I went out yesterday in an automobile to North Fork, thirty miles up the Klondike Valley, to see this electric plant. The ditch is thirty feet wide, about six feet in depth, and six miles long. The water drops down through great pipes, with a fall of two hundred and twenty feet on the turbines. I asked one of the men how Mr. Boyle got the idea of electrically heating the water and was told it came to him one morning at breakfast. The family had toast and eggs, and were browning the bread on the electric toaster. As he looked at it, Boyle thought that he might employ the same principle in keeping the water from freezing. His men made out of telephone wire a gigantic toaster somewhat like a woven-wire bed spring. This was properly insulated, dropped into the ditch, and connected with the electric plant.
In 1914 Boyle was forty-seven years old and in the prime of his vigour. Moreover, he had just won a million dollars in a suit against the Guggenheims and so had plenty of cash for any adventure. He organized a machine gun battery of fifty gunners, picked men of the Yukon, and offered them to the Allied armies. To his great distress, his battery was broken up and scattered through the forces. He went to London and from there was sent into Russia to help in keeping transportation open. On one occasion he reported to the chairman of the Soldiers’ Committee, who was inclined to be nasty.
“Were you sent here because you were the best man they could find on the Western Front?” he demanded of Boyle.
“Possibly so,” was the reply. “And now, you answer me this. Are you the best man on your committee?”
“I am,” answered the chairman, expanding his chest.
“Very well, I will meet you man to man,” said Boyle, as he unbuttoned his coat and doubled his fists. He had no more trouble with that chairman.
Starting with a capital of fifty cents, Joe Boyle made a fortune by gleaning gold from abandoned workings. Then he gave up mining to go to war and became almost as famous in Eastern Europe as in the Klondike.
To get the water for washing down the gold-bearing gravel of the Klondike hills, millions of dollars were spent in building ditches, flumes, and pipes from the Tombstone Mountains, seventy miles away.