Young Alaskans in the Far North by Emerson Hough (ereader android .txt) 📕

“Thursday, August 14th.—Dawson at 4 a.m. Our boat does not go any farther. We reserved passage on the Norcom for White Pass. She will sail the evening of next Saturday. On British soil again.

“This place has had twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants in boom times, but there are only about twelve hundred people here now, I believe. A good many people are starting off for Chisana district, up the White River, where they say there is a gold strike. All this country has been crazy over gold strikes for a good deal more than twenty years.

“We went to a hotel here and got baths and got barbered up, which makes a change in our looks. We got a few things to wear which the archdeacon could not give us.

“Friday, August 15th.—Went up the famous Klondike River, which comes in here. Half of it is clean and the other half dirty. Saw no more pick-and-shovel work. Everything is run by the big dredges owned by companies, which do the work of hundreds of men. They thaw out the ground now with steam-pipes which they drive down in, and then turn in steam. Then they rip out the ground down twenty feet with the big scoops of the dredges. They just have water enough to float the dredges. Everything is worked and washed right on the dredge. It beats placer mining a whole lot. But a few men can work one of these dredges, and then a few men get all the money they turn out.

“Walked on up to Bonanza and some of the famous creeks above the dredges. They are using hydraulic mining up there, another wholesale way. Saw no individual mining.

“We boys ate supper with a lot of French people who are working ‘lays’ on some claims which are owned by other people on the hillsides up toward Bonanza. The bed-rock, where the rich gold is, is about the middle of the hill, and runs straight through, and they are following through right along the bed-rock three hundred feet below the surface. They have ‘drifted’ in here, and they are using hydraulic mining, too. They seemed a jolly lot. They have a woman cooking for their crew, and asked us to eat with them—the best they had. We could not talk much in their language, and they did not understand very much of ours.

“We walked down from the mountains, four and a half miles, in an hour and five minutes, and were not tired.

“Saturday, August 16th.—The Commissioner of Yukon Territory—who is about the same as a governor would be in a Territory of the United States—asked us to luncheon to-day, because he knew of Uncle Dick. So we all went and had a very pleasant time. This is the Government House, and it has the British flag over it, of course. Everybody was very nice to us, and other ladies and gentlemen asked us a lot of questions, and we did of them, too. We felt very much at home here, and friendly. The Governor, or Commissioner, used to be American himself. He came up here in the early gold days.

“One gentleman at the luncheon told a good many stories of the old times. He told how cold it got sometimes. He said once they made some candles out of condensed milk. They sold them to a saloon-keeper, for a joke, because every one wants candles in the winter-time, but the saloon-keeper could not light these candles at all! He said there used to be a young man in Dawson they called ‘The Evaporated Kid’ because he was so thin. He said, too, there was a runaway express agent who had absconded from somewhere in America, and when he got to Dawson he hadn’t anything except one painting, a copy of a celebrated picture in Europe. He sold it for a half-interest in a claim, which proved to be worth $60,000. He went back to the States and gave himself up, and got a month in jail after he had paid what he had stolen. Then he came back to Alaska and has made a good citizen! He has always kept the old man who sold the interest in this claim. Of course they wouldn’t tell us the name of this man.

“They say the best place for hunting big game is to go up the Pelly River and then up the MacMillan River. White Horse is a good place to start from. There are sheep up in there, of two kinds, and moose and grizzly bear and caribou. September is the best time to go in there, but it would take about a month, and a fellow would have to be careful not to get caught in the snow. The Mount McKinley country is even better as a big-game place, so they tell me. I wish we boys could go in there some time.

“They used to get all kinds of money in here in the early days. This same gentleman told me he once had an interest in a claim where they took out $430,000 on a fraction of a claim which was only eighty feet by four hundred. He says the dredge people have found that they can work much poorer dirt than eight dollars a yard, which would pay a shovel-man. One man can only rock about two and a half yards a day. He can sluice about twice that. A dredge, working four men, works from 2,400 to 3,000 tons a day. So you see why dredges are in here now. He said nearly all the men who got rich easy lost their money. There was a lucky Swede who married an extravagant woman, and she spent all his money—several hundred thousand dollars—right away; but he only laughed and said, ‘I’ll strike it again pretty soon.’ But he never has. He says there were a good many hundreds of men who held on to their stakes and went out with 50,000 to 100,000 dollars each. It must have been exciting times in this little old town! Very quiet now.

“All the pictures of Dawson show the big white scar on a mountain-side where a landslip took off the whole side of the mountain many years ago. The Indians say it buried a village at its foot. This big hole in the mountain is right where you can see it down the street. You can’t help seeing it if you go to Dawson.

“I was much interested about the first man who discovered this country. They don’t all tell the same story about it. The Yukon Territory and Alaska are so much alike, and the people settling them have been so much alike, that it seems they are about the same. We crossed the international boundary between them away back at Rampart House. From there to here, on both sides of that line, men have been coming into this country, no one knows how long.

“Jack McQueston, so Mr. Ogilvie says in his book about the Yukon country, established Fort Reliance, six miles below where Dawson is, in 1871. Then Arthur Harper came in and joined him in trading. One time some Indians got hold of their rat poison, and two old women and one girl died. That made the Indians sore, so the traders had to pay for the women. They said the two old women were no good, but they would pay ten skins for the young woman, about six dollars. The Indians said that was all right! It’s a funny country.

“After that a man by the name of Mayo came in with Harper and McQueston, and in 1886, so this book says, they went down to Forty-Mile River, where they found gold already discovered. It was McQueston that founded Circle City, but it is not really on the line—nearly a degree in latitude south of it.

“Harper and McQueston seemed to move all around everywhere. They said they found color on the Peace River and on the Liard, but did not find anything on the Mackenzie. But on the Peel River they found good prospects, and some on the Porcupine also. They were all over that country, where we’ve been.

“This Harper party came over the Rat Portage, too, the way we did, and they describe it about the way we would. But that was long before the Klondike rush, for they got to Fort Yukon on July 15, 1873. The Klondike was not known then, nor until more than twenty years later.

“I guess that the man who really ought to have the credit for finding the gold in the Klondike country was Bob Henderson. He was not trading so much as prospecting. Besides, he got his start about the way most prospectors do—an Indian showed him some pieces of gold, and showed him the place where he found them. Anyhow, that is how Harper found some gold in the Tanana country. But Harper, though he was around in this country twenty-four years, never found any big strike. He died in Arizona in 1897. Jack McQueston stayed in later, and everybody remembered him as a generous trader.

“They say that the first gold to come out of the Yukon came from the Tanana River in 1880. A Mr. Holt of the Alaska Commercial Company took the first party over the Dyea Pass and down the Yukon, in 1875. They say a very little gold came out in 1882 and 1883, but nobody had ever heard of the Klondike then.

“McQueston liked the Stewart River better than any place for a long while. They got gold in a great many streams running into the Yukon, and found it on nine creeks as early as 1894. They sent out about $400,000 that year. There were a good many miners all along the river even in 1894—seventy-five miners in one party of stampeders. But still no one had heard of the Klondike, although they had prospected between the Yukon and the Arctic Ocean and far down to the mouth of the Yukon, and about everywhere else!

“Harper and McQueston had been on the Klondike, but did not find anything at first. Bob Henderson had as much nerve as anybody. They went up on Indian River, which runs parallel to the Klondike, about fifteen miles away. Henderson worked on Quartz Creek, they say, and he had to thaw out his ground with log fires the way they used to do, so he did not make much. Then he worked on Australia Creek. Of course these men all moved around a good deal. He only got about 600 or 700 dollars on the creek where he was working, so he moved over to a stream which he thought ran into the Klondike, and he called this Gold Bottom. He got the color here.

“Bob Henderson met George W. Carmac, and he offered to share his new strikes up on Gold Bottom, but he drew the line at the Indians Carmac was living with! So Carmac did not go out at first. But Carmac and two Indians, Charley and George, did go up the Klondike, and up Bonanza after a little, about a mile