The struggle inland of the first comers was a frightful one. No roads or pack-trails existed over the rough and lofty passes of the coast range of mountains, and it was killing work to transport the many tons of equipments and provisions over the nearly impassable Chilkoot and White Passes. For those who came too late in the season it was quite impassable, the trails and rivers were stopped by snow and ice, and numbers had to endure a long and miserable winter in the primitive coast settlements or straggle back to civilization.
The terrors of that first year's battle with the unbroken passes are indescribable. Thousands of dead pack-horses marked the way. And the mountains once crossed and the waters reached new troubles arose. Boats had to be built for the long reach of navigation down the chain of lakes and the Yukon—many having brought the necessary boat timbers with them. Six hundred miles of waterways were to be traversed. On some of the short streams connecting the lakes there were dangerous rapids to be run, in which many lost their goods and some their lives. The early winter added ice to the difficulties of the way and the Yukon section of the trip was made by the later comers through miles of drift ice, grinding and ploughing its way to the peril of the boats, or water travel was checked by the final closing of the stream for the winter, leaving no resource but a long sledging journey over the snow.
Those who took the long voyage to the mouth of the Yukon and journeyed by steamer up that stream had their difficulties with ice and current, and it was not uncommon for them to be frozen in, leaving them the sole expedient of the dog sled, if they elected to proceed to the diggings without their supplies.
Dawson once reached, the trouble and hardship were by no means at an end. Having penetrated a total wilderness in an arctic climate, borne on by dreams of sudden fortune, the enthusiastic treasure-seekers found new difficulties awaiting them. There was no easy task of digging and panning, as in more favored climes. Winter had locked the golden treasures with its strongest fetters. The ground was everywhere frozen into the firmness of rock. In midsummer it thawed no more than three feet down, and eternal frost reigned below.
To reach the gold-bearing gravels the miners had to build fires on the frozen surface and keep these going for twenty-four hours. This would soften the soil to the depth of some six inches. This thrown out, new fires had to be kindled, and thus laboriously the miners burned their way down to the gold-bearing gravel, usually at a depth of fifteen feet. Then other fires were built at the bottom and tunnels made through the five feet or more of "pay-dirt," which was dug out and piled up to await the coming of flowing water in the spring, when the gold might be washed out in the rockers and sluices employed.
As may be seen, the buried treasures of these gravel beds were to be won in these pioneer years only by dint of exhausting labor and frightful hardship. They would never have been found at all had not the bars and shores of the streams yielded gold at the surface level. Yet the extraordinary richness of these gravels, from which as much as $50,000 might be obtained as the result of a winter's work, excited men's imaginations to the utmost, and the stream of gold-seekers continued year after year until Dawson grew to be a well-built and populous city and the yearly output of the Klondike mines amounted to more than $16,000,000.
The difficulty in reaching the mines grew less year by year. As early as 1898 a railway was begun across the White Pass. It now extends from Skagway more than a hundred miles inland, the lakes and streams being traversed by steamers, so that the purgatory of the early prospectors has been converted into the "broad and easy way" of the later sinners. The old method of burning into the frozen soil has also been improved on, steam being now used instead of fire and the pay-dirt reached much more rapidly and cheaply by its aid.
The Klondike region, though largely prospected and worked by Americans, is not in Alaska, Dawson lying sixty miles east of the border. The streams of Alaska itself, so far as they have yet been worked, are far less promising, and yet Alaska has a golden treasure house of its own that may yet prove as prolific as the Klondike itself.
This is at Nome, on the shores of Bering Sea, about twenty-five degrees of longitude nearly due west from Dawson, and a hundred and fifty miles north of the mouth of the Yukon. Here the sands of the sea itself and of its bordering shores have proven splendid gold bearers and have attracted a large population to that inhospitable region, in latitude sixty-five degrees north; here has grown up a city containing 25,000 inhabitants, and here may be seen the most northerly railroad in the world.
In 1898 a soldier, in digging a well on the beach at Nome, saw in the sands thrown up that alluring yellow glint which has led so many men to fortune and so many to death. The story of his find came to the ears of an old prospector from Idaho, who, too ill to go inland, was stranded in the military station of Nome. Spade and pan were at once put to work and in twenty days the fortunate invalid found himself worth $3000 in gold.