We were now on historic ground, so far as gold mining in Alaska is concerned. The "Fortymilers" bear the same pioneer relation to gold mining in the North that the "Fortyniners" bear to gold mining in California. Ever since 1886 placers have been worked in this district, and it still yields gold, though the output and the number of men are alike much reduced. It is interesting to talk with some of the original locators of this camp, who may yet be found here and there in the country, and to learn of the conditions in those early days when a steamboat came up the Yukon once in a season bringing such supplies and mail as the men received for the year. It was here that the problem of working frozen ground was first confronted and solved; here that the first "miner's law" was promulgated, the first "miners' meeting" dealt out justice. Your "old-timer" anywhere is commonly _laudator temporis acti_, but there is good reason to believe that these early, and certainly most adventurous, gold-miners, some of whom forced a way into the country when there were no routes of travel, and subsisted on its resources while they explored and prospected it, were men of a higher stamp than many who have come in since. The extent to which that early prospecting was carried is not generally known, for these men, after the manner of their kind, left no record behind them. There are few creek beds that give any promise at all in the whole of this vast country that have not had some holes sunk in them. Even in districts so remote as the Koyukuk, signs of old prospecting are encountered. When a stampede took place to the Red Mountain or Indian River country of the middle Koyukuk in 1911-12, I was told that there was not a creek in the camp that did not show signs of having been prospected long before, although it had passed altogether out of knowledge that this particular region had ever been visited by prospectors. [Sidenote: "SNIPING ON THE BARS"] As the Fortymile is the oldest gold camp in the North, some of its trail making is of the best in Alaska. In particular the trail from the head of Jack Wade Creek down into Steel Creek reminded one of the Alpine roads in its bold, not to say daring, engineering. It drops from bench to bench in great sweeping curves always with a practicable grade, and must descend nigh a thousand feet in a couple of miles. At the mouth of Steel Creek we are on the Fortymile River again, having saved a day's journey by this traverse. And here, on the Fortymile, we passed several men "sniping on the bars," as the very first Alaskan gold-miners did on this same river, and probably on these same bars, twenty-five years ago. One hand moved the "rocker" to and fro and the other poured water into it with the "long Tom"; so was the gold washed out of the gravel taken from just below the ice. It was interesting to see this primitive method still in practice and to learn from the men that they were making "better than wages."