have been few scenes in mining history more striking than that which was enacted when the men landed from the Excelsior, weather beaten, roughly dressed, with scraggly beards and furrowed cheeks, and marching straight to the smelting works, proceeded to produce bags of gold, dirty and worn, containing thousands of dollars in the precious metal.

As fast as the bags were weighed they were ripped open with a knife and the contents were allowed to scatter over the counter; and then some of the miners produced from bundles and coat pockets gold dust in all sorts of queer receptacles, such as fruit jars and jelly tumblers, and even writing paper, carefully secured with twine. No wonder the spectators looked on with fascinated amazement. No wonder the strange news spread like wildfire. The gold fever of 1897 had begun to burn.

These miners brought the news that the new Eldorado was situated on the Klondike River, nearly two thousand miles from the mouth of the Yukon, just escaping the Arctic circle by a bare 150 miles, and situated in Canadian territory, a meagre 60 miles east of the 141st degree of longitude, which constitutes the boundary between Alaska and British America.

They told, too, of the terrible hardship through which they had gone in order to reach these marvelous gold fields and uncover their hidden wealth. Joseph Ladue, who left Plattsburg, N. Y., a few years ago, an impecunious farm hand, too poor to marry the woman of his choice, described how he had forced his way into the new diggings, established the city of Dawson, which is the metropolis of the gold region, and come back with thousands of dollars in hand and millions in prospect. But his most emphatic words were words of warning against those who would rush madly to the new field without considering the hardships they would have to undergo. Starvation and want, he said, would be the lot of those who ventured into the new Eldorado without a supply of provisions sufficient to last for months, and he said that those who ventured to leave for the North as late as August I were wasting their time, besides subjecting themselves to needless peril, for by the time they had traversed the long stretch of inhospitable country they would find winter setting in with Arctic vigor and they would be shut up in an ice-bound region hundreds of miles from telegraph or postoffice, a prey to starvation and cold.

Dawson City, which had sprung up in an Arctic night, was situated, they said, near the junction of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, had a population when the miners left of 3,500, was laid out on modern lines with sixty-foot avenues and fifty-foot streets and had all the ambitious scope of a bonanza town with a few score log cabins and innumerable tents.

While the voyagers on the Excelsior were still telling their marvelous stories in San Francisco fuel was added to the fire by the arrival at Seattle of the steamer Portland, also straight from St. Michael, with sixty miners aboard and over $700,000 in gold. The excitement aroused by the arrival of the Portland surpassed even that of the earlier arrival, and it had hardly touched the wharf before hundreds of men in Seattle were crowding over one another to get an opportunity to board her for her return trip to the mouth of the Yukon.

These miners had been hunting for gold in the Yukon country for years. Some of them had found it in generous quantities lying in the streams and in the beds of creeks flowing into the Yukon just west of the spot where the river crosses the boundary between Alaska and Brit

Junction of Forty Mile and Yukon Rivers. Cudahy and Steamer Weare in foreground.

Forty Mile Post on

right.