MINING WONDERS OF THE FAR NORTH
This faraway land of the North is the treasure cave of Jack Frost,
where gold and gravel are cemented together by perpetual ice. You know
of the thousands who rushed here years ago, and of the hundreds who
went back loaded with riches. You may have heard how the district about
Dawson, where I am writing, produced gold by the ton, the output for
ten years being worth more than one hundred million dollars.
In those days pockets worth hundreds of dollars were not uncommon.
In August, 1899, George T. Coffey took up two shovelfuls of earth
from Bonanza Creek, from which he washed sixty-three ounces of gold,
worth nearly a thousand dollars. A miner by the name of MacDonald got
ninety-four thousand dollars for the gold from a forty-foot patch of
ground. Some of the miners on Bonanza Creek were dissatisfied if the
gravel ran less than a dollar a pan. They worked the rich spots only,
and when the cream had been skimmed off the surface, gave up their
claims.
The gold diggers were followed by corporations. They brought to the
abandoned fields millions in capital and the best mining machinery.
They thawed the frozen gravel with steam and scooped up the
gold-bearing earth with dredges run by electricity. They carried rivers
in pipes over the mountains to wash down the gold-sprinkled hills.
They handled millions of tons of material, each of which yielded only a
few grains of pure gold, but altogether they produced as much wealth as
was taken out in those first prosperous years by the individual miners.
There are two methods by which the treasure that has been left is being
recovered. One is hydraulic mining and the other is dredging. Let me
give you some of the pictures of the first method, as I saw it on a
ride up the Klondike Valley this afternoon. I went with the resident
manager of the Yukon Gold Company, the Guggenheim corporation doing
most of the gold mining in the Dawson district. We flew along in a
high-powered automobile, winding in and out through great piles of
débris. We rode up Bonanza and Eldorado creeks, which have been dredged
from one end to the other. The whole way was through a mass of gravel,
rock, and earth washings. The beds of the rivers and creeks had been
ploughed in great furrows many feet deep. There were places where miles
of boulders, pebbles, and broken rock seemed to flow down the mountain
sides into the valley. Streams of water as big around as the thigh of a
man were shooting from pipes with such force that they gouged out great
chunks of icy gravel. In some places the water dropped from the top of
the mountain, washing down the earth in its fall. The whole gave me the
impression of a mighty cloudburst that had torn down the hills and let
loose avalanches of earth.
The story behind those streams of water will give you some idea of the
marvels of mining in the Far North. When the company bought what were
supposed to be the exhausted creeks of the Klondike, it found that in
order to work its concessions it must have water with sufficient force
to wash out the hills. There was no adequate supply nearer than the
Tombstone Mountains, seventy-odd miles away. The Guggenheims spent
four years and millions of dollars in bringing this river to their
gold fields. They carried it across frozen morasses, through vast
ravines, down stupendous valleys, and then lifted it over mountains and
delivered it by a great inverted siphon across the Klondike River to
the once famous diggings.
Much of the ditch had to be thawed out and cut from the perpetual ice.
In crossing the swamps new methods of road building had to be devised,
and men and machinery were assembled far in the interior of a region
once thought inaccessible to all but the most daring arctic explorers.
The supplies, mostly from the United States, had to come a thousand
miles over the ocean and then be carried five hundred miles more across
the mountains and down the Yukon to Dawson. Machinery was taken to
pieces and dragged by horses and dogs through almost impassable wilds.
The water flows through about twenty miles of flume, twelve and a
half miles of steel and stave pipes, and thirty-eight miles of ditch.
It comes out at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five cubic feet a
second, and with a pressure of four hundred pounds to the square inch.
As the stream is applied, the gold-bearing sand, gravel, and water go
tumbling down into sluice boxes filled with steel riffles bedded in
mercury. The quicksilver catches the gold, while the rock and sand go
on to the tailings below. Some of the gold sinks into the pile at the
foot of the sluicing, but this is reclaimed at the clean-up in the
fall. Something like three million cubic yards of earth are treated in
this way by the hydraulic giants each season. The average amount of
gold in the gravel is about twenty cents’ worth per yard, and of this
amount one half is said to be profit. The dividends paid by the Yukon
Gold Company have amounted to more than ten million dollars, and the
profits of a single year have been as much as one million.
As we rode up the valleys I asked the manager whether this process took
out all of the gold. He replied:
“We may lose a cent or two to the ton, but the amount is so small that
we are unable to tell just what it is. The gold content varies a good
deal. The stuff that goes through the dredges may at times yield sixty
cents a yard, and we have struck patches that ran five dollars per yard
or more.
“The old miners threw away the values that are now being saved,” he
went on. “One day I showed an old-timer a pan I had just finished
washing, and asked him how much he thought it would run. The pan
contained a few flakes of gold and quite a little fine flour gold. The
miner tilted it so that the grains ran to one side, and then took his
thumb and scraped out the flour and threw it away. He threw out just
the sort of stuff which we are trying to save, and upon which all our
calculations are based.”
The dredges, by which much of the gold is now being taken out, operate
in ground that has to be thawed before it can be worked. With the
exception of a foot or so at the surface, this whole Klondike region
is one mass of ice, mixed with boulders, pebbles, and sand that has
been frozen for thousands of years. The ice goes down no one knows how
deep. Diamond drills sunk to a depth of three hundred feet have gone
all the way through frozen earth. The mixture is covered by a thin bed
of muck, on top of which grows a layer of arctic moss. It is only when
the moss and the muck are stripped off that the hot summer sun makes
any impression on the ice below. Sprinkled through this ice, earth, and
rock lies the gold in the proportion of from thirty to sixty cents’
worth to the ton. In a wagon load of this mass there is not more pure
gold than you can pinch up between your forefinger and thumb. Yet
methods for mining it have been devised that make it worth going after.
There is a little gold not far from the surface, but most of it is at
bed-rock, which may be thirty, forty, or fifty feet down.
The earth has to be thawed out, inch by inch, and foot by foot, in such
a way that the dredges can bite into it and gulp it down at the rate of
twenty-six bites to the minute and about one third of a ton to the bite.
The dredges do their work so thoroughly that no bit of earth ever
escapes them. You can throw a red cent into the heart of a ten-acre
field that is to be upturned by these machines and be sure that the
coin will come out with the gold. A common amusement is to saw a dime
in two and then bet whether the dredges will bring up one of the
pieces. The man who bets in the negative holds one of the halves, and
the other is buried in the earth. As soon as that spot is dredged, the
missing half is almost certain to turn up.
The first miners kept wood fires burning until they had thawed their
shafts down to the gold. Other fires were then built along the bed-rock
and the earth was dugout until they had made great caverns and tunnels
thirty or forty feet under the frozen earth overhead. They used hot
stones to aid in the thawing and took out the loosened material in
wheel-barrows and raised it to the surface with buckets and a windlass
like an old-fashioned well-sweep. The earth being frozen, the miners
did not have to bother to use any timbers to support the roofs of their
tunnels.
Much of the thawing of to-day is done by steam forced into the earth
through steel tubes three fourths of an inch in diameter, and from ten
to thirty feet long. These are called “points.” Each tube has a hard
metal cap or steel head on the top, and below this an opening where the
connection with the main steam pipe is made. The bottom of the tube is
pointed so that it can be forced down into the ground. A man stands on
a tall derrick and with a twelve-pound sledge hammer drives the pipe,
inch by inch, through the earth. The steam-heated steel melts the ice
as it goes down. When the point reaches bed-rock, it is left there for
two or three days, oozing forth steam. To thaw out enough ground for
the dredges to work on, hundreds of these steam points have to be sunk.
In places the pipes are so close together that they stand out on the
back of old Mother Earth like the quills on a porcupine. They soften
the ground so that it is dangerous to walk over it until it has cooled.
A man may think it is solid under foot, when all at once he may sink to
his knees or waist in scalding hot mud.
In the creeks where the Yukon Gold Company has been operating with
steam points and dredges, the values amount to sixty or seventy cents’
worth of gold to the ton. The thawing costs about thirty cents for each
ton. When the famous Joe Boyle, organizer of the Canadian Klondike
Company, came to figure on his problem he found that the steam-point
method would cost him four cents more a ton than the value of the gold
he could recover. He concluded that if he could get rid of the great
non-conductor of muck and moss that covered the frozen earth, the sun
of a few summers would eventually thaw its way down to bed-rock.
Then came the question of how to strip off the muck at a cost that
would not eat up the profits. Boyle decided that the Klondike River
itself could be made to do the job. He dammed it in places and turned
its course this way and that. The current soon cleaned off the top
layer, and when the water was drawn off it left the gravel exposed to
the rays of the sun.
Boyle spent in the neighbourhood of a half million dollars apiece for
some of the dredges with which he scooped up the earth thawed out by
the sun. They were the largest ever built up to that time, and were
manufactured especially for his purposes. They were brought in pieces
by sea to Skagway, Alaska, carried over the coast mountains by train,
and transported down the Yukon by steamer to Dawson, where they were
put to work. They are now lifting the bed of the Klondike Valley and
turning it upside down at the rate of five hundred tons in an hour.
Buckets that hold a ton apiece pick up boulders as big as a half-bushel
basket and earth as fine as flour. They raise this stuff to the height
of a six-story house and pour it through revolving screens. The rock,
gravel, and sand are carried away, and the gold is caught in layers of
coconut matting. Every twenty-four hours the mats containing the gold
are lifted and washed. The gold and the black sand fall to the bottom
and the mats are put back again.
While I was cashing a draft at the Bank of British North America the
other day, I had concrete evidence of the wealth being won, grain by
grain, from the Klondike. I saw a shipment of gold ready to be sent
out. It had come to the bank in the form of dust and nuggets and had
been melted down into bricks. There were fifty thousand dollars’ worth
of these bricks lying on the counter, covering a space about three feet
square. They were of a light yellow colour, and some were almost white
on account of their high percentage of silver. Some were the size of a
cake of laundry soap while others were only as big as a cake of milk
chocolate. I lifted one of the larger ones. It weighed a little more
than twelve pounds and its value was two thousand dollars. Later I
saw the bank clerk put the bricks into canvas bags and label them for
export by registered mail.
Leaving the bank, I dropped in at the offices of the Northern
Commercial Company, where I watched gold dust and nuggets being made
ready for shipment to the States. The gold filled two satchels and was
worth in the neighbourhood of one hundred thousand dollars. It was put
up in little sacks the size of a five-pound salt bag. Each sack was
worth from five to ten thousand dollars.
All gold that is shipped out of Canada pays a royalty or tax to the
government, and everyone who leaves the Klondike is examined to see
that he has no gold upon him. Once a woman succeeded in smuggling out a
large quantity of nuggets and dust. She was examined by the inspectors,
but they took no account of a big flower pot containing a rose bush
that she was carrying with her. Not until she got safely away was it
learned that the soil with which the pot seemed to be filled was only
half an inch deep and that underneath were hundreds of dollars’ worth
of almost pure gold.