Joe Boyle thought otherwise. He reasoned, “If so much gold has come from the valley there must be quantities of gold dust and grains in the bed-rock underneath.” Working upon that supposition, he became a rich man by handling gold-bearing earth carrying values of only about twenty-six cents to the ton. And this brings me to another of the wonders of engineering in the Far North. It is a device invented by Boyle for keeping the hydro-electric plant running throughout the winter, notwithstanding the fact that the temperature at times falls to seventy degrees below zero. That is so cold that if you should attempt to run a sprayer such as is used in an orchard the water would turn to ice before it fell to the ground. At such times some of the streams have seven feet of ice over them and many are solid. Nevertheless, Boyle turned a branch of the Klondike River into a ditch six miles long and dropped it down upon turbines with a fall which he said would generate electricity to the amount of ten thousand horse-power a day all the year through. Joe Boyle knew that the waters of the Yukon and the Klondike flow under the ice all winter long and that there is an air space between the water and the ice overhead. He concluded that, on the principle of the double walls of an ice house or a thermos bottle, it was this dead air space that kept the running water from freezing. The only thing necessary was to make Nature furnish the thermos bottle. This Boyle did. He filled his ditch to the top and allowed a sheet of ice to freeze a foot or so thick upon it. He then lowered the level of the water two feet, leaving a running stream four feet deep, with an air space above. He next installed electric heaters underneath to help keep the water from freezing. In this way he made the water warm itself, for the stream thus kept moving generated the electricity for the heaters, each of which required current equal to one hundred horse-power. I went out yesterday in an automobile to North Fork, thirty miles up the Klondike Valley, to see this electric plant. The ditch is thirty feet wide, about six feet in depth, and six miles long. The water drops down through great pipes, with a fall of two hundred and twenty feet on the turbines. I asked one of the men how Mr. Boyle got the idea of electrically heating the water and was told it came to him one morning at breakfast. The family had toast and eggs, and were browning the bread on the electric toaster. As he looked at it, Boyle thought that he might employ the same principle in keeping the water from freezing. His men made out of telephone wire a gigantic toaster somewhat like a woven-wire bed spring. This was properly insulated, dropped into the ditch, and connected with the electric plant.