CHAPTER XXXV
MINING WONDERS OF THE FAR NORTH
This faraway land of the North is the treasure cave of Jack Frost, where gold and gravel are cemented together by perpetual ice. You know of the thousands who rushed here years ago, and of the hundreds who went back loaded with riches. You may have heard how the district about Dawson, where I am writing, produced gold by the ton, the output for ten years being worth more than one hundred million dollars.
In those days pockets worth hundreds of dollars were not uncommon. In August, 1899, George T. Coffey took up two shovelfuls of earth from Bonanza Creek, from which he washed sixty-three ounces of gold, worth nearly a thousand dollars. A miner by the name of MacDonald got ninety-four thousand dollars for the gold from a forty-foot patch of ground. Some of the miners on Bonanza Creek were dissatisfied if the gravel ran less than a dollar a pan. They worked the rich spots only, and when the cream had been skimmed off the surface, gave up their claims.
The gold diggers were followed by corporations. They brought to the abandoned fields millions in capital and the best mining machinery. They thawed the frozen gravel with steam and scooped up the gold-bearing earth with dredges run by electricity. They carried rivers in pipes over the mountains to wash down the gold-sprinkled hills. They handled millions of tons of material, each of which yielded only a few grains of pure gold, but altogether they produced as much wealth as was taken out in those first prosperous years by the individual miners.
There are two methods by which the treasure that has been left is being recovered. One is hydraulic mining and the other is dredging. Let me give you some of the pictures of the first method, as I saw it on a ride up the Klondike Valley this afternoon. I went with the resident manager of the Yukon Gold Company, the Guggenheim corporation doing most of the gold mining in the Dawson district. We flew along in a high-powered automobile, winding in and out through great piles of débris. We rode up Bonanza and Eldorado creeks, which have been dredged from one end to the other. The whole way was through a mass of gravel, rock, and earth washings. The beds of the rivers and creeks had been ploughed in great furrows many feet deep. There were places where miles of boulders, pebbles, and broken rock seemed to flow down the mountain sides into the valley. Streams of water as big around as the thigh of a man were shooting from pipes with such force that they gouged out great chunks of icy gravel. In some places the water dropped from the top of the mountain, washing down the earth in its fall. The whole gave me the impression of a mighty cloudburst that had torn down the hills and let loose avalanches of earth.
The story behind those streams of water will give you some idea of the marvels of mining in the Far North. When the company bought what were supposed to be the exhausted creeks of the Klondike, it found that in order to work its concessions it must have water with sufficient force to wash out the hills. There was no adequate supply nearer than the Tombstone Mountains, seventy-odd miles away. The Guggenheims spent four years and millions of dollars in bringing this river to their gold fields. They carried it across frozen morasses, through vast ravines, down stupendous valleys, and then lifted it over mountains and delivered it by a great inverted siphon across the Klondike River to the once famous diggings.
Much of the ditch had to be thawed out and cut from the perpetual ice. In crossing the swamps new methods of road building had to be devised, and men and machinery were assembled far in the interior of a region once thought inaccessible to all but the most daring arctic explorers. The supplies, mostly from the United States, had to come a thousand miles over the ocean and then be carried five hundred miles more across the mountains and down the Yukon to Dawson. Machinery was taken to pieces and dragged by horses and dogs through almost impassable wilds.
The water flows through about twenty miles of flume, twelve and a half miles of steel and stave pipes, and thirty-eight miles of ditch. It comes out at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five cubic feet a second, and with a pressure of four hundred pounds to the square inch.
As the stream is applied, the gold-bearing sand, gravel, and water go tumbling down into sluice boxes filled with steel riffles bedded in mercury. The quicksilver catches the gold, while the rock and sand go on to the tailings below. Some of the gold sinks into the pile at the foot of the sluicing, but this is reclaimed at the clean-up in the fall. Something like three million cubic yards of earth are treated in this way by the hydraulic giants each season. The average amount of gold in the gravel is about twenty cents’ worth per yard, and of this amount one half is said to be profit. The dividends paid by the Yukon Gold Company have amounted to more than ten million dollars, and the profits of a single year have been as much as one million.
As we rode up the valleys I asked the manager whether this process took out all of the gold. He replied: