MUIR GLACIER IN ALASKA.
The first important find along the Yukon was made on Stewart River in 1885, about $100,000 being taken out in two summers. The next year a good find was made at Forty-Mile Creek, finds being made later on Sixty-Mile Creek, Birch Creek, and other streams. On Birch Creek arose Circle City, named from its proximity to the Arctic circle, and growing into a well-built and well-conducted little town.
Meanwhile a valuable find had been made on Douglas Island, one of the long chain of islands that bound the western coast line, and this has since developed into one of the richest mines in the world. It is not a placer mine, however, but a quartz mine, one needing capital for its development and with no charms for the ordinary gold-seeker. The gold is found in a friable and easily worked rock, enabling low-grade ores to be handled at a profit, and to-day fifteen hundred stamps are busy and the mines are highly profitable.
The placer miners, however, have no use for gold that rests in quartz veins and has to be obtained by the aid of costly stamping mills. The gold they seek is that on which nature has done the work of stamping, by breaking up the original veins into sands and gravels, with which the freed gold is mixed in condition to be obtained by a simple process of washing. The wandering miners thus prospected Alaska, following the long course of the Yukon and trying its tributary streams, many of them making a living, a few of them acquiring wealth, but none of their finds attracting the attention of the world, which scarcely knew that gold-seekers were at work in this remote and almost unknown region.
Thus it went on until 1897, when on July 16 a party of miners arrived in San Francisco from the upper Yukon with a large quantity of gold in nuggets and dust and a story to tell that deeply stirred that old land of gold. On the 17th another steamer put into Seattle with more miners and $800,000 in gold dust, nearly all of it the outcome of a winter's work on a small stream known as the Klondike, entering the Yukon about fifty miles above Forty-Mile Creek.
The discovery of this rich placer region was made in the autumn of 1896 by an Illinois man named George McCormick, who, in the intervals of salmon fishing, tried his hand at prospecting, and on Bonanzo Creek, a tributary of the Klondike, was surprised and overjoyed to find gold in a profusion never before dreamed of in the Alaskan region. The news of the find spread rapidly through Alaska and before winter set in the old diggings were largely deserted, a swarm of eager miners poured into the Klondike region, and the frozen earth was torn and rent in their eagerness to reach its yellow treasures.
The news of the discovery spread as far and fast as the telegraph could carry it. The richness of the find surpassed anything ever before found and the whole country was agog. The stories of wonderful fortunes made by miners were testified to by a display of nuggets and sacks of shining gold in stores and hotels, the find of one man being shown in a San Francisco shop window in the shape of one hundred and thirty thousand dollars worth of gold.
The old gold-fever broke out again as an epidemic. Such a stampede as took place had never before been seen. The stream of picturesque humanity that poured through Seattle and on to the golden north surpassed the palmy days of '49 when California opened its caves of Aladdin. Every steamer that could be made use of was booked to its full capacity, while many ardent gold-seekers were turned away. Every passenger and every pound of cargo that could be taken on these steamers was loaded and the hegira was almost instantly in full blast.
As it proved, the new find was in Canadian territory, a few miles east of the Alaskan boundary, but the flood of men that set in was mainly American. Many threw up good positions or mortgaged their homes for funds to join the mad migration, oblivious in most cases of the fact that they were setting out to encounter hardships and arctic extremes of temperature for which their home life had utterly unfitted them. Warnings were published that those who joined the pioneer flood faced starvation or death by freezing or hardship, but the tide was on and could not be turned, and before the autumn had far advanced thousands had landed at the mushroom settlements of Skagway and Dyea, laden with the effects they had brought with them and proposing to fight their way against nature's obstacles over the difficult mountain passes and along the little less difficult lakes and streams to the promised land of gold. A village of log houses and tents, known as Dawson, had sprung up at the mouth of the Klondike, and this was the mecca towards which the great pilgrimage set.