We had heard much of beach mining at Nome, but saw little of it. Stories were told of men who, in the summer of 1899, had taken hundreds of dollars in gold dust from the beach sands by the crudest methods, and thousands of men were now flocking into the camp for the purpose of doing beach mining. They were sadly disappointed. Not, however, because there was no gold in the beach sands, but because it was so infinitesimally tiny that they had no means of securing it. No hand rocker, copper plate, nor amalgam had been used with success, neither did any of the myriads of prospective miners bring anything with them which promised better results. Great heaps of machinery called by hopeful promoters "gold dredgers" were being daily dumped upon the beach from the ships, signboards were covered with pictures of things similar, while the papers continually bloomed with advertisements of machines, which, if speedily secured by the miners, would, according to the imaginative advertiser, soon cause all to literally roll in riches. One flaming dodger ran in large letters thus: "Calling millions from the vasty deep. A fortune in one hundred days. Our dredger will work three thousand yards of sand in heavy surf at Cape Nome. It will take out twenty-four thousand dollars in a day. You can make more money with us than by taking flyers in wild-cat oil schemes, etc." The poster was illustrated by a huge machine gotten up on the centipede plan; at least, it resembled that hated insect from having attached to its frame two sets of wheels of different sizes along the sides like the legs of a centipede, but with a steam boiler for a head, and a big pipe for a throat from which the salt water was disgorged to wash out this immense amount of sand and give the gold to the miner. It did not save the gold. Thousands of dollars of good, hard-earned money were dumped upon the beach in the shape of heavy machines of different kinds, which were worse than useless, and only brought bitter disappointment to their owners. Men had stripped the beach the summer before of all coarse gold which had, perhaps, been ages in washing up from the ocean's bed, or down the creeks from the hills, and only the fine, or "flour gold," as it was called, remained. By the newcomers men were cursed for spreading abroad tales of beach mining of the year before, but this was unjust, for conditions were not the same. The waters bringing the gold to the beach could not, in one season, replenish and leave the sands as rich as they had been after long years, perhaps ages of action, and blame could not rightly be attached to any one. Almost without exception, the men who did the cursing were the men who had never been hard workers, and did not intend to be, and so, after becoming satisfied that the nuggets were not there to be simply picked up and pocketed, they turned, looked backward, and went home. It was well for the new camp that they did.