Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

“We may lose a cent or two to the ton, but the amount is so small that we are unable to tell just what it is. The gold content varies a good deal. The stuff that goes through the dredges may at times yield sixty cents a yard, and we have struck patches that ran five dollars per yard or more.

“The old miners threw away the values that are now being saved,” he went on. “One day I showed an old-timer a pan I had just finished washing, and asked him how much he thought it would run. The pan contained a few flakes of gold and quite a little fine flour gold. The miner tilted it so that the grains ran to one side, and then took his thumb and scraped out the flour and threw it away. He threw out just the sort of stuff which we are trying to save, and upon which all our calculations are based.”

The dredges, by which much of the gold is now being taken out, operate in ground that has to be thawed before it can be worked. With the exception of a foot or so at the surface, this whole Klondike region is one mass of ice, mixed with boulders, pebbles, and sand that has been frozen for thousands of years. The ice goes down no one knows how deep. Diamond drills sunk to a depth of three hundred feet have gone all the way through frozen earth. The mixture is covered by a thin bed of muck, on top of which grows a layer of arctic moss. It is only when the moss and the muck are stripped off that the hot summer sun makes any impression on the ice below. Sprinkled through this ice, earth, and rock lies the gold in the proportion of from thirty to sixty cents’ worth to the ton. In a wagon load of this mass there is not more pure gold than you can pinch up between your forefinger and thumb. Yet methods for mining it have been devised that make it worth going after. There is a little gold not far from the surface, but most of it is at bed-rock, which may be thirty, forty, or fifty feet down.

The earth has to be thawed out, inch by inch, and foot by foot, in such a way that the dredges can bite into it and gulp it down at the rate of twenty-six bites to the minute and about one third of a ton to the bite.

The dredges do their work so thoroughly that no bit of earth ever escapes them. You can throw a red cent into the heart of a ten-acre field that is to be upturned by these machines and be sure that the coin will come out with the gold. A common amusement is to saw a dime in two and then bet whether the dredges will bring up one of the pieces. The man who bets in the negative holds one of the halves, and the other is buried in the earth. As soon as that spot is dredged, the missing half is almost certain to turn up.

The first miners kept wood fires burning until they had thawed their shafts down to the gold. Other fires were then built along the bed-rock and the earth was dugout until they had made great caverns and tunnels thirty or forty feet under the frozen earth overhead. They used hot stones to aid in the thawing and took out the loosened material in wheel-barrows and raised it to the surface with buckets and a windlass like an old-fashioned well-sweep. The earth being frozen, the miners did not have to bother to use any timbers to support the roofs of their tunnels.

Much of the thawing of to-day is done by steam forced into the earth through steel tubes three fourths of an inch in diameter, and from ten to thirty feet long. These are called “points.” Each tube has a hard metal cap or steel head on the top, and below this an opening where the connection with the main steam pipe is made. The bottom of the tube is pointed so that it can be forced down into the ground. A man stands on a tall derrick and with a twelve-pound sledge hammer drives the pipe, inch by inch, through the earth. The steam-heated steel melts the ice as it goes down. When the point reaches bed-rock, it is left there for two or three days, oozing forth steam. To thaw out enough ground for the dredges to work on, hundreds of these steam points have to be sunk. In places the pipes are so close together that they stand out on the back of old Mother Earth like the quills on a porcupine. They soften the ground so that it is dangerous to walk over it until it has cooled. A man may think it is solid under foot, when all at once he may sink to his knees or waist in scalding hot mud.

In the creeks where the Yukon Gold Company has been operating with steam points and dredges, the values amount to sixty or seventy cents’ worth of gold to the ton. The thawing costs about thirty cents for each ton. When the famous Joe Boyle, organizer of the Canadian Klondike Company, came to figure on his problem he found that the steam-point method would cost him four cents more a ton than the value of the gold he could recover. He concluded that if he could get rid of the great non-conductor of muck and moss that covered the frozen earth, the sun of a few summers would eventually thaw its way down to bed-rock.

Then came the question of how to strip off the muck at a cost that would not eat up the profits. Boyle decided that the Klondike River itself could be made to do the job. He dammed it in places and turned its course this way and that. The current soon cleaned off the top layer, and when the water was drawn off it left the gravel exposed to the rays of the sun.

Boyle spent in the neighbourhood of a half million dollars apiece for some of the dredges with which he scooped up the earth thawed out by the sun. They were the largest ever built up to that time, and were manufactured especially for his purposes. They were brought in pieces by sea to Skagway, Alaska, carried over the coast mountains by train, and transported down the Yukon by steamer to Dawson, where they were put to work. They are now lifting the bed of the Klondike Valley and turning it upside down at the rate of five hundred tons in an hour. Buckets that hold a ton apiece pick up boulders as big as a half-bushel basket and earth as fine as flour. They raise this stuff to the height of a six-story house and pour it through revolving screens. The rock, gravel, and sand are carried away, and the gold is caught in layers of coconut matting. Every twenty-four hours the mats containing the gold are lifted and washed. The gold and the black sand fall to the bottom and the mats are put back again.