“After that a man by the name of Mayo came in with Harper and McQueston, and in 1886, so this book says, they went down to Forty-Mile River, where they found gold already discovered. It was McQueston that founded Circle City, but it is not really on the line—nearly a degree in latitude south of it.
“Harper and McQueston seemed to move all around everywhere. They said they found color on the Peace River and on the Liard, but did not find anything on the Mackenzie. But on the Peel River they found good prospects, and some on the Porcupine also. They were all over that country, where we’ve been.
“This Harper party came over the Rat Portage, too, the way we did, and they describe it about the way we would. But that was long before the Klondike rush, for they got to Fort Yukon on July 15, 1873. The Klondike was not known then, nor until more than twenty years later.
“I guess that the man who really ought to have the credit for finding the gold in the Klondike country was Bob Henderson. He was not trading so much as prospecting. Besides, he got his start about the way most prospectors do—an Indian showed him some pieces of gold, and showed him the place where he found them. Anyhow, that is how Harper found some gold in the Tanana country. But Harper, though he was around in this country twenty-four years, never found any big strike. He died in Arizona in 1897. Jack McQueston stayed in later, and everybody remembered him as a generous trader.
“They say that the first gold to come out of the Yukon came from the Tanana River in 1880. A Mr. Holt of the Alaska Commercial Company took the first party over the Dyea Pass and down the Yukon, in 1875. They say a very little gold came out in 1882 and 1883, but nobody had ever heard of the Klondike then.
“McQueston liked the Stewart River better than any place for a long while. They got gold in a great many streams running into the Yukon, and found it on nine creeks as early as 1894. They sent out about $400,000 that year. There were a good many miners all along the river even in 1894—seventy-five miners in one party of stampeders. But still no one had heard of the Klondike, although they had prospected between the Yukon and the Arctic Ocean and far down to the mouth of the Yukon, and about everywhere else!
“Harper and McQueston had been on the Klondike, but did not find anything at first. Bob Henderson had as much nerve as anybody. They went up on Indian River, which runs parallel to the Klondike, about fifteen miles away. Henderson worked on Quartz Creek, they say, and he had to thaw out his ground with log fires the way they used to do, so he did not make much. Then he worked on Australia Creek. Of course these men all moved around a good deal. He only got about 600 or 700 dollars on the creek where he was working, so he moved over to a stream which he thought ran into the Klondike, and he called this Gold Bottom. He got the color here.
“Bob Henderson met George W. Carmac, and he offered to share his new strikes up on Gold Bottom, but he drew the line at the Indians Carmac was living with! So Carmac did not go out at first. But Carmac and two Indians, Charley and George, did go up the Klondike, and up Bonanza after a little, about a mile above the mouth. They were looking after logs for lumber. But they found color up in there. The Indians didn’t care much about it. But after Bob told them about strikes higher up in the country, these Indians and Carmac went farther up Bonanza. They all claim to have found the first gold there. Henderson would not let them stake on Gold Bottom because he didn’t like the Indians, so they turned back, because they had found ten cents to the pan on Bonanza. They found more gold on Bonanza, and so Carmac staked there on August 17, 1896, the Discovery claim and Number One Below Discovery, each 500 feet long, up and down the creek. They tell me that these claims ran the full width of the valley bottom—that is, from base to base of the hill on either side.
“Then some Indians staked above and below, Tagish Charley on Number Two below, and Skookum Jim on Number One above. They had about a cartridgeful of gold when they got down to the mouth of the Klondike, and they still thought there was more money in lumber than in mining.
“Everybody got wind of it now, and there were a lot of people in this country already, before the Klondike news got out. There were twenty-five men looking for Henderson’s Creek, and about that many looking for the Carmac claims.