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Show B if) - eft - - - - ft HH. -IrT Til f vffA 0 ffi Mtfw THE world will go gold-hunting until the last yellow nugget is extracted from the earth. Naturally Nat-urally the Klondike and Yukon goldfields, as the latest to be opened, will attract-the would-be pioneers pio-neers of the present, and romantic stories coming out of the great Alaskan Alas-kan forests and mountains will stir the blood of the adventurous until tho whole region has become commercialized. commercial-ized. In a recent publication of the Smithsonian, H. C. Cadell reports his studies and investigations in the Klondike Klon-dike and the Yukon and presents a picture of conditions in these famous fields which the man with the gold fever will do well to see. The name Klondike was once in every ev-ery mouth, and late in the nineteenth century it nearly became a synonym for all that was rich and prosperous. But of late it has not been so common, its early bloom having faded away. The sensational pockets of fine placer gold, which attracted hordes of hardy adventurers from every quarter, now are nearly depleted, and no new ones Lave been discovered to maintain its earlier reputation But while this part of the Yukon district can no longer be called a poor man's goldfield, it still contains a considerable quantity of alluvial gold which can be secured by the application of capital and brains. It remains a region .well worth visiting, for besides the gold It has other possibilities of development. There are many points of geographic and scientific interest; in this remote and imperfectly explored northwestern northwest-ern corner of the British empire there are numerous problems awaiting the discussion and investigation of the geologist and the geographer of the years to come. Skagway Now a Wretched Spot. On his trip of investigation Mr. Cadell Ca-dell steamed up the coast from Van- The last stretch of the railroad from Skagway runs along Lake Bennett to White Horse, a few miles above Lake Laberge, where safe navigation down the Lewes river to Dawson begins. Dawson City the Center. Although the great ice fields of the early ages swept the greater portion of North America they missed the region re-gion of the Klondike, and consequent ly the gold-producing deposits remained re-mained intact until the early prospec-. tors discovered them. The Yukon goldfield is confined mainly to the vicinity vi-cinity of Dawson City, although small quantities of gold can be found in the sand of the Yukon for hundreds of miles up the valley. Dawson City is situated on the alluvial flat where the Yukon is joined by the Klondike river, two tributaries of which are tho famous Bonanza creek and Hunker creek. Although traces of gold were discovered in the Yukon valley in about 1S69, it was twelve years later, in 1881, before it was found in the Big Salmon, and in the Lewes, afterward after-ward coarse gold was found on the Fortymile, a tributary of the Yukon below Dawson, and in 1S94-1906 the discoveries of Bob Henderson and George Cormack, in Hunker and Bonanza Bo-nanza creek and many miners made fortunes in a short time, but unfortunately unfor-tunately most of the gold was. spent foolishly or in debauchery. One man is said to have taken $600,000 out of a claim 86 feet by 300 feet, but, so the story goes, he spent it in a few years and died in poverty. The quick est fortune on record was secured by two men who cleaned up gold to the value of $65,000 in 27 hours. Stories of the proceedings at Klondike during these "golden days" arc not edifying, but point to the moral that wealth too easily and quickly won is apt to work ill. The total output in 1898 was $20,- iwOT,Ma!, jj , , " Gene. raj. Vitw or Dawsom couver, and through the Lynn canal, to Skagway, which he terms the gateway gate-way to the Yukon, and describes as "a wretched little town with decayed wooden houses and grass-grown streets, the scene of many robberies, riots and murders at the time of the gold rush, which the police authorities had neither the power nor energy to control. Skagway is not, and can never be, of much use to the United States except as an obstruction to Canadian progress, but might be of some advantage to the vast Canadian hinterland less than twenty miles inland." in-land." Skagway is surrounded on three sides by a plateau of steep and rugged rug-ged mountains through which two trails lead to the north over the White Horse and the Chilcoot passes, up whose wild and difficult ravines thousands thou-sands of fortune-seekers trekked and struggled with their heavy packs, tools and tents in the mad rush to the expected Kl Dorado over five hundred miles away. Soon after the gold was found in quantities a mountain railroad rail-road was built up the White pass from Skagway to the summit and on to Lake Bennett, a distance of 40 miles, traversing a wild and iceworn plateau of gigantic proportions, strewn with moraines, sprinkled over with lakes and inclosed by snowy peaks 5,000 to 6.000 feet in height. At the head of Lake Bennett lies the deserted town of Ber.nett, where, at the time of the gold rush, there were lodged some five thousand people in houses, huts and tents. The only building now standing beside the railroad rail-road station is a wooden Presbyterian church which shows that at least a few righteous men were among that sordid crowd. It was here that the first prospectors and miners got into boats and canoes and navigated their frail craft through lakes and rapids for the remaining C31 miles of their 7enturesome journey to Dawson City. 000,000, from which figure it jumped six million annually until 1900, when the production reached $22,275,000, the highest point. From this point a steady decline began until in 1908, when it was $2,829,131, at which time hydraulicking and dredging began, and the total output rose slowly until it was $5,018,411 in 1913. It has been estimated that only about $20,000,000 worth of gold remains to be produced, out of the original available amount ol nearly $180,000,000. A; the height ol the boom in the winter of 1899 the population of Dawson is said to have reached 25,000; recently, however, It has dwindled down to less than two thousand people. Three Ways of Getting Gold. The various processes of recovering gold in this region fall under three main heads individuals, by washing surface gravels with shovel and pan, or by sluicing with flume and sluice box; small parties, by working drift with mechanical scrapers and sluices, or drift-mining in shafts and sluicing, and capitalists, by dredging with powerful pow-erful mechanical plants, hydraulic sluicing with monitors, or mining and stamping ore in mills. The first class includes "poor men's diggings" and the second requires more financial resources re-sources and mechanical ability, but a successful man in the first may become be-come a member of the second class. While the first two classes require fairly rich ground, only men with exceptional ex-ceptional ability and ample capital can reach the third claca. The vast territory of the Y'ukon district dis-trict is imperfectly explored, and although al-though it is far north, the climate in summer is warm and favorable for agriculture ag-riculture and grazing. Exploration is now readily ei'fe'ited from Dawson, and Mr. Cadell hope: that fresh enterprise will reveal nev resources that will lead to the permanent settlement of this remote and almost lyiinhaWljfJ outpost. |