Chapter XII: Down the Yukon and Home (3)

In one spot of three or four square feet on Eldorado, the nuggets are so thick that you can pick them out by hand as a farmer’s boy picks potatoes out of a hill. In juxtaposition there may be as many more square feet which are not considered worth thawing and sluicing; and so the angles of the drifts seem like the path of a man of vacillating mind trying to make his way to the light in darkness. From two to three feet above the real bedrock is the false bedrock, a stratum of stone broken into angular fragments, apparently by some great force passing overhead. Between the two is the best paying-dirt, and occasionally here is found, perhaps with particles of gold sticking to it, the tusk of a mammoth who was the ruler in the valley before the days of the moose.

In the angular fragments of the false bedrock the miners who are fond of making out the reason of things over their cabin-fires, with diversified reading in newspapers or even a dip in a text-book of geology at school as basic knowledge, find support for their favorite theory as to how the yellow particles came to their resting-place. Gold had never been found before in such incongruous surroundings. Therefore, they contend, it must have been borne from its point of precipitation by some force worthy of the situation and of Alaska, where nature has a gift for seemingly paradoxical performances done on a Brobdingnagian scale. What else but a glacier was equal to the feat? It had scattered wealth in its progress like some good Lady Bountiful, crushing with its great weight the false bedrock between whose fragments the dust had fallen by force of gravity to the true bedrock.

Another, a smaller and perforce a more confident school of thought, holds that an ancient volcano “coughed” the dust out of the bowels of the earth.

For my part, inasmuch as the geologists themselves have come to no certain conclusion, I hold that all the gold which has been found in the Klondyke and Indian River districts was smelted in a great pot in The Dome and has leaked out of its cracks. Then, as a fitting corollary, I desire that one day an old forty-niner, as sturdy and as fine as an old weather-beaten oak, shall discover the pot and find a leverage strong enough to lift the cover off it; whereupon, a good guardian, gently reserving enough of his millions to give him a certain annuity for life, he may spend the rest in ’Frisco after the manner of his own choosing as quickly as he can. But I am certain--such is the irony of fate--that, instead of him, the happy man will be an Oklahoma “boomer,” the father of several strapping daughters, who never panned a handful of dirt before he mortgaged his all in order to buy a Klondyker’s outfit. He will set his daughters up in the capitals of Europe, where they will marry continental noblemen, while the whole family will be miserable for life.

In candor, I must say that with mine as with most theories there are facts which go to contradict it. The claims on the upper reaches of the creeks, which have their origin on the slopes of The Dome, are much richer than those on the lower reaches, where the dust is finer and more travel-worn as well as more scattering. But in the head-waters nothing has yet been found which is worth the working. So either all the gold leaked out some time before this force that carried it ceased to operate, or the mythical person who has charge of the pot mended the cracks, or, possibly--and this is my hope--the fortunes which have already been brought to light were only an overflow, the palpable result of the chemist in charge of the vessel having misjudged its capacity.

By the fifteenth of May the drifts were filled or partly filled with seepage which had frozen below a depth of a few feet, where the temperature is never above freezing. Work in them was at an end by the first of May, when the surface earth had begun to thaw a little at midday. Then the plane, saw, and hammer took the place of the pick and shovel. If they had used rosewood at New York or London prices the miners could not have built their flumes and sluice-boxes out of more expensive material than that they had in the warping, knotty fir boards which were condescendingly sold at $250 a thousand by the three saw-mills in the country. Once the flumes were laid to the gulches and to the dams in the creek itself, the sluice-boxes were properly laid on the dumps which were to be washed first and the gates between the two were made tight, the community was ready to reap the reward of a winter’s toil as soon as the sun should thaw the drifts of snow on the mountain-sides sufficiently to make a sluice-head of water.

There followed a brief period of inactivity like that between sowing and harvest for the farmer. Every man had his opinion of how much the output of all the creeks would be, and the estimates varied from six to fifteen millions. Within the big world of speculation there were the small worlds of the groups of cabins which clustered around that of the owner of each claim on Eldorado and Bonanza. For the laymen who had taken portions of claims to work on shares and for the claim-owners, especially those who had employed the workers on their claims at daily wages, it was an interval of some anxiety. They would soon know in what measure the estimates that they had made from specimens of pay-dirt panned out in buckets of water in their cabins during the winter would be verified. Men who had more than a hundred thousand dollars in their dumps possibly had not five dollars in cash in their possession.

The members of no community had ever been submitted to a greater burden of usury. They bore it with rare good-nature. What else were they to do? they asked. They needed money for wages, for food for their men, and for lumber, and those in town who had money knew the value of it. The regular rate in the winter was ten per cent. a month, and some of the so-called millionnaires who had owned nothing except an outfit two years before were owing as much as $25,000 on from three to six months’ time.

A spirit of optimism and good cheer prevailed. A sun bath, lounging in a home-made chair on the stoop of a cabin (perhaps with a pair of moose horns forming an ornamental back), was a luxury better appreciated in the Klondyke than in a temperate clime. Sometimes a breeze, with a faint odor of fir-trees and of the many wild flowers which spring up in tropical luxuriance in the spring, came down the valley. Over the hills were young birches which yielded a delicious sap for the tapping. There was even gratitude to the tyrant windlass of the winter days in that it had supplied exercise, given an appetite, kept the blood circulating, and prevented the scurvy, which is to be dreaded only by the man who lounges in his cabin, does not wash himself, does not cook his food properly, and endeavors generally to imitate the bear. Nearly everyone could hope, if he did not expect, that his claim or his lay would turn out as well as he had estimated. At all events, he would have some spending money. He knew that the early boats from Lake Le Barge would bring in many luxuries just at the opportune moment when the “clean-up” was about finished and he might go to “town.” He smacked his lips in anticipation of the day when he would have all the eggs that he could eat, regardless of their cost.

One day the sun suddenly beat down with great fierceness, which was unabated for several days. Then the water came gushing down the flumes in greater quantity than was needed, and the men picked up their picks and shovels again and began peeling off the dirt on the dumps and tossing it into the sluice-boxes. The warmth was prolonged through the night, so that the dirt continued to thaw as fast as they could strip it off, and on many claims--whose owners had foresight or were in luck, as one pleases to put it--there were two shifts working all the time except when, once or twice a day, the boxes were being “cleaned” of the accumulation of gold and the sand which sinks with it between the cleats. The snowdrifts were melting as if they were under a blowpipe. Even the tiny streams of the gulches become torrents, dams had to be opened, and some sluice-boxes floated away from their moorings. Only too soon was the loss of the wasted energy brought home. With the snow gone and rains and the seepage from the thawing surface the only source of water supply, the currents dwindled until many claims had not a single sluice-head. The claim-owners on the tributary Eldorado, with as much dirt to wash as the main stream Bonanza, particularly had cause to resent the prodigality of nature in expending all of its ammunition at once. Instead of having finished their washing in June as they had confidently expected, all through July they were measuring the head of water from hour to hour with the care of a physician feeling a patient’s pulse.

When the “clean-up” of a day’s shovelling was made, you might feast your eyes on the consummation of the harvest. The water was shut off and the cleats in the boxes were lifted and rinsed, leaving a residue which glistened with yellow particles. Just a small stream was turned on by the man at the water-gates, who was probably making the most of his rest from shovelling by smoking a pipe of cut plug, and then turned off again, or on a little more or off a little less, while the most expert miner on the claim pushed the speckled sand-pile back and forth with a common brush-broom until all the foreign particles had floated off, except a sprinkling of the heavy black sand which is invariably the companion of placer gold.

Three or four or five thousand dollars--perhaps ten or fifteen or twenty thousand if the “clean-up” be on Eldorado--which is three or four or five double handfuls, is put into a pan with an ordinary fire-shovel. The sight is bound to make your blood run faster and to color your reason with an epic enthusiasm. That little yellow pile, you know at a glance, will stand the test of chemicals. It must also accept the concrete responsibility for all the disappointments, sufferings, and deaths of the pilgrims on the trail and the worries of their friends and relatives at home. Once you have seen a “color” in the bottom of a pan with the black sand following it around like a faithful servant, you can never again be deceived by the glitter of any false gods. You would know it if you saw it between cobblestones on Broadway, or if it were no larger than a pin-head at the bottom of a trout-pool.

It is small wonder that once a man is a prospector, in good faith, not a child of a wild stampede, he is always a prospector. There is an heroic aspect, the more charming in contrast to the complexity of civilization, in going from creek to creek which have no place on the maps of geographical societies, taking a pan of dirt here and a pan of dirt there, breathing fresh air, a zest given to your exercise by the hope of success.

For the moment, the yellow pile makes you feel like seeking a claim of your own and harvesting its treasure for yourself. But when you look at the miry path along the base of the mountain by the creek-side, and think of following it with a pack on your back until it is no more, and a wilderness begins; of passing on over the mountains until you come to what you consider a likely place, and thawing through thirty feet of earth at a rate of a foot a day in the hap-hazard possibility of finding “pay-dirt,” you conclude that the poetry of the thing can be better appreciated by sitting on someone else’s dump.

Besides, as one who did a little prospecting on his own account and is proud to say that he found a few “colors”--which is just what anyone else can do in the Klondyke region--I observed that the recent arrivals of Nestorian prospectors who took a delight in quoting to you from Emerson when their hands were reeking with clay and their gray locks were sticking through the crowns of old hats, do not like Alaska, though free to admit its material opportunities. They could not be weaned from the temperate climate and the skies of California, and were determined to return to their old stamping-grounds, where any honest prospector can get a grubstake from a speculative city man, and needs nothing more to make him happy and free.

After a few days’ washing the hopes of most of the laymen were shattered; and so far as their peace of mind was concerned, the worst of it was that they had only their own lack of foresight to blame. They had learned that even in the Klondyke men do not make a practice of giving fortunes away to strangers--except to music-hall artistes--though, as in the centres of civilization, they often negotiated a bargain with an air of self-sacrifice which is an assumption of as much.

Such was the attitude of many of the claim-owners below the discovery claim on Bonanza and of a few above who had prospected their claims well enough to have some idea of what was in them. They concluded to let out their ground to be worked on shares, two men to each section, which is called a lay. Many, especially those who had come in with the little pilgrimage that reached Dawson in the autumn of ’97, were enraptured over the chance of getting a portion of a claim on the original creek and not far from “discovery,” at that.

The number of applications quite exceeded the number of lays to be let, and all through the winter the laymen on Bonanza were the envy of their fellows. The samples which they washed out in their cabins had the peculiarity of bringing promises up to original expectations, because the laymen had the weakness of selecting the samples from their best dirt. When the man who was in the drift came to one of those rare spots in the pay-streak of Lower Bonanza where he could see the tiny particles shining in the wall of earth like golden hoar-frost, he gleefully called out to his “pardner” at the windlass to take it into the cabin so they could see how much it ran to the bucket. In the evening the happy children, upon the result as a basis, quite overestimating the amount of dirt they had in their dumps, figured out small fortunes for themselves, spoke of the claim-owner as a good angel, hugged their knees fondly, as if they had materialized into dust, and saw brilliant pictures in their smoke rings.

In their letters, detailing their success to the folks at home, they promised their wives new gowns and their daughters pianos. They were doing so well that they felt that they could afford holidays. They fell into the way of “knocking off” by mutual consent at noon on days when they had to bake bread. If it was a little colder than usual in the morning they succumbed to the temptation of making more figures and dreaming more dreams by the fire and postponing work until the morrow. “The gold’s in the ground; it’s ours. All we’ve got to do is to take it out, and we’ve got to stay here two or three winters, anyway,” was the argument with which they excused themselves. The size of their dumps beside those excavated by employees who worked by the hour was a silent commentary on the value of discipline.

Mid-July found them in Dawson in a mood to afford at least one more dish of eggs, one more dinner at the restaurant before they settled down to the economical life which their necessities required. Occasionally they took out of their pockets, to amuse their friends, clippings from the home paper, in which they saw themselves made out millionnaires. They reread the letters from home which had come along with the clippings in the first mail down the river, and confronted deep perplexities. It was only human that they should wish that the wife had not gone so far as actually to order the piano and the gown. While they calculated how much they would need for their winter’s outfit and how much they could send home--if that fund did not all go for eggs before the problem was settled--they formulated the wording of their replies by which they should explain the situation.

To the credit of the sex be it said that the wives of some of the unfortunate laymen knew their husbands’ weaknesses. One optimist, who had taken only $900 out of his claim instead of the $10,000 that he had anticipated, received this reply from home:

“God bless you, Charlie, but we’ve made too many ten thousands without ever getting them for me to count my chickens before they’re hatched. I’m being as economical as I can, and telling the neighbors that I hope you’ll make a good year’s wages, but that it’s too early to tell yet for certain.”

Most of the laymen, if they had worked steadily for eight hours a day--more are scarcely practicable on account of the long nights--would have had more than the equivalent of the prevailing rate of wages. Those who had felt themselves to be unfortunate in not getting lays and had sought employment, because they had someone to tell them to go to work in the morning, were in the mood of the school-boy who had studied during the term and passed his examination as opposed to the boy who had not. Their employers were better satisfied because their claims had been worked with more system and thoroughness than the others, and were more than glad to pay the interest, heavy as it was, on their borrowed capital.

While the laymen were inclined to exaggerate the amount of their earnings in order to decrease the discrepancy between their winter boasts and their spring returns, the claim-owners themselves, who early in May were serene optimists and put the total output of the country at $15,000,000, by the end of May were dour pessimists, asserting their unbounded faith that the total output would not be more than $6,000,000. Early in May, you see, there was an impression that the Government royalty of ten per cent. on the gross product of all claims had been repealed. At the end of May, Major Walsh, the Commissioner of the Yukon District, arrived with the positive information that the royalty would be collected. Most of the claim-owners on Bonanza had suffered the same disillusion as their laymen; but most of them, if the Government had not decided that they would have to pay the royalty on the laymen’s gold as well as on their own, would have put on a bold front, especially as their claims were for sale.

When claim-owners met on the trail, after comparing notes as to the number of eggs eaten at the first sitting, the invariable remark was:

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about your claim being sold!”

For no one was certain whether he or some stranger owned the wealth of his dumps. Without any property under consideration by the capitalists of London or New York, you were a kind of social outcast. Claims that were under options were as common as mortgages formerly were on farms in Kansas.

The prospect of famine during the winter had been responsible for this. Some enterprising fellows, who were among the first to go out over the ice, made the best of their opportunity as connecting links between an isolated community and civilization.

“Here you are,” they said to the claim-owners on Eldorado and Bonanza, “paying a dollar and a quarter and a dollar and a half an hour for labor and thawing the dirt out by inches, when capitalists, with cheaper labor and improved appliances, can take it out for half the money. Why, it’s a case of the old stage coach against the lightning express. If they can block a number of claims and work ’em together, they’ll gladly pay you on the spot more’n you can get out of your claim the way you’re working it, and make a good thing out of it too. The whole outside’s wild over the Klondyke. The capitalists are longing for the chance. All that’s got to be done is to lay it before ’em. You name your price and give me six months’ option and we’ll take ’em out and sell ’em. What we get for ’em’s our affair. We’ll make our commission out of the difference.”

The enthusiasts believed what they said. They assured themselves and the claim-owners that none of the arguments which held good in other mining camps could apply in this instance. The Klondyke was a law unto itself in all matters of investment, they said. They put dust from each of the claims which they were to sell in a separate bag, and this they were to offer to the simple-minded financiers of London and New York as a guarantee of the correctness of their several representations. Each zealous miner being desirous that his claim should show up well on the list, some of the promoters obtained several thousand dollars in nuggets.

Such examples of success were not without their effect upon those who went out over the ice at later periods. The field of all the claims on the creeks as yet demonstrated to be valuable having been worked, they turned their attention to those creeks which had been staked on unfounded rumors by stampedes, and possibly were worth no more than the beds of so many creeks in the valley of the Hudson River. They neglected none of the details. Because it looks better to the lay eye, they chose dust from Eldorado as examples of the product of these “wild oat prospectors.”

The moral effect of the option craze was unfortunate in more respects than one. Men who owned claims on stampede creeks felt that they could afford to waste their winter in idleness in their cabins as long as they had property in the hands of New York capitalists. They could not escape the heresy that a claim in the Klondyke, no matter what its location, was regarded by the outside world as a valuable piece of property. It was especially hard for those who had not funds enough to buy their winter’s outfit, as they inquired along the river bank, day after day, as the boats came in, to learn finally that the promoters to whom they had intrusted their claims had arrived on the Pacific Coast just at the time when the Klondyke was forgotten and all public interest was centred in another subject, and, accordingly, had enlisted in the volunteer army.

Those promoters with small ambitions fared the best. In London they sold a few of the cheaper claims, which, as a rule, were disappointments to the purchasers. But sometimes it is better to be trusting than to be wise. One young Englishman bought a claim on Sulphur for $2,000 which would not have sold for $500 in Dawson at the time. When he arrived to take possession of it in June, its value had risen so rapidly on account of the later development of the creek that he sold it for $20,000. The anxiety of the claim-owners on the new creeks, as Sulphur, Dominion, and Hunker--all having their head-waters on the slopes of The Dome--were called, lest the promoters had sold their claims, was as great as that of some of the claim-owners on Bonanza lest their claims had not been sold. Perhaps as many as thirty claims on the new creeks had been worked to any extent during the past winter, with such results as to increase their speculative value by five hundred per cent.

The forty happy kings of the forty claims on Eldorado also preferred not to sell. That “pup” returned good for evil. It heaped satire upon the satirists who had given it its name as a joke, and continued to surpass all expectations. The optimism which over-estimated Bonanza under-estimated Eldorado. These forty kings, as they compared the output with their figures, concluded, with some pride, that all born mathematicians are inclined to be too conservative.

You could see the dust glistening in the dumps of the “pup.” The water gurgling over the cleats in the sluice-boxes seemed to sing a merrier song than on Bonanza. Every shovelful which it bore chuckling over the cleats yielded up a dollar or more. It licked twice as much off rocks that had to be lifted out of the sluice-boxes by hand because its current was not strong enough to carry them on down to the waste pile. At intervals, nuggets of some size were unearthed by the spade and were tossed into a pan at one side. If you were a friend of the claim-owner he would beg you to take your pick of the lot as a souvenir of the day. But you would not get one worth more than ten or fifteen dollars, even if you were greedy enough to choose it for its size rather than for its beauty. The giants--one was found worth $600 and those worth from $50 to $100 were not infrequent--had been spied in the drifts in the winter.

A magnificent carelessness of details prevailed. A scientific miner who had seen fortunes made in California out of a cent a pan would have regarded the forty kings in the light of infants making a holiday with a tack hammer and a gold watch. They could afford to laugh back at him in return. There is some reason in their philosophy that one cannot afford to pay men a dollar and a quarter an hour to pick up stray pennies, and more in the philosophy that when you have a fortune you have enough.

It was not yet in the old-timer’s nature, rapidly as his character was changing, to squeeze the last cent out of Mother Earth, in the manner of some hard taskmaster, when she had given to him such a bountiful harvest. A little line of dust, like a braid of gold lace, remaining on either side of the sluice-boxes after a day’s clean-up was dismissed with the remark that it would “come out in the wash” next time. If the workman who had the uncomfortable and unhealthy position--especially when the sun was directly overhead--of standing in the dump-box, took a few minutes’ rest, he shrugged his shoulders and said that any dust that was lost in the meantime could be a boon to the Chinamen who, coming humbly after the white man’s departure, would patiently take fortunes out of the white man’s tailings--unless the capitalist should make the valley resound with the toil of machinery manned by cheap labor, thus cheating poor John out of what he has come to regard as the right of his race in placer mining countries.

There was not one strong box for the safekeeping of the daily harvest of thousands on all of the creeks. The bags of dust were kept in the little cellars which the miners had excavated under their cabins for the preservation of their food. There was a joke which went the round of the firesides during the food-panic that it would be cheaper to fry the dust and save the hams. For the bags, made of roughly tanned moosehide, the Indians received prices in keeping with those of other things. They bore the owner’s name printed in ink, if ink could be obtained; their capacity was about $5,000 each, and they were not unlike, in their freshness as well as in their size, the dirty, worn, brown little bags which were carried in lieu of purses. Three or four of them were all that you cared to carry on your back. When you met men on the trail bending as under heavy packs of slight bulk, you knew their business. If there were many bags there might be an escort with a rifle and there might not. Most of the claim-owners thought nothing of sending several thousands by their employees, unaccompanied, to be deposited in one of the Commercial Companies’ stores; but once the “Cheechawkos” began to arrive, all sought locks for their cellar-doors.

VI

SOME KLONDYKE TYPES

THE FOOL AND HIS LUCKY FRIENDS--MORE THEORIZERS--JOE STALEY AND BILLY DEDDERING--FRENCH GULCH BENCH--GOOD FORTUNE THAT WAS DESERVED--NEIGHBORS AND TWINS--NO CURE FOR THE GOLD FEVER.

It was the greater world of the Klondyke that was bounded by the creek claims. A smaller world was bounded by the hill-sides where there were many fresh mounds of earth, suggesting that the population might be digging their graves one by one. Graves of ambitions most of these mounds were, in all truth. A few, readily distinguished as far as you could see the two figures hovering over them, were the birthplaces of the fortune which the figures were exhuming with the orthodox rocker.

The original nugget washed out of a bench and deposited where Indian Charlie’s gaze would light on it did not lead, even indirectly, to the discovery of the wealth of the benches. This honor belongs to a stalwart Swede, whose race in the Klondyke is the general butt of that fine wit of our own race which makes a mark of a foreigner’s broken English and his efforts to understand strange manners and a strange language. One day in the spring of 1897 he went up the slope above his cabin near the mouth of Eldorado and began to strip off the muck as fast as the sun thawed it. Directly his neighbors saw what he was doing they began to compose satirical remarks against the time when he should come down.

“Why don’t you go looking for gold up a tree?” they asked him.

“I tank gold no grow on trees,” he replied, in all candor.

“Say, did you ever hear,” they continued, as they held their sides, “that the weight of gold makes it sink? I suppose you think the glacier walked up on the hills and left a few millions there. The millions didn’t roll down? Oh, no! That’s why we have to sink through thirty feet in the creek bed to pay dirt. Better try the trees! You might find a bear up the trees and bear meat would be worth three pennyweights a pound in town.”

“If you don’t dig some hole you no find gold. By tam! I dig a hole if I vant to,” he replied, as he went into his cabin.

“Well of all the fools,” they said, “it takes a Swede to beat the lot.”

Men passing on the trails stopped to look up to the point where the “fool” was working, grew friendly in despising him, and carried the joke to the ends of the creeks and to Dawson, where it was elaborated over the bars.

One evening the “fool” quietly called on all of his friends among his fellow Scandinavians, as well as upon certain Anglo-Saxons who had not made fun of his English. They followed him up the hill and drove stakes in the neighborhood of his prospect hole. The twinkle in his blue eye was not unkind, though suggestive, the next morning when he showed to the scoffers a handful of nuggets from a claim which was worth $50,000. But scoffers accept nothing on faith. They would not believe that he took the nugget out of the hill until they had panned some of his dirt themselves.

“Well, of all the lucky fools,” they said, “it takes a Swede to beat the lot! Here’s millions been lyin’ within ten rods of us for a year and we never knowed it.”

Those who had sharpened their wits at the discoverer’s expense now hastened to get a claim as near as possible to his, until a mile of Bonanza on both sides of the creek was taken up, from the point where the slopes meet the creek bed to their summit. Theories about the habits of the glacier were qualified by the experts. Thenceforth, it stood to reason that the breadth of no glacier of such importance would be limited to that of a creek. The scoffers soon found themselves saying that this had been their opinion all along, and eventually became so imaginative as to hint that they had advised the Swede to make the experiment.

Poetic justice attended the immediate outcome of the stampede. The pioneer and the parasite got their fit rewards. There was less than an acre of good pay dirt on Skookum Bench, as it was called, and this mostly fell to the discoverer and his friends. Here and there in the neighborhood good day’s wages could be made with a rocker, and nothing more. Enthusiasm over bench claims languished.

“It was just like a Swede to strike the only rich bench in the whole country the first time that he put his pick in the ground,” said the scoffers. In their pessimistic philosophy, which exults over deserted prospect holes, the latest strike is always bound to be the last. They are the very ones who were the greatest optimists when they left home to try their luck in the North against the advice of their friends. This weakness is likely to grow on Klondykers who become too fond of a sedentary life, unless their supply of bacon runs out and forces action, or they awaken to a sense of their growing degradation when they eat fresh eggs in Dawson and then see the world in bright colors again. But long after the cynics are dead, strikes will be made in Alaska by the class of real prospectors who cheerily face all hardships and get out of them good digestions for anything from flapjacks to moose gristle or even boiled willow roots.

Joe Staley and Billy Deddering, who discovered French Gulch Bench, the richest of all the benches, the spring following the discovery of Skookum Bench, were of the order of real prospectors. They had served their apprenticeship in various parts of the Rockies, which are the playground of free men from end to end.

Fond as I am of the California prospector, I am unwilling to accept the verdict of his squint whenever he brings it to bear on a portion of the earth’s surface, though Billy Deddering, I admit, as he understands relative values, has reason to believe in his. But, in one sense, I rejoice with him in his faith, inasmuch as the scoffers, who want to make out that all success in the Klondyke comes from luck, and that they have failed because they never had any, spun the yarn that a log which he was shooting down the hill for a cabin knocked a nugget out of the ground and thus became the godfather of his fortune.

Some two miles above the mouth of Eldorado, French Gulch splits the embankment which forms the western wall of the valley of Eldorado. Billy’s squint, when he brought it to bear on the rounded corner of the embankment on the lower side of the gulch in something of the manner of an old-fashioned marine covering a sail with his telescope, told him that this was exactly the place where gold ought to be found, even if it was not. The first hole that he sunk yielded only colors. A clerk from London or the Eastern seaboard of the United States might have gone back down the hill with his pick and shovel in a fit of blues and never come up again. Billy was not in the least discouraged. He merely readjusted his squint, and concluded:

“If ’tain’t here it must be farther up.”

So it was. In the next hole he took $187 out of his first pan on bedrock. Joe was with him at the time, but at the request of Joe I give all the credit for the discovery to Billy.

“It was Billy’s idea entirely,” Joe said. “He spotted the ground first.”

“What did you do,” I asked Billy, “when you struck it after all your years of buffeting about from one camp to another?”

“Well,” he replied, “I looked around to see if anybody had seen us.”

“Nobody did see us, so far as we could make out,” Joe put in, “but they must have noticed that we went down the hill as light as if we was walkin’ on feathers, though we was tryin’ to look very solemn, like we was at a funeral. When somebody asked us if we had found anything I reckon we kind o’ started, though we was careful to say, ‘Jest a few colors.’ But durned if the crowd wasn’t up there ’fore the few friends we had among our neighbors had fairly got their stakes in the ground.”

“And you, Joe? What did you think of that night before you turned in?”

“Old’s I am, and long’s I’ve been knockin’ about the world, I’ve never been married, and naturally I thought what a surprise it would be to mother, when she got a letter sayin’ that her oldest boy was comin’ back to ’hio with a pile to pay off the mortgage and spend the rest of his days on the old homestead.”

“And you, Billy?”

“I wished I was in ’Frisco with that hundred and eighty-seven.”

Many times I climbed the hill to have a talk with Joe and Billy. They were a relief from the loungers and speculators in the hotel at the Forks, who seemed to think that the business of a newspaper correspondent was to expound the possibility of the schemes for enlisting capital which they were promoting. It was a pleasure to look into the good faces of Joe and Billy, and to shake their hands, caked with clay. I sat on a stone and smoked my pipe, while Joe carried buckets of dirt to Billy, who looked up with a smile on his round German face, which was spattered with drops of mud that had splashed out of the rocker when he shook it, or when he ladled water on to the dirt with a dipper made out of a butter-can. Joe said that he didn’t mind if the fact that he had struck it was published in the _Sydney_ (Ohio) _Journal_, but beyond that I knew he had no axes to grind, and my highest ambition for the moment was that they should think me a good fellow, while their greatest fear was that I was starving because I would not go up to the tent and have a cup of coffee and a “bite to eat” in the middle of the afternoon.

The sun was accommodating enough to thaw the dirt as fast as Billy could rock it, and Joe could bring it a little faster than either the sun could thaw it or Billy could rock it. This allowed Joe intervals in which to rest, to entertain me, and to relight his pipe. I used to offer my pouch to him, telling him that he would get more smoke if he used tobacco.

“Couldn’t think of it. There’s nothin’ so sweet as the heel,” he would say. “It gives me a puff, and that’s all I want.”

It was not surprising that he wondered why the supplies of tobacco which other men had brought in with their outfits were long ago exhausted, while he had plenty left. He protested, notwithstanding Billy’s denials, that he filled his pipe every morning--at least, almost every morning.

The experience of seeking with his own hands wealth direct from the hands of Mother Nature had chiselled out the lines of his face in distinct, unqualified characteristics, without any of the doubtful gingerbread work which we find on faces in civilization. It was like the weather-beaten image on some old church, careless of the storms which make a new image streaked and mean. He and his “pardner” were “rocking out” five hundred dollars a day; he was no man’s servant and no man’s master, and more of a king than kings. I have gathered nuggets on his claim as easily as I have picked up white pebbles on the beach in boyhood.

The great difficulty is in developing such a wonderful squint as Billy Deddering’s and in finding the exact spot where such nests of nuggets are located. If ever there was a poor man’s claim it is the bench claim. All you need to work it are a rocker, which costs fifteen dollars, and your pick and shovel. A blind ditch whose frozen walls are as tight as a porcelain bath-tub will catch the seepage from the pay dirt, which is thawed by the sun as it is gradually exposed. So you have all the water that you need, without too much. If the bedrock be at some depth, you can work in winter as well as in summer. A year at the most will suffice to take out your fortune; and you have no worry over borrowed money, flumes, sluices, or dams.

If Billy had not already staked his bench claim rights for the Bonanza Creek region, he and Joe would not have had to be content with a single claim, and one of them would have got the claim just above discovered, which was even richer, two men taking as high as a thousand dollars a day out of it. Here was dirt richer than any on Eldorado itself, twenty of whose forty working claims, probably containing thirty million dollars, stretched out in a panorama before you when you looked either up or down the creek. If one could have had a claim on the bench of the size of the creek claims, instead of one only a hundred feet square, he would have been more than a millionaire; and by hiring labor he could have left the country in three months after the discovery with his money in his pocket.

Sad to say, there was not room for all on French Gulch Bench any more than on Eldorado. The whole extent of the pay dirt was not more than two or three acres. It was just as large as the dip in the hill-side, which, according to the theory of Billy, caught and held the gold when it was travelling, while all that passed over the rim went on down to the creek bed below, leaving only an occasional color in its track. But I disagree with Billy. I think that all is accounted for by the giant keeper of the pot in The Dome having thrown out a handful of the overflow across the hills. This makes the presence of wash-gravel, which is absent, unnecessary, and reconciles itself to the presence of nuggets in rotten mica shist, which is the most inexcusable of all the paradoxes in Alaska, the old prospectors say.

Aside from Billy and Joe, I came to know some of their fortunate neighbors. Dan Saunders probably had the best claim of all. He was at the hotel at the Forks one day, and in his cups when a man offered in the bar-room to sell a claim on French Gulch Bench for a hundred dollars. The Forks is the Stock Exchange of the creeks, and at that moment, on account of some rumor, the opinion ruled that the bench had been salted. The claim-owner believed it. Dan said he would give fifty down and the first fifty out of the claim, and the offer was accepted. The morning after, when Dan’s wit was not so brilliant, but his reasoning faculties had improved, he went up to look at his elephant. He came down a week later and tried to spend the two or three thousand dollars he had taken out in the meantime. He could dispose of only part of it, and returned to his claim in despair, somewhat disgusted with city life.

Burke, who owned the claim next to Saunders, was a type of the runaway boys from the East who have turned up in the Klondyke after having served an apprenticeship in the West. This one reaped among the harvest of his wild oats the largest nugget that was taken out of French Gulch Bench. It was the shape of an oblong pancake, without any quartz in it, and worth $210. When I met him in Dawson one morning, he was gleeful over the joke he had played on the old folks at home. For the first time in five years he had written to them. They had as good reasons to suppose that he was dead as that he was in the Klondyke.

“Won’t their eyes pop and won’t they have something to tell the neighbors when they find out that their worthless Tom is comin’ home with fifty thousand cold!”

That same day I dined with Joe Staley at the foremost restaurant in town. When we had eaten fresh eggs and other luxuries which had just been brought in from the “outside,” as he pushed his plate away from him he shook his head dubiously:

“I dunno as I’ll be so happy as I thought, when I settle down among the cows and chickens,” he mused. “This grub don’t taste the way I thought ’twould. Darned if I don’t like the beans and bacon that I have up at the claim better, and I’ll be glad to be back carryin’ dirt to the rocker for Billy to-morrow. They say once the gold fever’s in a fellow’s bones it sticks like the rheumatiz, and I believe it. I reckon it’s the only thing I’ll be satisfied with in this life. But I won’t prospect in this godless region. I’ll go back to Californy.”

On my way to see Joe and Billy I often stopped for a chat with Ned and Fred Beck, who were sinking a shaft to bedrock at the base of French Gulch Bench hill. These twin brothers had been “pardners” for forty years. They had the vigor which comes from living among the Rockies. Their faces, framed in white beards, were fresh and smiling. The archaic furnace which they had constructed for sharpening their tools, if not their age and personal resemblance, would have attracted attention.

“Have you never quarrelled?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, lots of times,” said Fred, “and agreed on quits lots of times, too. After Ned’s had a drink or two he always gets cranky and wants to start out for himself.”

“Not much crankier’n you do,” Ned put in.

“That’s right,” Fred assented. “But when we’re sober we make it up again and are ashamed of ourselves. We may be twins, but we’re just fitted for each other.”

“That’s right, too,” Fred assented.

VII

GETTING ACQUAINTED

MR. AND MRS. “MEENACH” AND THEIR MENAGE--THE JUVENILE MINING COMPANY, LIMITED--VOSS--THE ARCH-DEACON--A SOUR-DOUGH STIFF--A DALMATIAN AND A TURK--SIAWASH GEORGE AND HIS STEAM-ENGINE--MISS MULROONEY AT THE FORKS--THE PRICE OF A “SQUARE” WITH TRIMMINGS.

One day, if the quartz claims which have been staked should fulfil the hopes of their owners, the Klondyke will become a place of managers and workmen, of stamp mills and chemical processes. To-day, there is very little to say about the working of the mines, which is as simple as building a fire, digging a well and doing the week’s wash, but much to say about my friends and acquaintances there, who came from the ends of the earth and represented most of its employments. Without knowing individuals, the pilgrimage of the Cheechawkos would have meant no more to me than a motley procession seen from a balcony. Those leading citizens and well-known characters whom I met, under the guidance of Captain Hansen in a round of the town on the evening after my arrival, are worthy of a chapter by themselves. If I had taken advantage of all the letters of introduction to claim-owners that they gave me I think that I should have been three weeks in travelling the length of Bonanza.

In return for hospitality that did not stand upon formality but laid its hand on my shoulder and insisted, I could offer nothing except the news from the “outside,” the bad news that there was no escape from the royalty. I registered a vow that if I were to make the journey over the ice again I would find room among my supplies for one more article of luxury, or else forego the privilege of introductions. I saw in my dreams the smiles with which my hosts would have greeted the offer of a good cigar, until I had the conscience of a highway robber.

“Don’t forget to call on Meenach!” said Captain Hansen. “He’s the luckiest man in the country without exception. He doesn’t have to darn his own socks and cook his own bacon and beans and you’ll know him because he’s sleek and fat and clean-shaven. I walk up the creek when I can get the time just for the privilege of poking my head in at Meenach’s door. To a poor devil of a Klondyker it’s a peep into paradise.”

It was not enough that the fortunate Meenach should have his wife; he had also his little boy of six and his two little girls, one of four and the other of two years, with him. After he wrote to Mrs. Meenach that he had killed his lion, she came on to him; and she brought with her such thing as sheets, tablecloths, and pillows, and a regulation cooking-stove. He never dared to compute just how much the stove had cost him, preferring not to have his enjoyment of the luxury allayed. The mere expense of bringing it up from Dawson would have bought two or three good ones at home.

To the miners the most wonderful feature of the Meenach cabin was the carpet on the floor. Some of them wanted to take off their boots before entering, and one suggested that if he were younger he would walk in on his hands.

“If you don’t mind,” he added, “I’ll sit with my back to the sheets on the bed. It’s too much at a time. I want to drift into this easy like.”

“Folks who live in castles may be bothered by having too many rooms to care for,” said Mrs. Meenach, “but not I, in my cabin. I could put the children to bed with one hand, stir something on the stove with the other, and set the table with the third, if I had it. It’s no trouble to go to the market in the morning. All our fresh vegetables are in tin cans in the cache just outside the door. Oh, yes, there is much to be thankful for if I look at it in the right light. We kept our condensed cream, our canned asparagus and our canned peas all winter without being frozen. Then, please heaven, something green grows in this country. I have a little cranberry sauce from the poor cranberries on the hill-side, and I agree with the children that it is ‘gooder’n’ anything I ever tasted. If I could get a fresh cabbage I think I should eat it all without waiting to put salt on it. Now I live from day to day on the hopes of the eggs which are expected in on the first boats.”

Thus she chatted while she warmed the tinned roast mutton in the frying-pan, boiled the evaporated potatoes and the tinned sweet corn.

“I’m not going to say that dinner, such as it is, is ready,” she said, “because, in the Klondyke, that is quite superfluous.”

It is good when you have eaten beans for a month off a tin plate balanced upon your knee, to look upon a clean table-cloth again, to sit by the window of a cabin in blissful certainty that your journey is at an end, and have a good and gentle woman pour you a cup of tea. I remember the meal as a banquet, not a dinner. After it was over, the lord and master and I smoked our pipes until the little ones’ heads began to nod, when I went into the cabin of one of his laymen to roll up in my blanket.