It was perplexing to hear people talking about "Number One Above on Bonanza," "Number Nine Below on Hunker," "Number Twenty-six Above on Eldorado," and others, until it was explained that claims are numbered above and below the one originally discovered on a creek. Eldorado is one of the smallest of creeks; yet, notwithstanding its limited water supply, it has been one of the richest producers. One reach, of about four miles in length, has yielded already more than thirty millions of dollars in coarse gold.
The gold of the Klondike is beautiful. It is not a fine dust. It runs from grains like mustard seed up to large nuggets.
When one goes up among the creeks, sees and hears what has actually been done, one can but wonder that any young and strong man can stay away from this marvellous country. Gold is still there, undiscovered; it is seldom the old prospector, the experienced miner, the "sour-dough," that finds it; it is usually the ignorant, lucky "cheechaco." It is like the game of poker, to which sits down one who never saw the game played and holds a royal flush, or four aces, every other hand. How young men can clerk in stores, study pharmacy, or learn politics in provincial towns, while this glorious country waits to be found, is incomprehensible to one with the red blood of adventure in his veins and the quick pulse of chance. Better to dare, to risk all and lose all, if it must be, than never to live at all; than always to be a drone in a narrow, commonplace groove; than never to know the surge of this lonely river of mystery and never to feel the air of these vast spaces upon one's brow.
No one can even tread the deck of a Yukon steamer and be quite so small and narrow again as he was before. The loneliness, the mystery, the majesty of it, reveals his own soul to his shrinking eyes, and he grows—in a day, in an hour, in the flash of a thought—out of his old self. If only to be borne through this great country on this wide water-way to the sea can work this change in a man's heart, what miracle might not be wrought by a few years of life in its solitude?
The principle of "panning" out gold is simple, and any woman could perform the work successfully without instruction, success depending upon the delicacy of manipulation. From fifty cents to two hundred dollars a pan are obtained by this old-fashioned but fascinating method. Think of wandering through this splendid, gold-set country in the matchless summers when there is not an hour of darkness; with the health and the appetite to enjoy plain food and the spirit to welcome adventure; to pause on the banks of unknown creeks and try one's luck, not knowing what a pan may bring forth; to lie down one night a penniless wanderer, so far as gold is concerned, and, perhaps, to sleep the next night on banks that wash out a hundred dollars to the pan—could one choose a more fascinating life than this?
Rockers are wooden boxes which are so constructed that they gently shake down the gold and dispose of the gravel through an opening in the bottom. Sluicing is more interesting than any other method of extracting gold, but this will be described as we saw the process separate the glittering gold from the dull gravel at Nome.