It was a "squaw man" rejoicing in the name of "Slick George" who first revealed the magic wealth of the Klondyke. Whilst making a fire on a small creek now known to the world as Bonanza Creek wherewith to cook his evening meal, he thawed out some of the frozen gravel, and, in the manner of the born prospector, carelessly washed it, to find himself the possessor of nearly a thousand dollars in raw gold. Making Forty Mile with a view to dissipating his newly found wealth in a gormandizing "jag," he sent the settlers in that ramshackle camp into wild excitement by producing nuggets of a size hitherto unmatched. In a few hours Forty Mile was a deserted place. Every able-bodied man, and not a few others, responded to the lure of gold with an alacrity that was remarkable. Anything that would float was pushed into the muddy Yukon, and poled up the fifty-two miles river to the new Eldorado. The news spread with the speed amazing in so sparsely populated a country. From all the townships lying on the banks of the Yukon, from Sitka and from the Canadian borderland, came endless processions--good men, bad men, women and children--all with the gold-lust overleaping any other considerations. Dawson, the center of all this itinerant humanity, grew from a struggling camp on a frozen muskeg to a teeming Babylon. The strike proved to be genuine. Already tens of thousands of dollars had been unearthed along some of the smaller creeks. The price of commodities rose as the population increased. When the Arctic winter settled down, and the mountain-locked country was frozen a hundred feet down from the surface, the thousands who had made the journey in ignorance of the conditions obtaining found the food supply inadequate to meet the needs of the wanderers. The law of Supply and Demand operating, only the lucky stakers were able to pay the huge prices demanded for every single commodity. The news filtered through to the outer world. From the Eastern States and the Pacific Slope, from far-away Europe, came more wanderers. Late in their quest, but hopeful nevertheless, they prepared for the terrible journey over the Chilcoot Pass and down across the frozen lakes to the land of gold. At Dyea thousands were struggling to get over the Pass. Women and children and dogs and Indians constituted the human octopus spread out over the snow at the mouth of the Dyea Canyon, which is the entrance to the Pass. Rearing above them was the white precipitous peak over which every pound of their gear and food had to be packed. Included in this crowd were two familiar figures--an immense man, looking even more immense in his bearskin parkha, and a woman, garbed in similar fashion, whose faces were set and cold. They folded up their tent as the first light of the morn struck the white pinnacle above, and packed it with the other multitudinous things that formed a dump on the snow beside them. "Got to make the passage now. There's wind coming," said Jim.