortunes for themselves, spoke of the claim-owner as a good
angel, hugged their knees fondly, as if they had materialized into
dust, and saw brilliant pictures in their smoke rings.
In their letters, detailing their success to the folks at home, they
promised their wives new gowns and their daughters pianos. They were
doing so well that they felt that they could afford holidays. They fell
into the way of “knocking off” by mutual consent at noon on days when
they had to bake bread. If it was a little colder than usual in the
morning they succumbed to the temptation of making more figures and
dreaming more dreams by the fire and postponing work until the morrow.
“The gold’s in the ground; it’s ours. All we’ve got to do is to take it
out, and we’ve got to stay here two or three winters, anyway,” was the
argument with which they excused themselves. The size of their dumps
beside those excavated by employees who worked by the hour was a silent
commentary on the value of discipline.
Mid-July found them in Dawson in a mood to afford at least one
more dish of eggs, one more dinner at the restaurant before they
settled down to the economical life which their necessities required.
Occasionally they took out of their pockets, to amuse their friends,
clippings from the home paper, in which they saw themselves made out
millionnaires. They reread the letters from home which had come along
with the clippings in the first mail down the river, and confronted
deep perplexities. It was only human that they should wish that the
wife had not gone so far as actually to order the piano and the gown.
While they calculated how much they would need for their winter’s
outfit and how much they could send home--if that fund did not all go
for eggs before the problem was settled--they formulated the wording of
their replies by which they should explain the situation.
To the credit of the sex be it said that the wives of some of the
unfortunate laymen knew their husbands’ weaknesses. One optimist, who
had taken only $900 out of his claim instead of the $10,000 that he had
anticipated, received this reply from home:
“God bless you, Charlie, but we’ve made too many ten thousands without
ever getting them for me to count my chickens before they’re hatched.
I’m being as economical as I can, and telling the neighbors that I hope
you’ll make a good year’s wages, but that it’s too early to tell yet
for certain.”
Most of the laymen, if they had worked steadily for eight hours a
day--more are scarcely practicable on account of the long nights--would
have had more than the equivalent of the prevailing rate of wages.
Those who had felt themselves to be unfortunate in not getting lays and
had sought employment, because they had someone to tell them to go to
work in the morning, were in the mood of the school-boy who had studied
during the term and passed his examination as opposed to the boy who
had not. Their employers were better satisfied because their claims had
been worked with more system and thoroughness than the others, and were
more than glad to pay the interest, heavy as it was, on their borrowed
capital.
While the laymen were inclined to exaggerate the amount of their
earnings in order to decrease the discrepancy between their winter
boasts and their spring returns, the claim-owners themselves, who early
in May were serene optimists and put the total output of the country
at $15,000,000, by the end of May were dour pessimists, asserting
their unbounded faith that the total output would not be more than
$6,000,000. Early in May, you see, there was an impression that the
Government royalty of ten per cent. on the gross product of all claims
had been repealed. At the end of May, Major Walsh, the Commissioner
of the Yukon District, arrived with the positive information that the
royalty would be collected. Most of the claim-owners on Bonanza had
suffered the same disillusion as their laymen; but most of them, if
the Government had not decided that they would have to pay the royalty
on the laymen’s gold as well as on their own, would have put on a bold
front, especially as their claims were for sale.
When claim-owners met on the trail, after comparing notes as to the
number of eggs eaten at the first sitting, the invariable remark was:
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about your claim being sold!”
For no one was certain whether he or some stranger owned the wealth of
his dumps. Without any property under consideration by the capitalists
of London or New York, you were a kind of social outcast. Claims
that were under options were as common as mortgages formerly were on
farms in Kansas.
[Illustration: A Flume on Bonanza Creek.]
The prospect of famine during the winter had been responsible for this.
Some enterprising fellows, who were among the first to go out over the
ice, made the best of their opportunity as connecting links between an
isolated community and civilization.
“Here you are,” they said to the claim-owners on Eldorado and Bonanza,
“paying a dollar and a quarter and a dollar and a half an hour for
labor and thawing the dirt out by inches, when capitalists, with
cheaper labor and improved appliances, can take it out for half the
money. Why, it’s a case of the old stage coach against the lightning
express. If they can block a number of claims and work ’em together,
they’ll gladly pay you on the spot more’n you can get out of your claim
the way you’re working it, and make a good thing out of it too. The
whole outside’s wild over the Klondyke. The capitalists are longing for
the chance. All that’s got to be done is to lay it before ’em. You name
your price and give me six months’ option and we’ll take ’em out and
sell ’em. What we get for ’em’s our affair. We’ll make our commission
out of the difference.”