A Street in Nome.
Far more interesting to the one who has not been properly rewarded in his search for placer claims than the placer deposits themselves are the gold-bearing beach sands, whose productivity will mainly be responsible for the influx of population to the new region. From them, by crude and simple methods, has been taken, in barely more than two months, gold to the value of more than a million dollars, and what the possibilities for the future may be no one is wise enough to tell. So clearly exaggerated did the accounts of the free-sand rocking appear, even those coming from reputable miners who were personally known to me, that I could hardly bring myself to take them at their full value, but, being accidentally drifted in the course of a summer’s wanderings to St. Michael, above the mouth of the Yukon River, I had easy opportunity to verify for myself the accuracy of the statements that had been sent out, and to cast a geological glance at the situation. My examination of the region was confined to a few of the later days of September and to early October.
The geographical position of the Nome region is the southern face of the peninsular projection of Alaska which separates Kotzebue Sound on the north from Bering Sea on the south, and terminates westward in Cape Prince of Wales the extent of the North American continent. In a direct line of navigation, it lies about twenty-five hundred miles northwest of Seattle and one hundred and seventy miles southeast of Siberia. The nearest settlement of consequence to it prior to 1899 was St. Michael, a hundred miles to the southeast, the starting point of the steamers for the Yukon River; but during the year various aggregations of mining population had built themselves up in closer range, and reduced the isolation from the civilized world by some sixty miles. The Nome district as settled centers about the lower course of the Snake River, an exceedingly tortuous stream in its tundra course, which emerges from a badly degraded line of limestone, slaty, and schistose mountain spurs generally not over seven hundred to twelve hundred feet elevation, but backed by loftier granitic heights, and discharges into the sea at a position thirteen miles west of Cape Nome proper. Three miles east of this mouth is the discharge of Nome River. Both streams have a tidal course of several miles. Nome, or, as it was first called, Anvil City—named from a giant anvil-like protrusion of slate rock near to the summit of the first line of hills—occupies in greater part the tundra and ocean beach of the eastern or left bank of Snake River, but many habitations, mainly of a temporary character, have been placed on the bar beach which has been thrown up by the sea against the mouth of the stream, and deflected its course for some distance parallel with the ocean front. A number of river steamers (one even of considerable size) and dredges have found a suitable anchorage or “harbor” in the barrier-bound waters, and much driftwood passes into them at times of storms and higher waters, when the greatly constricted and shallow mouth is made passable. The entire region is treeless, and the nearest approach to woodland is in the timber tract of Golovnin Bay and its tributaries, about forty miles to the northeast. A fairly dense growth of scrub willow, three to five feet in height, with elms and alders, forms a fringe or delimiting line to parts of the courses of the streams in the tundra, which greatly undulates in the direction of the foothills and incloses tarnlike bodies of fresh and slightly brackish waters. It is covered merely with a low growth of flowering herbaceous plants, grass, and moss, with a somewhat scantier admixture of the dwarf birch, arctic willow, and crowberry. The surface is pre-eminently swampy during the warmer periods of the year, and walking over it means either wading through the water or risking continuous jumps to and from the individual clumps of matted grass and moss—the so-called “nigger-heads.” The greater part of the tundra seems to rest on gravel and sand—doubtless of both marine and fluviatile origin—and ordinarily the frozen stratum is already reached at a depth of two or three feet, sometimes less. In early October of the past year it was still too “open” to permit of easy walking over it, but in quite early hours of the morning the surface afforded fair lodgment to moderate weights. Fragmentary parts of the skeleton of the mammoth have been found here and there, even loose on the top grass, but where found in such situations it is by no means certain that they had not been redeposited by high tidal wash. A large fragment of thigh bone, with shoulder blade, which I found about an eighth of a mile inland and perhaps fifteen feet above the water, was associated with one of the mandibular bones of the whale. I could obtain no information as to their having been possibly carried to their present position by man, but it may have been the case. A large skull, which I owe to the kindness of Mr. Inglestadt and to Mr. Louis Sloss, Jr., manager of the Alaska Commercial Company, was obtained, as nearly as I could determine through inquiry on the spot, from about the same locality. Where it abuts upon the sea the tundra stands from eight to twenty feet above it, at places descending to even lower levels. The sea face is almost everywhere an abrupt one, showing undercutting by high water, and it is continued by a broad, rapidly sloping sand and shingle beach, which packs firmly, and almost immediately beneath the surface exhibits a distinctly stratified construction—the alternate layers of fine, flat gravel, coarse, clayey sand, and finer “ruby” (fragmented garnet) sand sloping like the surface, although generally with a milder pitch, to the sea.
A Native of the Land of Nome.
The open sea front, with inland tundra, is continued for a distance of about fourteen miles westward of Nome, where it is interrupted by the mountains, in a west-southwest course, reaching the sea; flat-topped Sledge Island, so much recalling in aspect some of the islands lying off Whale Sound, in the northwest of Greenland, is their oceanic continuation for some distance, with sharp breaks on both the oceanic and inner sides. It is probable that much of the débris that has resulted from the disruption of the mountain masses has been distributed littorally by the sea, with an eastward wash, to form the bars and shallows which for some distance stretch along the coast; nor is it impossible that some of the giant bowlders of limestone, marble, granite, and syenite which are found on the margin of the beach about four or five miles west of Nome, some of them measuring eight and twelve feet or more in diameter, and all of them smoothly rounded and evenly polished, represent a part of this destruction. At the same time, there is good reason to suspect that they may have been deposited by ice action, either as erratics of floe ice coming from the northwest, or of glacial distribution from the region of the mountains. Whatever may have been the final stage in the history of the amphitheater of Nome (the region included between Cape Nome and Sledge Island), which my limited observation did not permit me to determine to full satisfaction, it is almost certain, even in the absence of the ordinary glacial testimony, that the region is one of past glaciation, and that much of the gravel and bowlder material of the ocean front is of morainic origin, so modified and altered in position by readjustments of the land and water as to have lost its proper physiographic contours. The aspect of the hills and valleys is almost precisely that of some of the regions of Greenland which have only quite recently been vacated by the glaciers, while the composition of the shingle—the inclusion over so long a front of bowlders from beyond the first line of mountain heights, many of them most markedly grooved and polished—is also highly suggestive of glacial deposition.
The Harbor of Snake River (Nome).
The gold sands, or sands that are worked for gold, are merely the ordinary materials of the beach, loose and incoherent like most seashore sands, and particularly defining horizons three to six feet below the surface. In regular stratified layers, with fine and moderately coarse gravel, they embrace four or five distinct layers of fragmented garnets (the components of the so-called “ruby sand”), and it is from these, and at this time almost exclusively from the bottom layer of three to five inches thickness, which is popularly described as lying on “bed rock”—in most places merely a hard-pan of arenaceous clay or argillaceous sand, with no true rock to define it—that most of the gold is obtained. Each ruby band nearer to the top seems to contain less and less gold, and there is no question that the different layers are merely reformations by the sea from those of earlier deposition, just as surface shingle deposits generally are in part reconstructions of underlying beds. That the ocean is to-day depositing the ruby sand is unmistakably shown by the great patches of this sand lying on the surface and its incoming in the path of nearly every storm. Even these surface sands are mildly gold-bearing, showing that the gold, despite its high specific gravity, may be buoyed up and wafted in by such a light medium as water when it has been reduced to sufficiently minute particles or scalelike forms. It is little wonder that a general belief has gained currency with the more enthusiastic locators that the sand gold is a deposition or precipitate from the sea.
The gold itself occurs in an exceedingly fine state of subdivision, too fine in most cases to be caught without mercury or the best arrangement of “blanketings.” Much of it is really in the condition of colors dissected nearly to their finest particles, and it is hardly surprising that it should have so long escaped detection. Occasionally pieces to the value of three to six cents are obtained in the pans, and I was witness to the finding of a scale with the value of perhaps nearly twenty cents. The usual magnetitic particles are associated with the gold, and their origin can clearly be traced to the magnetite which is so abundantly found in some of the schists (micaceous, chloritic, and talcose schists), which, judged by the fragments and bowlders that everywhere lie in the path of the streams of the tundra, must be closely similar to the series of schists of the Klondike region. The particles of fragmented garnet, which by their astonishing abundance give so distinctive a coloring to the layers which they compose or constitute, are of about the ordinary fineness of seashore sand, perhaps a trifle coarser, but occasionally much coarser particles or masses of particles are found; and in the placer deposits of Anvil Creek, as in the bunch of claims around “Discovery”—about five miles due north of Nome—fragments of the size of lentils are not uncommon. I have seen full garnets obtained from the wash here which were of the size of small peas. Nodules of manganese (manganite, pyrolusite) are at intervals found with them, and some stream-tin (cassiterite), as in the Klondike region, also appears to be present. Apart from the evidence that is brought down by the magnetite and garnet, it would naturally be assumed that the gold had its primal source in the mountains back of the coast. These, as has already been stated, have undergone exhaustive degradation, and the materials resulting from their destruction, in whatever way brought about, have been thrown into the sea, and there adjusted and readjusted—or, so far as the gold particles are concerned, one might say “concentrated.” Latterly, and perhaps this is also true to-day, the land has undergone elevation, and exposed much that until recently properly belonged to the sea. The tundra is a part of this ocean floor, and it too doubtless contains much gold, perhaps even very much.