Alaska Humpbacked Salmon, Male and Female.
The trip of forty miles from Fort Reliance to Forty Mile Post was made in the morning, and was enlivened by an exciting race between our boat and that belonging to Danlon. We had kept pretty closely together on all our trip, passing and repassing one another, but our boat was generally ahead; and when we both encamped at Fort Reliance, the other party resolved to outwit us. So they got up early in the morning and slipped away before we were well awake. When we discovered that they were gone, we got off after them as quickly as possible, but as the current flows about seven miles an hour, and they were rowing hard besides, they were long out of sight of us. However, we buckled down to hard rowing, each pulling a single oar only, and relieving one another at intervals, tugging away as desperately as if something important depended on it. When we were already in sight of Forty Mile Post we spied our opponents' boat about a mile ahead of us, and we soon overhauled them, for they had already spent themselves by hard rowing. Then Pete knew a little channel which led up to the very centre of the camp, while the others took the more roundabout way, so that we arrived and were quite settled—we assumed a very negligent air, as if we had been there all day—when the others arrived. We called this the great Anglo-American boat race and crowed not a little over the finish.
FOOTNOTE
[1] A portion of this description is similar to that used by the writer in an article published in "Outing."
CHAPTER IV.
THE FORTY MILE DIGGINGS.
Forty Mile Creek is the oldest mining camp in the Yukon country, and the first where coarse gold or "gulch diggings" was found. In the fall of 1886 a prospector by the name of Franklin discovered the precious metal near the mouth of what is now called Forty Mile Creek. This stream was put down on the old maps as the Shitando River, but miners are very independent in their nomenclature, and often adopt a new name if the old one does not suit them, preferring a simple term with an evident meaning to the more euphonious ones suggestive of Pullman cars. At the time of the discovery of gold there was a post of the Alaskan Commercial Company at the mouth of the stream, but the trader in charge, Jack McQuesten, was absent in San Francisco. As the supplies at the post were very low, and a rush of miners to the district was anticipated for the next summer, it was thought best to try to get word to the trader, and George Williams undertook to carry out a letter in midwinter.
Accompanied by an Indian, he succeeded in attaining the Chilkoot Pass, but was there frozen to death. The letter, however, was carried to the post at Dyea by the Indian, and the necessary supplies were sent, thus averting the threatened famine. From 1887 to 1893 the various gulches of Forty Mile Creek were the greatest gold producers of the Yukon country, but by 1893 the supplies of gold began to show exhaustion; and about this time a Russian half-breed, by the name of Pitka, discovered gold in the bars of Birch Creek, some two hundred miles further down the Yukon.
A large part of the population of the Forty Mile district rushed to the new diggings and built the mining camp to which they gave the name of Circle City, from its proximity to the Arctic Circle. The Forty Mile district is partly in British and partly in American territory, since the boundary line crosses the stream some distance above its mouth, while Birch Creek is entirely in American territory. The world-renowned Klondike, again, is within British boundaries. So the tide of mining population has ebbed back and forth in the Yukon country, each wave growing larger than the first, till it culminated in the third of the great world-rushes after gold, exciting, wild and romantic—the Klondike boom, a fit successor to the "forty-nine" days of California, and to the events which followed the discovery of gold in Australia.