The story behind those streams of water will give you some idea of the marvels of mining in the Far North. When the company bought what were supposed to be the exhausted creeks of the Klondike, it found that in order to work its concessions it must have water with sufficient force to wash out the hills. There was no adequate supply nearer than the Tombstone Mountains, seventy-odd miles away. The Guggenheims spent four years and millions of dollars in bringing this river to their gold fields. They carried it across frozen morasses, through vast ravines, down stupendous valleys, and then lifted it over mountains and delivered it by a great inverted siphon across the Klondike River to the once famous diggings. Much of the ditch had to be thawed out and cut from the perpetual ice. In crossing the swamps new methods of road building had to be devised, and men and machinery were assembled far in the interior of a region once thought inaccessible to all but the most daring arctic explorers. The supplies, mostly from the United States, had to come a thousand miles over the ocean and then be carried five hundred miles more across the mountains and down the Yukon to Dawson. Machinery was taken to pieces and dragged by horses and dogs through almost impassable wilds. The water flows through about twenty miles of flume, twelve and a half miles of steel and stave pipes, and thirty-eight miles of ditch. It comes out at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five cubic feet a second, and with a pressure of four hundred pounds to the square inch. As the stream is applied, the gold-bearing sand, gravel, and water go tumbling down into sluice boxes filled with steel riffles bedded in mercury. The quicksilver catches the gold, while the rock and sand go on to the tailings below. Some of the gold sinks into the pile at the foot of the sluicing, but this is reclaimed at the clean-up in the fall. Something like three million cubic yards of earth are treated in this way by the hydraulic giants each season. The average amount of gold in the gravel is about twenty cents’ worth per yard, and of this amount one half is said to be profit. The dividends paid by the Yukon Gold Company have amounted to more than ten million dollars, and the profits of a single year have been as much as one million. As we rode up the valleys I asked the manager whether this process took out all of the gold. He replied: “We may lose a cent or two to the ton, but the amount is so small that we are unable to tell just what it is. The gold content varies a good deal. The stuff that goes through the dredges may at times yield sixty cents a yard, and we have struck patches that ran five dollars per yard or more.