After supper he darkened the windows for me and went to work. I sought the comfort of a wooden bunk, covering myself with a dirty bed-quilt. It was very ancient and perhaps did not smell sweet, but what did I care? It was Heaven. The darkness was delicious. I had not known real darkness for so long throughout the summer—always sleeping out of doors in the light of the Alaskan night—that I had felt continually strained and uncomfortable for the lack of it, and this darkened cabin came to me like the sweetest of opiates.
When I awoke the Frenchman was preparing breakfast. I had slept some ten hours without moving. There was only one tin plate, one cup, and one knife and fork, and he insisted upon my eating with them, while he stood by and gravely superintended, urging more slapjacks upon me. I suddenly felt ashamed that I had told him neither my name nor business, for although I had questioned him freely, he had not manifested the slightest curiosity. So without being asked I volunteered some information about myself. He listened attentively and politely, but without any great interest. It was quite apparent that the most important thing to him was that I was a stranger. Soon after breakfast I thanked him warmly and went away—I knew enough of miners not to insult him by offering him money for his hospitality.
The night shift of shovellers had given way to the day shift, and work was going on as fiercely as ever. The bottoms of all these gulches are covered with roughly stratified shingle, most of which slides down from the steep hillsides of the creek. Among the rocks on the hillsides are many quartz veins, which carry "iron pyrite" or "fool's gold"; these often contain small specks of real gold. So when all the rubble gets together and is broken up in the bottom of the stream, where the water flows through it, the different materials in the rocks begin to separate one from another, more or less, according to the difference in their weights and the fineness of the fragments into which they are broken. Now gold is the heaviest of metals, and the result is, that through all this jostling and crowding it gradually works itself down to the bottom of the heap, and generally quite to the solid rock below. This has been found to be the case nearly everywhere. In process of time the gravel accumulations become quite thick; in Miller Creek, for example, they varied from three or four feet at the head of the valley, where I was, to fifty or sixty at the mouth. But all the upper gravels are barren and valueless. Where the gravels are not deep, they are simply shovelled off and out of the way, till the lower part, where the gold lies, is laid bare; this work generally takes a year, during which time there is no return for the labor.
Once the pay gravel—as it is called—is reached, a long wooden trough called a "sluice," is constructed, the current turned through it, and the gravel shovelled in. This work can only be carried on in the summer-time, when the water is not frozen, so that the warm months are the time for hustling, day and night shifts being employed, with as many men on each as can work conveniently together. In case the barren overlying gravel is very deep, the miners wait until it is frozen and then sink shafts to the pay dirt, which they take out by running tunnels and excavating chambers or "stopes" along the bed rock. In this work they do not use blasting, but build a small fire wherever they wish to penetrate, and as soon as the gravel thaws they shovel it up and convey it out, meanwhile pushing the fire ahead so that more may thaw out. In this way they accumulate the pay dirt in a heap on the surface, and as soon as warm weather comes they shovel it into the sluices as before.
At the time of my visit, the construction of the sluices was a work of considerable labor, for as there was no sawmill in the country, the boards from which they were made had to be sawed by hand out of felled trees.
In the last few of the trough-sections or sluice-boxes, slats are placed, sometimes transverse, sometimes lengthwise, sometimes oblique, sometimes crossed, forming a grating—all patterns have nearly the same effect, namely, to catch the gold and the other heavy minerals by means of vortexes which are created. Thus behind these slats or "riffles" the gold lodges, while the lighter and barren gravel is swept by the current of water out of the trough, and the heavy stones are thrust out by the shovel of the miner. Nearly the same process as that which in nature concentrates gold at the bottom of the gravels and on top of the bed-rock is adopted by man to cleanse the gold perfectly from the attendant valueless minerals.
Washing the Gravel in Sluice-Boxes.