"The daring seeker for gold must go to the bleak ranges of the frigid North, where, even in the middle of the summer, the ground is frozen as hard as a rock a few inches below the surface; or else to the jungle-clad slopes of the tropics, where fever and stewing heat menace him with ever-present death; or yet to regions so far removed from civilization that the white man has not yet penetrated there. The shores of the Arctic Ocean, the steaming equatorial forests of the Eastern Andes, or the untrodden valleys of the inner Himalayas offer the most hopes to the prospector. But he may spend all the gold-dust he finds, and more, to go there and return.
"The tundras of Alaska and eastward to Hudson Bay still contain placer gold, to a surety, gold not difficult to find if a man is willing to face an Arctic winter and a mosquito-haunted summer to work there. It's a wonder to me, Jim, that your father didn't join the great rush to the Fraser River, in British Columbia, in 1856. That was a mad and sorrowful stampede, if ever there was one!"
"He was crazy about the Fraser," Jim answered. "All that kep' him from goin' was the smash-up o' the Kern River rush, which lef' him dead-broke an' nigh starvin', like I told you. But he never forgot the Fraser. That's what took us up north, to wind up with.
"It was in '79, when I was twenty years old, that Father comes into the cabin, an' says, point blank,
"'We're a-goin' to the Kootenay.'
"'Somewheres up near the Fraser River. There's gold there, so they're sayin', like there was on the Sacramento in '49. An' thar ain't no one, hardly, thar! Fust one in gits it all.'
"I tried to reason with him. So did Mother, but it weren't no manner o' use. A week later, we was gone."
"I shouldn't have thought he'd have found much on the Kootenay," said Owens reflectively, "it's all vein mining there. That needs heavy crushing machinery."
"Not all," Jim corrected. "There's some glacial gravel there an' we washed out enough to pay our way. But Father wanted something bigger.