THE STORY OF THE KLONDIKE GOLDFIELDS

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8296, 26 September 1903, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE STORY OF THE KLONDIKE GOLDFIELDS

(By Samuel E. Moffet.)

The gold-miner is the one human being who refuses to recognise the impossible. For three hundred years the nations have been sending their boldest and most resourceful explorers to discover the Pole-, and the secret of the North remains a mystery vet. But if it were known that the Pole was surrounded by placer .goldfields, its site would be a hustling mining-camp within, a year- The obstacles that have defeated the explorer would not daunt the prospector. He would scramble over .the ice-floes, on bis liands and knees, if necessary, and he would have his claim staked out before the first summer sun surrendered to the winter night. He has proved it in the Klondike. The basin of the Upper Yukon has been known for at, least- a quarter of a century to be more or less abundantly s_prinkled with gold. George Holt had crossed the Chilcoot, and prospected through the interior, in the seventies. Before that time tiie Chileat Indians had objected to the presence of white men in their country, wishing to preserve a monopoly of the trade with the Indians of the interior, but, in 1879. Captain Beardslee, of the United States ship Jamestown, induced them, to raise the embargo, and a stream of miners began' to trickle in. They made good wages, but few sensational strikes. Little minintr-camps sprang up here and there— Fortv" Mile, Circle City, Eagle City, and I others. A few hundred men were patiently combing the country. And now came the usual perversity of fortune. The great. discovery was at hand, and, as at the Cornstock and so many other bonanzas, luck passed by the intelligent, hard-woTking, discerning prospectors and hit a- shiftless drifter in the face. The Klondike River had been prospected from time to time, but had'not created a good impression, and had been left to the Indian salmon-fishers to whom it owed its name. In 1894, as Mr Tappan Adney's investigations showed, Robert Henderson, of Scotch breed, Nova Scotia birth and Colorado training, found himself at Joe Ladue's post at Sixty Mile, with a cash capital of ten cents. Ladue had been booming the outlook on Indian River, a few miles above the Klondike. Henderson offered to prospect for him for a "grub-stake," and Ladue accepted the proposition. Henderson explored the tributaries of Indian River during the next two years, making fair wages, with a reasonable prospect of .something more. In the summer of 1896 he crossed the divide that separated the waters of the Indian from those of the Klondike. Prospecting in the valley of an unknown stream, he washed out eight cents to the pan. Delighted with this promise, Henderson named the stream Gold Bottom Creek. He induced three men to" go with him and take up a claim together. They built sluices, and washed out seven hundred and fifty dollars—the first gold extracted from the Klondike basin. Henderson went to Sixty Mile for provisions, and spread the news of his discovery.' Returning by way of the Klondike, he" passed ,the Indian fishing-village at its mouth. On the other side of the, YukonRiver was encamped-George "Washington Carmack. Henderson went- over and told Carmack of his discovery, and urged him to take up a claim.with two Indian bucks, taking a short cut by. way of another stream, called Rabbit Creek. On this trip he found some colors of gold, which he showed to Henderson.. Carmack and the two Indians took-up three claims on GoldBottom Creek, and then started back to the. fishing-village. The party went down Rabbit Creek, and, after travelling a- few miles, stopped to rest. One'of the miners filled a pan with dirt. In that pan was the key to the richest gold deposits ever uncovered on earth—a. hoard that was to yield a hundred million dollars within., six years, with nobody knows how much behind. Carmack staked off a thousand-foot "discovery claim for himself, with two adjoining five-hundred-foot claims, one above and one below for the. two Indians. Then the narty hurried to the recorder's office at Forty •Mile, recorded their claims, renamed Rabbit ■Creek "Bonanza," and boasted of their discovery. Forty .Mile disgorged ;.its_ idle--pbpulatiort., The news spread. up-and down. th? Yukon,, and, .-before long, Bonanza was 'stakeel for- Jts. entire length,; as well,as>a. which-turned .put-to-.fce still; more'-'heavily;'.:charged with gold, and was Meanwhile, Henderson, was cheerfully pegging away at Gold Bottom: One day he saw some men coming over the ridge. They told him! they were from Bonanza Creek, where they had the richest thing in, the world. He asked them where this wonderful creek was located, and when: they

pomted toward his old Babbit Greek, lie knew that he had missed his vfuture. ? ; • Henderson made a succession of plucky. attempts to catch the receding tide ;whose flood should have led him on to fortune, but he met with an extraordinary series ot mishaps/including a change m the law, which deprived him. of a valuable claiin between, the thne he staked it out and the time ha readied the recorders omce to- . record it. At last he gave up, and returned penniless to Colorado—robbed of his last dollar on the steamer—to his old job in tne Aspen mines. , 1S Carmaek made his strike on August 16, ; : or 17, 1896. it happened that Joe Ladue w*f already on hi/way to i in. the wake of his "grub-staker Bender- .. son It -occurred to him that there would be a "ood opening for a branch tradmg--5 st there. Whe heard of the sensational discoveries on Bonanza Creek^, he expanded the post into a town. He built fstore and £bin, and staked out a town site of two hundred acres, of which to tecured title to one tondrrd and seventy-ei-ht, the other twenty-two remaining in ?fe oos=ession of the Government. The DomiCn surveyor, -Mr .Ogilv e named the infint metropolis Dawson City, alter i->r George M Dawson, Director of the GeoloricaVSurvey of Canada, who had establishS boundary, between Alaska and the British possessions. TW that first year Luck shut her eyes and t S^^ufwhefh/^con to whom all creeks looked alike, washed in the despised dirt and struck it rich, A ministers son from Chicago wound up a spectacular career at home by an enforced trip to Alaska for reformatory purposes He took up a claim that proved a Donanza, and divided his time with equal, diligence between shovelling out throwing it at the birds-most-ly of scarlet plumage! His father heard of his success, and hurried to Dawson to save the fortune. The news of the rescue expedition travelled ahead, and when it reached the prodigal, he gave his claim and what money he had .left to a dance-hall siren and drifted down the Yukon in a skiff. . . Clarence Berry was raising fruit in a resno County,' California, some years Klondike discovery. He resolved to hunt for gold in Alaska. He had forty dollars of his own, and borrowed sixty more at extravagant -interest. -In 1894 he out with forty others, of whom two lasted as fur as Lake Bennett. Those two died on the way to Forty Mile, which Berry reached alone. He sent to California for his fiancee, who made the journey by the all-water route to Forty Mile City, and there was a weddin". When the Indian made his find on Bonanza Creek, it did not take the Berrys long to get there. They secured several good claims, from one of which Mrs Berry picked. out fifty thousand dollars to amuse her idle moments. Berry made a trip to San Francisco soon after, and exhibited in a hotel window one hundred and thirty thousand dollars, taken from a single claim. His brother" stay ed behind, but lived in luxury befitting a millionaire, on canned potatoes, beans and real beefsteak, cooked by his own hands in his palatial twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin. Charles Anderson was plied with drink by two" gamblers, and induced to promise to buy an unknown claim on Eldorado for eight hundred dollars. In the cold, gray dawn of the morning after, he knew that he had been swindled, but he would not go back on his word. He paid the money, and by the time he had worked a third- of the claim, he had taken out two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The land in which these incidents happened was one to which no magnet but gold would have drawn any civilised settler. There were three or four months in which hot weather and mosquitoes were prevalent, but, even in those, winter was always growling at the door. The mercury dropped below freezing-point at .some time in every month of.the year, and there were months in which it never once went as high as the freezing-point. .At midwinter there was only two hours of sunshine in the day. The ground never thawed except in a shallow layer on top. Below that layer there was solid ice all the year round. The early miners used to dig off the top stratum and expose another layer to the sun, and so gradually work down- ; ward toward the bed-rock. Of course, this method confined operations to a few months in summer. Some time before the Klondike discoveries a new scheme had been devised. The miner built fires on the frozen ground, and so bored through the ice in shafts and lateral drifts where the sun.never could have penetrated. In this way he was able to work all the year round. This device enabled the Klondike to turn out several times as much' gold in a year as it could have produced by the old methods. Later, still further (improvements were invented, such- as the plan of drilling with great hollow augers, through which steam was driven to thaw the ground 3 The news of the great find in the northcame upon the world with dramatic suddennessf On June 16, 1897, the steamer "Excelsior" tied up to her dock m -ban Francisco, and a procession of weatherbeaten passengers filed gravely ashore. They were loaded down with small baggage valises, jam-cans, boxes, oil-cans, and packages done up in old newspapers—which they seemed strangely reluctant to entrust to any hands but thgir own. They were returning miners from the Klondike, and they had with them a trifle of three-quar-ters of a million dollars' worth of gold. The next day the '"Portland" reached Seattle with another batch of miners and eight hundred thousand dollars) more infold, and, like a flood bursting through a broken dam, the maddest rush in the history of mining .was under way. _ _ Now the curious thing is—and it is a remarkable illustration of the power of the p rei3S _that this revelation was not xeally new. The areat strike had been made in Auaust, 1896, nearly a year before, the tributaries of the Klondike had been staked out in the fall o'f that year, and letters, sent out by the miners during the winter, f had told their friends outside of the wonderful discovery. These letters were delivered in January and February, and their recipients had headed for the Klondike, and actually reached Dawson, by the time the "Excelsior," with her sensational news, reached San Francisco. Yet the world did not- become excited, or even conscious that anything unusual was going on in the north, until the dramatic advent of the "Excelsior" and Ahe "Portland" stirred the newsXiaper instinct for sensations. Mr Ogilvie, the Canadian Commissioner for the Upper Yukon, and The best authority on the mineral resources of the region, had estimated that there was joom on the Klondike and its tributaries for about a thousand claims. There were more than this number of miners already on the ground —yet a hundred thousand men started for the new Ophir with no prospect that on© in a hundred of them would be able to find a paying location. But there Tvas a graver matter ahead than the mere certainty of financial disappointment. The) Klondike region was one of those countries in which "a crow would have to carry his rations with; him." . It was locked in ice for seven months in the year. Those who. knew, it were horrified by the apparently certain prospect of an awful tragedy. Here were a hundred thousand anen, mostly .ignorant and poorly supplied, rushing into a land that was normally stocked for a couple .of thousand, and into -which all the existing means of transportation could not possibly carry provisions dnring the* short. summer for more than a small number. iChey started with'amazing irresponsibilty. One observer noticed a traveller assaulting the. passes with thirty-two pairs of moccasins, a : case of pipes, a case of shoes, two Irish setters, a bull pup and- a lawn-tennis set. He was going "just for a jolly -good, time,- you know.", ; ..: . -■'.-.1. : -' : S-. - .v.'.-:.-..--v. -,/:\v- ; W^':'■

Fortunately, tlie trap did not lie, open to all corners. Its approaches were s»guarded by natural difficulties that it was. impossible;; for the crowds to reach it at once. It was. necessary first to fake a" steamer from. Seattle or Victoria to the head of the Lynn, Canal, or from San - Francisco to St. Michaels, and the available steamers would hold only so many. There* were tvfo main 1 routes —one by way of the YuEon from St. Michaels, and the other by way of the I passes from Dyea or Skagway. _ The Yukon route waß the easier, but ft took

fhe little stern-wheel tubs then in service forty days to go up tha river out of the five months of open water, and they would not 'hold more than a minute fraction of the people who wanted to go. Only fifteen hundred men managed to push through to Dawson before the close, of navigation in 1897. Of the eighteen hundred who tried the all-water route by way of iit. -Michaels and-the Yukon steamers, only forty-three gob through, and thirty-five of those had to go back, for lack of provisions to carry them' through the winter. Even as it was famine at Dawson was averted only by shipping people who were without provisibhs>aown the, river before the ice barred the, way. ; Six thousand persons took, their chances in Dawson, and at one time- they - were paying speculators from one hundred dollars to one hundred and twenty dollars per sack for flour, a dollar a. pound for beef,.. and one dollar and fifty cents a pound for mutton...The stores of the great trading corporations did not raise their regular prices of six dollars per sack for flour, forty cents a pound for bacon, and other things in proportion, but their supplies were limited and they would sell only a little tO' each person. The United States Government started a reindeer relief expedition, but through mismanagement rnostof the deer died, and the attempt was abandoned.

There were two possible ways of getting over the coast mountains—by the Chilcoot Pass from Dyea and by the White Pass from.' Skagway. The Chilcoot was high, steep and terrifying; the White'Paes, long, muddy and heart-breaking. As you toiled up the trail from Dyea, you saw a gigantic gray wall, seven hundred feet high, barring your progress. But when you reached it, you found you could crawl up its face, and even lead a loaded horse—-the latter discovery, like so many others in that region, was made by a tenderfoot. By the White Pass route you did not have the precipitous ascent of the Chilcoot, but you had to go twice as far, as you struggled through bogs in which you were likely to leave your horse and, perhaps, your entire outfit as well. The whole trail- was blazed by the carcases of dead horses. Starting at the head of Lynn Canal, within four miles of each other, both trails converged on the other side of the mountains at Lake Lindeman, from which there was a single all-water route to the mines. The little Alpine lake, with its next neighbort "Lake (Benlnefch, /suddenly bscale the busiest boat-building centre, in the world. Every man had to have a boat, or a share in one, and, at first, he had to build it himself. 1 There was ho labor to be hired. Moreover, he had, not only to build the boat, but to cut down the trees and saw them into boards for the purpose, sometimes bringing the logs several miles. The work was generally done in partnership, and, when a craft, was finished, the. neighbors would knock off and help launch it. In the spring of 1898 three thousand boats were set afloat on Lake Bennett within two months. Of course, the opportunities for money-making at this point were not long left unimproved. A litle sawmill, which sold boards to the prospectors at two hundred and fifty dollars per thousand feet, was worth more than most Klondike claims, and some expert builders found it worth their while to settle on the lake and sell ready-made boats at from- two hundred and fifty dollars to six hundred dollars apiece. Thirty or forty thousand men endured the hardships of this journey within the first year, and then civilisation took possession of the country, and made the trip to Dawsom a simple summer-excursion tour. An aerial steel tramway dispelled the terrors of the Chilcoot, and tliat in turn was superseded by the. White Pass and Yukon Railroad, one hundred and eleven miles long, from Skagway to White Horse, connecting with daily steamers for Dawson in summer, and with stages in winter. You can liave your baggage checked through now from Seattle to the capital of the Klondike, and be tied to the world by telegraph and daily mails when you' get there. One more of Nature's fastnesses has been stormed, and the route that was strewn six years ago with the bones of men and horses has no ir-ore hardships than the line between N«:w York I and Chicago.