The gold is found in a friable and easily worked rock,
enabling low-grade ores to be handled at a profit, and
to-day fifteen hundred stamps are busy and the mines are
highly profitable.
The placer miners, however, have no use for gold that rests
in quartz veins and has to be obtained by the aid of costly
stamping mills. The gold they seek is that on which nature
has done the work of stamping, by breaking up the original
veins into sands and gravels, with which the freed gold is
mixed in condition to be obtained by a simple process of
washing. The wandering miners thus prospected Alaska,
following the long course of the Yukon and trying its
tributary streams, many of them making a living, a few of
them acquiring wealth, but none of their finds attracting
the attention of the world, which scarcely knew that
gold-seekers were at work in this remote and almost unknown
region.
Thus it went on until 1897, when on July 16 a party of
miners arrived in San Francisco from the upper Yukon with a
large quantity of gold in nuggets and dust and a story to
tell that deeply stirred that old land of gold. On the 17th
another steamer put into Seattle with more miners and
$800,000 in gold dust, nearly all of it the outcome of a
winter's work on a small stream known as the Klondike,
entering the Yukon about fifty miles above Forty-Mile Creek.
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