In 1867, when the far-seeing Secretary Seward purchased
Alaska from the Russian government for $7,200,000, there was
an outcry of disapproval equal to that made when Louisiana
territory was purchased from France in 1803. Many of the
people called the region "Seward's Folly" and said it would
produce nothing but icebergs and polar bears, and General
Benjamin F. Butler, representative from Massachusetts, said
in the House: "If we are to pay this amount for Russia's
friendship during the war, then give her the $7,200,000 and
tell her to keep Alaska." Representative Washburn, of
Wisconsin, exclaimed: "I defy any man on the face of the
earth to produce any evidence that an ounce of gold has ever
been found in Alaska."
To-day Alaska is yielding in gold $10,000,000 per year; its
fisheries are among the richest in the world, including more
than half the salmon yield of the United States; its forests
are of enormous value; its fur-seal harvest is without a
rival; its territory is traversed by one of the greatest
rivers of the world, two thousand miles long and with more
than a thousand miles of navigable waters, and it promises
to become an important farming and stock-raising region. As
for extent, it is large enough to cover more than twenty of
our States. In revenue it has repaid the United States the
original outlay and several millions more; while, aside from
its gold product, its fisheries have netted $100,000,000 and
its furs $80,000,000 since its acquisition. Seward, then,
was wise in looking upon this purchase as the greatest
achievement of his life, though he truly said that it would
take the country a generation to find out Alaska's value.
The most dramatic and interesting portion of the story of
Alaska is its gold-mining enterprise, and it is of this,
therefore, that we propose to speak. The discovery of placer
gold deposits in British Columbia led naturally to the
surmise that this precious metal might be found farther
northward, and as early as 1880 wandering gold-hunters had
made their way over the passes from Cassiar or inward from
the coast and were trying the gravel bars of tributaries of
the Yukon, finding the yellow metal at several places.
[Illustration: MUIR GLACIER IN ALASKA.]
The first important find along the Yukon was made on Stewart
River in 1885, about $100,000 being taken out in two
summers. The next year a good find was made at Forty-Mile
Creek, finds being made later on Sixty-Mile Creek, Birch
Creek, and other streams. On Birch Creek arose Circle City,
named from its proximity to the Arctic circle, and growing
into a well-built and well-conducted little town.
Meanwhile a valuable find had been made on Douglas Island,
one of the long chain of islands that bound the western
coast line, and this has since developed into one of the
richest mines in the world. It is not a placer mine,
however, but a quartz mine, one needing capital for its
development and with no charms for the ordinary gold-seeker.
The gold is found in a friable and easily worked rock,
enabling low-grade ores to be handled at a profit, and
to-day fifteen hundred stamps are busy and the mines are
highly profitable.
The placer miners, however, have no use for gold that rests
in quartz veins and has to be obtained by the aid of costly
stamping mills. The gold they seek is that on which nature
has done the work of stamping, by breaking up the original
veins into sands and gravels, with which the freed gold is
mixed in condition to be obtained by a simple process of
washing. The wandering miners thus prospected Alaska,
following the long course of the Yukon and trying its
tributary streams, many of them making a living, a few of
them acquiring wealth, but none of their finds attracting
the attention of the world, which scarcely knew that
gold-seekers were at work in this remote and almost unknown
region.
Thus it went on until 1897, when on July 16 a party of
miners arrived in San Francisco from the upper Yukon with a
large quantity of gold in nuggets and dust and a story to
tell that deeply stirred that old land of gold. On the 17th
another steamer put into Seattle with more miners and
$800,000 in gold dust, nearly all of it the outcome of a
winter's work on a small stream known as the Klondike,
entering the Yukon about fifty miles above Forty-Mile Creek.
The discovery of this rich placer region was made in the
autumn of 1896 by an Illinois man named George McCormick,
who, in the intervals of salmon fishing, tried his hand at
prospecting, and on Bonanzo Creek, a tributary of the
Klondike, was surprised and overjoyed to find gold in a
profusion never before dreamed of in the Alaskan region. The
news of the find spread rapidly through Alaska and before
winter set in the old diggings were largely deserted, a
swarm of eager miners poured into the Klondike region, and
the frozen earth was torn and rent in their eagerness to
reach its yellow treasures.
The news of the discovery spread as far and fast as the
telegraph could carry it. The richness of the find surpassed
anything ever before found and the whole country was agog.
The stories of wonderful fortunes made by miners were
testified to by a display of nuggets and sacks of shining
gold in stores and hotels, the find of one man being shown
in a San Francisco shop window in the shape of one hundred
and thirty thousand dollars worth of gold.
The old gold-fever broke out again as an epidemic. Such a
stampede as took place had never before been seen. The
stream of picturesque humanity that poured through Seattle
and on to the golden north surpassed the palmy days of '49
when California opened its caves of Aladdin. Every steamer
that could be made use of was booked to its full capacity,
while many ardent gold-seekers were turned away. Every
passenger and every pound of cargo that could be taken on
these steamers was loaded and the hegira was almost
instantly in full blast.
As it proved, the new find was in Canadian territory, a few
miles east of the Alaskan boundary, but the flood of men
that set in was mainly American. Many threw up good
positions or mortgaged their homes for funds to join the mad
migration, oblivious in most cases of the fact that they
were setting out to encounter hardships and arctic extremes
of temperature for which their home life had utterly
unfitted them. Warnings were published that those who joined
the pioneer flood faced starvation or death by freezing or
hardship, but the tide was on and could not be turned, and
before the autumn had far advanced thousands had landed at
the mushroom settlements of Skagway and Dyea, laden with the
effects they had brought with them and proposing to fight
their way against nature's obstacles over the difficult
mountain passes and along the little less difficult lakes
and streams to the promised land of gold. A village of log
houses and tents, known as Dawson, had sprung up at the
mouth of the Klondike, and this was the mecca towards which
the great pilgrimage set.
The struggle inland of the first comers was a frightful one.
No roads or pack-trails existed over the rough and lofty
passes of the coast range of mountains, and it was killing
work to transport the many tons of equipments and
provisions over the nearly impassable Chilkoot and White
Passes. For those who came too late in the season it was
quite impassable, the trails and rivers were stopped by snow
and ice, and numbers had to endure a long and miserable
winter in the primitive coast settlements or straggle back
to civilization.
The terrors of that first year's battle with the unbroken
passes are indescribable. Thousands of dead pack-horses
marked the way. And the mountains once crossed and the
waters reached new troubles arose. Boats had to be built for
the long reach of navigation down the chain of lakes and the
Yukon--many having brought the necessary boat timbers with
them. Six hundred miles of waterways were to be traversed.
On some of the short streams connecting the lakes there were
dangerous rapids to be run, in which many lost their goods
and some their lives. The early winter added ice to the
difficulties of the way and the Yukon section of the trip
was made by the later comers through miles of drift ice,
grinding and ploughing its way to the peril of the boats, or
water travel was checked by the final closing of the stream
for the winter, leaving no resource but a long sledging
journey over the snow.
Those who took the long voyage to the mouth of the Yukon and
journeyed by steamer up that stream had their difficulties
with ice and current, and it was not uncommon for them to be
frozen in, leaving them the sole expedient of the dog sled,
if they elected to proceed to the diggings without their
supplies.
Dawson once reached, the trouble and hardship were by no
means at an end. Having penetrated a total wilderness in an
arctic climate, borne on by dreams of sudden fortune, the
enthusiastic treasure-seekers found new difficulties
awaiting them. There was no easy task of digging and
panning, as in more favored climes. Winter had locked the
golden treasures with its strongest fetters. The ground was
everywhere frozen into the firmness of rock. In midsummer it
thawed no more than three feet down, and eternal frost
reigned below.
To reach the gold-bearing gravels the miners had to build
fires on the frozen surface and keep these going for
twenty-four hours. This would soften the soil to the depth
of some six inches. This thrown out, new fires had to be
kindled, and thus laboriously the miners burned their way
down to the gold-bearing gravel, usually at a depth of
fifteen feet. Then other fires were built at the bottom and
tunnels made through the five feet or more of "pay-dirt,"
which was dug out and piled up to await the coming of
flowing water in the spring, when the gold might be washed
out in the rockers and sluices employed.
As may be seen, the buried treasures of these gravel beds
were to be won in these pioneer years only by dint of
exhausting labor and frightful hardship. They would never
have been found at all had not the bars and shores of the
streams yielded gold at the surface level. Yet the
extraordinary richness of these gravels, from which as much
as $50,000 might be obtained as the result of a winter's
work, excited men's imaginations to the utmost, and the
stream of gold-seekers continued year after year until
Dawson grew to be a well-built and populous city and the
yearly output of the Klondike mines amounted to more than
$16,000,000.
The difficulty in reaching the mines grew less year by year.
As early as 1898 a railway was begun across the White Pass.
It now extends from Skagway more than a hundred miles
inland, the lakes and streams being traversed by steamers,
so that the purgatory of the early prospectors has been
converted into the "broad and easy way" of the later
sinners. The old method of burning into the frozen soil has
also been improved on, steam being now used instead of fire
and the pay-dirt reached much more rapidly and cheaply by
its aid.
The Klondike region, though largely prospected and worked by
Americans, is not in Alaska, Dawson lying sixty miles east
of the border. The streams of Alaska itself, so far as they
have yet been worked, are far less promising, and yet Alaska
has a golden treasure house of its own that may yet prove as
prolific as the Klondike itself.
This is at Nome, on the shores of Bering Sea, about
twenty-five degrees of longitude nearly due west from
Dawson, and a hundred and fifty miles north of the mouth of
the Yukon. Here the sands of the sea itself and of its
bordering shores have proven splendid gold bearers and have
attracted a large population to that inhospitable region, in
latitude sixty-five degrees north; here has grown up a city
containing 25,000 inhabitants, and here may be seen the most
northerly railroad in the world.
In 1898 a soldier, in digging a well on the beach at Nome,
saw in the sands thrown up that alluring yellow glint which
has led so many men to fortune and so many to death. The
story of his find came to the ears of an old prospector from
Idaho, who, too ill to go inland, was stranded in the
military station of Nome. Spade and pan were at once put to
work and in twenty days the fortunate invalid found himself
worth $3000 in gold.
At Nome the gold was first found in the beach sands and even
in the sands of the sea adjoining the beach, old Neptune
being forced to yield part of the treasures he had taken to
himself. Later, the bench of higher land stretching back
from the beach and the sides of the down-flowing creeks were
found to be gold-bearing, the bench gravels being from forty
to eighty feet thick, with gold throughout. A heavy growth
of moss covers this coastal plain, under which lie the
frozen gravels, which are softened by the use of steam and
thus forced to give up their previous freight. That is all
we need say about the gold product of Alaska, further than
to sum up that the territory yields about $10,000,000 per
year, or with the Klondike about $25,000,000, these
equalling nearly one-third the total production of the
United States. Here is a fine showing for a region once
deemed worthless.
Gold is an alluring subject, but Alaska has other sources of
wealth which enormously exceed its golden sands in value.
We have already spoken of the rich products of its fisheries
and furs. The former include several species of salmon,
which the Yukon yields in vast numbers; the latter embrace,
in addition to the usual fur-bearing animals, the valuable
fur-seal of the Aleutian Islands, a species found nowhere
else. To these sources of wealth may be added the vast
forests of valuable timber, especially of spruce, hemlock,
red and yellow cedar, which are likely to become of great
value in the growing extermination of the home forests of
the United States.
Alaska also presents excellent opportunities in its coast
districts for agriculture, most of the hardy vegetables and
cereals here yielding good crops. But a more valuable
outlook for the farmer appears to lie in the grazing
opportunities of the land. In some localities along the
south coast the grasses grow in splendid luxuriance, much of
the grass being six feet high. On the higher elevations and
in exposed places the grass is often too low for hay making
but is admirable for grazing, the cattle that eat it growing
very fat. Of these grass lands there are about 10,000 square
miles, of which more than half can be utilized.
Stock raising, then, is likely to become a leading industry,
and especially dairying, there being more meat than is
needed by the sparse population. There are admirable dairy
sites on the islands and mainland. The reindeer, recently
introduced, are likely to prove invaluable to the natives,
supplanting in great measure the dog for transportation
purposes, and supplying also food and clothing. Reindeer
milk makes excellent cheese, and in a few years there may be
deer-meat for sale outside.
Such is the story of Alaska. It occupies much the same
position on the west coast of America as Norway does on that
of Europe, but has four times as wide a habitable area as
Norway and a milder climate on its south coast lands.
Therefore, as Norway sustains a population of 2,240,000,
there is no special reason why Alaska may not yet possess a
population of 3,000,000 or 4,000,000 and take rank as one of
the important States of the American Union.