CHAPTER III
THE HIDDEN LEDGE
The summer of 1897 was a memorable one in the great Northwest. It was then that the first authentic news of the immense richness of the Klondyke region became public. Less than a dozen persons had wintered on Bonanza and Eldorado, the famous gold creeks discovered by Carmack in September, 1896, and these reported the marvelously rich "strikes." Certain weighty moose-hide sacks they carried, confirmed their stories.
Two weeks later the docks of the principal cities on the sunset coast presented a changed appearance. All was hurry and flurry. Ships being loaded to the deck rails were moored by their great hawsers alongside docks groaning under immense freight deposited upon them. The rush and clatter of drays and wagons united in one deep, deafening roar. These huge masses of freight and baggage presented the same general appearance. Everything with which to begin mining life in a new and barren country was there. Dog sleds and fur robes, heavy army sacks crammed to their drawstrings with Mackinaw and rubber clothing, boots and shoes, boats, tents, dogs and horses, piles of lumber for boat building, coils of rope, dog harness and bales of hay, while fat yellow coated hams bulged in heaps both gay and greasy in the summer sun as though further frying were unnecessary.
There were mining tools heaped in corners or against the walls of warehouses, being stacked too high to safely keep their places if jostled ever so lightly. New and clean gold pans, one inside another, towered roofward among outfits of aspiring tradespeople of the prospective camps in the Klondyke; these same rich men in embryo being also the proprietors of the closely piled sacks of flour, meal and beans, along with hundreds of cases of butter, eggs and cream, ad infinitum.
Among the hurrying, excited men preparing for departure an undesirably large number were those anxiously caring for bottle-filled cases and black barrels, cumbrous and heavy enough to have been already crammed with Klondyke gold; but in reality being full to the brim of that which (their owners prognosticated) would relieve them of using pick and shovel, and bring them without effort after their arrival in the new diggings all the shining gold they could want to handle. It concerned them little that they would give in exchange for all this wealth only that which would deplete the pockets, befuddle the brains and steal the wits of the deluded purchasers, making them in every case less able to cope with adverse conditions so desperate in this new, untried, and remote region.
These men walked, well dressed and pompous, among their goods and chattels on the great and busy wharves in the hot sunshine, mopping their perspiring brows and fat cheeks, which latter, like those of well kept porkers, adorned their rubicund faces. Across their broad waistcoats dangled glittering ropes and "charms" of tawdry composition, well suited to the ankles of a chaingang, so heavy were they; and from spotless white shirt fronts there shone jewels (?) of enormous size and cheapness.
Above the din was heard at short intervals on the steamer's deck the rattle of machinery, dropping huge, freight-laden nets or baskets into the hold. Upon the wharves hustled blackened stevedores, flushed and panting, reeking with perspiration and tobacco juice, but straining, tugging, lifting until one could almost imagine he heard their muscles snap; resolutely and steadily laboring hour after hour, until at last, wearied beyond further endurance, they gave way to others who sprang energetically into their places.