Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 262, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 November 1915 — Klondike and Yukon Today [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Klondike and Yukon Today

THE world will go gold-hunting until the last yellow nugget is extracted from the earth. Naturally the Klondike and Yukon goldfields, as the latest to be opened, will attract the would-be pioneers of the present, and romantic stories coming out of the great Alaskan forests and mountains will stir the blood of the adventurous until the whole region has become commercialized. In a recent publication of the Smithsonian, H. C. Cadell reports his studies and investigations in the Klondike 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 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 have 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 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 steamed up the coast from Van-

couver, and through the Lynn canal, to Skagway, which he terms the gateway 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.” Skagway is surrounded on three sides by a plateau of steep and rugged mountains through which two trails lead to the north over thfe White Horse and the Chilcoot passes, up whose wild and difficult ravines thousands of fortune-seekers trekked and struggled with their heavy packs, tools and tents in the mad rush to the expected El Dorado over five hundred miles away. Soon after the gold was found in quantities a mountain railroad 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 Bennett, 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 station is a wooden Presbyterian church —which shows that yt 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 531 miles of their venturesome journey to Dawson City. 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 of the Klondike, and consequently the gold-producing deposits remained intact until the early prospectors discovered them. The .Yukon goldfield is confined mainly to the vicinity of Dawson City, although ■mail 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 the famous Bonanza creek and Hunker creek. Although traces of gold were discovered in the Yukon valley in about 1869, it was twelve years later, in 1881, before it was found in th# Big Salmon, and in the Lewes, after* ward coarse gold was found on the Fortymile, a tributary of the Yukon below Dawson, and in 1894-1906 the discoveries of Bob Henderson and George Cormack, in Hunker and Bonanza creek and many miners made fortunes in a short time, but unfortunately 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 quickest fortune on record was secured by two men who cleaned up gold to the value of $65,000 ip 27 hours. Stories of the proceedings at Klondike during these “golden days'* are 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 $20,000,000, from which fixate it jumped six million annually until 1900, when the production reashed $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 of nearly $180,000,000. At the height of 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 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 and mechanical ability, but a successful man in the first may become a member of the second class. While the first two classes require fairly rich ground, only men with exceptional ability and ample capital can reach the third class and work the low-grade placer gravels or quartz veins successfully. The author describes in detail the several methods of extracting gold from the frozen Klondike field, based upon his personal observations, and shows how man has changed the topography of this district, especially in the valleys. First the drift miners turned the gravel upside down, then the dredgers plowed it all over again and threw it into great ridges of stone with mud banks between, and finally where there were white gravels on the high ground, the hydraulic “giants” washed them down into great fan-shaped cones, sometimes reaching across the entire -valley, completely burying all. below, damming up gullies and producing new lakes. All of which operations have made tough problems for the future geologist.

The vast territory of the Yukon district Is imperfectly explored, and although it is far north, the climate in summer is warm and favorable for agriculture and grazing. Exploration is now readily effected from Dawson, and Mr. Cadell hopes that fresh enterprise will reveal new resources that will lead to the permanent settlement or this remote and almost uninhabited outpost.