[CHAPTER XXI]
A YUKON MINING CAMP
The supper provided by the hospitable miners was a good one, and heartily did our travellers enjoy it; but while they are appeasing the extraordinary appetites that they acquired somewhere in the Alaskan wilderness, let us take a look at this most northern of American mining camps.
To begin with, although it is at the junction of Forty Mile Creek and the Yukon River, it is not in Alaska, but about twenty miles east of the boundary in Northwest Territory, which is one of the subdivisions of Canada. The most recent name of this camp is “Mitchell,” but all old Yukon miners know it as Camp Forty Mile. At the time of Phil Ryder’s visit it contained nearly two hundred log-cabins, two stores, including the one that he established in the name of his friend Gerald Hamer, two saloons, both of which were closed for the season, and a small cigar factory. Although the winter population was only about three hundred, in summer-time it is much larger, as many of the miners come out in the fall and return before the 15th of June, at which date, according to Yukon mining law, every man owning a claim must be on the ground, or it may be “jumped.”
Forty Mile is what is known as a placer camp, which means that its gold is found in minute particles or “dust” in soft earth, from which it can be washed in sluices or rockers. Into one of these a stream of water is turned that sweeps away all the dirt and gravel, allowing the heavier gold to sink to the bottom, where it is caught and held by cross-bars or “riffles.”
Although gold has been discovered at many points along the Yukon and its branches, the deposit at Forty Mile is the richest yet worked, and has paid as high as three hundred dollars to a man for a single day’s labor. Twelve thousand dollars’ worth of gold was cleared by one miner in a three months’ season, and a five-hundred-dollar nugget has been found; but most of the miners are content if they can make “ounce wages,” or sixteen dollars per day, while the average for the camp is not over eight dollars per day during the short season of that arctic region.
Sluices can only be worked during three or four months of summer-time; then come the terrible eight or nine months of winter when the mercury thinks nothing of dropping to sixty or seventy degrees below zero, and the whole world seems made of ice. Strange as it may appear, the summer weather of this region is very hot, eighty-five degrees in the shade and one hundred and twelve degrees in the sun being frequently reached by the mercury. During the summer months, too, the entire Yukon Valley is as terribly infested with mosquitoes as is any mangrove swamp of the tropics. Thus the hardy miner who penetrates it in his search for gold is made to suffer from one cause or another during every month of the year.
In spite of the summer heat the ground never thaws to a depth of more than five or six feet, below which it is solidly frozen beyond any point yet reached by digging. Under the dense covering of moss, six to eighteen inches thick, by which the greater part of Alaska is overspread, it does not thaw more than a few inches. Consequently the most important item of a Yukon miner’s winter work is the stripping of this moss from his claim in order that next summer’s sun may have a chance to thaw it to working depth.
There were no women nor children at Forty Mile, and there were very few amusements, but there is plenty of hard work in both summer, when the sun hardly sets at all, and in the winter, when he barely shows his face above the southern horizon. Besides the laborious task of moss-stripping, the miner must saw out by hand all lumber for sluices and rockers. He must build his own cabin and fashion its rude furniture, besides doing all of his own house-work and cooking. He also expects to do a certain amount of hunting and trapping during the winter months, so that his time, unless he be very lazy, is fully occupied. But lazy men are not apt to reach Forty Mile, for the journey from Juneau, in southern Alaska, which is the largest city in the Territory, as well as the nearest outfitting point for the diggings, is so filled with peril and the roughest kind of hard work as to deter any but men of the most determined energy.