FROZEN GOLD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue LXI, 12 July 1930, Page 10 (Supplement)

FROZEN GOLD.

A HUMAN HELTER S.KELTER

SEEKING TREASURE IN THE

BARREN LANDS

ADVENTURE UNDER THE NORTHERN LIGHTS.

(By EVAN J. DAVID.)

On a 2000-mile front extending from the Canadian Rockies and the Yukon on the west and along a thousand miles of the glistening steel of the Canadian National Railway, trans-continental line on the south, all the way to Ungava on the east, thousands of men, Avomen and children from all parts of the world are battling night and day with axes, dynamite, snowshoes, dog teams, bobsleds, snowmobiles, tractors and 'planes, equipped with skiis in winter and with canoes and 'planes fitted with floats in summer, to wrest hidden gold from the great geological pre-Cambrian shield which covers those sub-Arctic regions. To get to that gold they are building railways, harnessing waterfalls for 'electric power, bridging., rivers, constructing new highways through the bush, cutting new trails ■ over the muskeg and adventuring northward, in every kind of aeroplane. All want to be the first to discover the precious gold and silver and the baser metals, such as copper and lead. Night and day; winter and summer they are living and lighting, doing and dying, in that great battle to conquer the frozen. North, the impenetrable bush, the barren lands and tho deceptive muskeg. From the four corners of the earth they come in a mighty procession. Into tho little one-storey town of The Pas, on the Saskatchewan River in Northwestern Manitoba, they have rushed by thousands. For many years it was the end of.steel, and the juinping-off place for tho mushers of the North, the beginning of the long dormant, rusty and abandoned stretch of steel to the Nelson River. It had ence been the dream of this town that the railway, begun in IUII and abandoned in IUIS, would some day bo continued to its original destination, either at Port Nelson or .Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay. Then The Pas would bo an important town only 500 miles from this new exit to the sea and to Europe. A Stream of Rushers. - But it. was not until gold and copper in enormous quantities were found at the Flin Flon, S5. miles north of The Pas, and at the Sherritt-Gordon, some 30 miles farther north, that the Canadian Government appropriated the money to rejuvenate the old railway and continue it over the barren lands to Fort Churchill, 00 miles north of Fort Nelson on the west shore of Hudson Bay. Accordingly, since 1928, thousands upon thousands of rushers have poured into the little town of The Pas. From December, 1028, to March, 1929, the population had jumped from a thousand to five thousand. This did not include the thousands who went north to rebuild the abandoned railway nor the prospectors, the drillers, the engineers, the surveyors, the trappers, the adventurers, the clandestine rum sellers, the gamblers who mushed into all parts of Northern Manitoba. Nor the dock builders and carpenters flown into Churchill to begin the erection of a seaport and a railway terminal on a barren rock north of 53 and the northern lights.

The Government well knew that if there was a rush into the timberless land many would freeze to death in the 50 below zero weather of that long winter, and that as n.any would starve because of the lack of transportation to convey food into that remote corner of this continent. But what a rush there will be to that most northern railway terminal on this continent when the Canadian Govern m ent lifts the ban. ' Jumping Off Place for Babel. Meanwhile The Pas is the great jump-ing-off place for the thousands of prospectors who are scattering fanshaped up into that two thousand square miles of unexplored and unpopulated Barren Lands and north-west territories. There I saw brown Mexicans with beaded sombreros and high-heeled boots' from the mining field of their native mountains; lanky Australians with their broad-brimmed felt hats and long strides; Boers with their stolid countenances and heavy leather belts; pale Scandinavians with their teeth specked from chewing snuff; short stocky Hollanders with their phlegmatic countenances, and wiry Belgians. Two trains a week leave The Pas for the end of steel. One is called the "Way Freight," and the other the "Muskeg Special." No passenger trains ■ have yet been sent over the line .into Fort Churchill. But several old tourist ears are attached to .the fifty or more freight cars which haul food supplies, tools, fodder, etc., for the railway builders.

Our car contained a great variety of men, all going north on some pretext or another, but all really in search of frozen gold. The Story of the Ninety-Eighter. The Scot was a little man in his middle fifties. He was what the sourdoughs in Canada call a NinetyEighter. He had been in the gold rush to the Klondike in that year, and in every gold rush since then. He told me all. about the fire and famine in Dawson. He gave me all the details of his trip down the Yukon and across the Behring Sea to Nome. He saw the historic £10,000 in gold nuggets lying in the cradle back of the waterfront in Nome, when an injunction had been granted by a bribed judge against moving it. Ever since he was shipped away from home by his parents at the age of thirteen as a cabin boy with an uncle who would not give him any pay— with the result that he jumped ship in Chile —this Scot had gone up and down the highways and byways of the world searching with microscope and pick, digging, and washing for gold, gold, gold! He was on his way to mile 137.

From the marker at mile 137 this Scot with the grey beard, the searching eyes, the inevitable corn-cob pipe in the yellow husks of his front teeth, was hoping to transport his complete outfit of firearms, ammunition, food, clothes, cradles, sleeping bag, canned goods— enough to keep him for six months. To trap? Yes, but only so he could prospect for gold, gold, gold!—and be sure to earn enough on his furs to stake him for another prospecting adventure under the Northern Lights or the Southern Cross' — (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright.)