Although Cook's claim to have reached the summit of Denali met with general acceptance outside, or at least was not openly scouted, it was otherwise in Alaska. The men, in particular, who lived and worked in the placer-mining regions about the base of the mountain, and were, perhaps, more familiar with the orography of the range than any surveyor or professed topographer, were openly incredulous. Upon the appearance of Doctor Cook's book, "To the Top of the Continent," in 1908, the writer well remembers the eagerness with which his copy (the only one in Fairbanks) was perused by man after man from the Kantishna diggings, and the acute way in which they detected the place where vague "fine writing" began to be substituted for definite description. Some of these men, convinced that the ascent had never been made, conceived the purpose of proving it in the only way in which it could be proved--by making the ascent themselves. They were confident that an enterprise which had now baffled several parties of "scientists," equipped with all sorts of special apparatus, could be accomplished by Alaskan "sourdoughs" with no special equipment at all. There seems also to have entered into the undertaking a naive notion that in some way or other large money reward would follow a successful ascent. The enterprise took form under Thomas Lloyd, who managed to secure the financial backing of McPhee and Petersen, saloon-keepers of Fairbanks, and Griffin, a wholesale liquor dealer of Chena. These three men are said to have put up five hundred dollars apiece, and the sum thus raised sufficed for the needs of the party. In February 1910, therefore, Thomas Lloyd, Charles McGonogill, William Taylor, Peter Anderson, and Bob Horne, all experienced prospectors and miners, and E. C. Davidson, a surveyor, now the surveyor-general of Alaska, set out from Fairbanks, and by 1st March had established a base camp at the mouth of Cache Creek, within the foot-hills of the range. Here Davidson and Horne left the party after a disagreement with Lloyd. The loss of Davidson was a fatal blow to anything beyond a "sporting" ascent, for he was the only man in the party with any scientific bent, or who knew so much as the manipulation of a photographic camera. [Sidenote: The Sourdough Climb]