Jack Heaton, gold seeker

by A. Frederick Collins

“Now between the gravel and bed-rock is a layer of gold-bearing dirt called pay-streak and this is hoisted to the surface by means of a windlass on the ends of whose rope are spliced a couple of buckets; and this windlass, of course, sets over the shaft. Usually two men go down in the shaft and pick the frozen pay streak from the ground. The shafts vary in depth from fifteen to forty feet depending on what part of the country the mine is located.

“The third man stays on top to draw up the buckets and with a wheel-barrow wheels the gold-bearing dirt back and dumps it in a pile where it will be in no danger of getting washed away by the melting snows when spring comes. In the spring when water is plentiful the fun begins for then the clean-up takes place and the men who were as poor as Indian dogs all winter wax rich and take their winnings back to civilization where they can be separated from it.

“The clean-up means that the color-bearing dirt is shoveled into the sluice-box, that is, a trough without ends, into which the miner has contrived to keep a steady stream of water running. The water washes away the dirt and leaves the free gold just as it does in the more primitive method of panning.”

The miners were as glad to see the boys as the latter were to see them, yes even more so. They immediately knocked off all work and there was a regular “chin-fest,” as Bill called it, from that time on. They made the boys stay to supper and improvised bunks in their cabin for them to sleep on. After Art Jennings, who, as you will gather from his name, was the lone white man, had heard the news of the outside world they talked about three other things only, the first of which was gold, the second gold and the third gold.

“This placer minin’ is altogether too slow a game for me,” remarked Bill when they were on their way again. “What I wants is to see moosehide sacks of it piled up like cordwood, I do.”

“Well there are moosehide sacks of it cached right here in Yeehatville on the Circle. From the Pacific Ocean on up to the Arctic Ocean there’s gold. In every stream and river, as well as the land between them, this precious metal is found in either particles or in nuggets. Take the Klondike! it’s not much larger than the Rat River here and yet so much gold was found there its name became known all over the world. Every river in Alaska and the Yukon, I suppose, is just as rich but you don’t hear much about them because the Klondike was the first and so outshone all the rest. We’ll get ours yet, don’t worry,” said Jack hopefully.

Each trip the boys made from their base of supplies took them from one to two weeks. Their marches in and out were usually made in a couple of days and when they had worked away from their permanent base as far as they wanted to go they would set up a temporary camp.

If the weather was not too severe, that is to say below zero, they pitched their tent, but when it got to twenty, forty or sixty below, or a blizzard struck them as it frequently did in mid-winter, they made a better camp by cutting out blocks of snow and piling them up into a dome-shaped shelter like the igloo of the Eskimo, but which Bill, who always persisted in nick-naming everything that was new to him, called a butter-dish.

Building a snow igloo was a simple matter after they had put up a couple, and the boys got it down to such a fine point that they could do the complete job in two or three hours. Of course this was largely the result of Jack’s experience in the Arctic which enabled him to go about it in the right way. He had brought his saw-knife with him for this express purpose. This useful tool is about eighteen inches long and one and three-fourths inches wide and while one of the edges of it is sharp like a knife the other edge has teeth cut in it like a saw.

With this saw-knife Jack or Bill would saw out the hard frozen snow into blocks which for the lower layers of the igloo measured about two feet in length and eighteen inches wide and high; as the upper layers were reached they used smaller and smaller blocks. Finally when all of the snow-blocks but one were laid up and the igloo was as hemispherical as the half of a ball, the last block, which they beveled on four sides, was set in the center and this held all of the other blocks out like the keystone of a bridge.