Alaska -- Description and travel; Frontier and pioneer life -- Alaska
On Skukum Gulch $30,000 were taken from two boxes of dirt. Frank
Phiscator of Michigan, after a few months' work, brought home $100,000
in gold, selling one-third of his claim interests for $1,333,000, or at
the rate of $5,000,000 for the whole.
When a man is compelled to pay one thousand dollars out of every ten
thousand he digs from the ground, he will boast little of large
"clean-ups"; and for this reason it is hard to estimate the real amount
of gold extracted from the Klondyke mines.
Captain James Kennedy, an old pioneer and conservative mining man,
estimates the output for the season of 1899 as $25,000,000, or fifty
tons of dust and nuggets.
The most commendable thing about the Canadian Government is their strict
enforcement of order. Stealing is an almost unheard of thing, and petty
thieving does not exist. Mounted police in their brown uniforms and
soldiers in their red coats are everywhere seen in and around Dawson,
and they practice methods, which, to the uninitiated, make them very
nearly omnipresent.
While walking down street in Dawson one morning about nine o'clock, I
passed a group of men all wearing sober faces. "They're done for now,"
said a rough miner, glancing in the direction of the Barracks, where a
black flag was fluttering at the top of a staff.
"How so?" asked another, just come up to the group.
"Three men hung over there, an hour ago. They're goin' to bury 'em now,"
and the speaker twitched his thumbs first toward the Barracks, then
farther east, where a rough stretch of ground lay unused. Here could be
seen policemen and soldiers, evidently in the midst of some performance
not on their daily routine.
A number of prisoners wearing the regulation garb of
convicts,--pantaloons of heavy mackinaw, one leg of yellow and the other
of black,--were carrying long, rough boxes, while others were digging
shallow graves.
Upon inquiry I found that what the miner had said was true. Three
prisoners, two of them Indian murderers, with another man notoriously
bad, had indeed been hung about eight o'clock that morning in the
barracks courtyard. In less than two hours afterward they were interred,
and in as many days they were forgotten.
By the middle of July, 1899, the steamers leaving Dawson on their way
down the Yukon to St. Michael and the new gold fields at Nome, were well
filled with those who were anxious to try their luck in Uncle Sam's
territory where they can breathe, dig, fish, hunt, or die without buying
a license.
By August the steamers coming from St. Michael brought such glowing
accounts of the Nome gold fields, that while few people came in, they
carried as many out as they could accommodate.
By September the rush down the Yukon was tremendous, and of the twelve
thousand people in Dawson many hundreds left for Nome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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