It is not the purpose of such a book as this to go into detail in regard to the gold and the other minerals which lie hidden in the heart of Alaska. There are many volumes dealing with the gold fields and with mines and mining which contain such definite information along those lines as the student may seek. But to those who knew Alaska both before and after the great stampede of 1898 the change of scene in the locality offers food for thought. In the great Interior, where once man alone, with only his pick and shovel, coaxed from Mother Earth in small quantities the precious yellow metal, huge monsters with an endless chain of buckets now swoop down, dig up sand and gravel by the ton and search every ounce of it for gold. One may now take a motor car and ride out to the spots where in the early days bewildering fortunes were made in a short space of time,--fortunes which in many cases were spent as fast as they were made. A well-known missionary of the Episcopal Church relates that one day during his travels he met a man freighting with dogs along the Koyakuk River. He learned while stopping at the camp that night that in the palmy days of the gold rush this man had offered a dance-hall girl her weight in gold dust if she would marry him. She refused. But she told him she would get his dust anyway. And she did! Twenty years have gone by since the madness at Dawson, Nome, and the other gold centers was at its height. The true story of the stampede to Klondike has never been written. Perhaps it never will be. It was unique,--not so much in the number who flocked to the gold fields. Of those who went between 1897 and 1900 thirty thousand is an elastic estimate. Far greater was the multitude which flooded California during the wild rush of '49. Eighty thousand in one year! Five thousand ships, deserted by both owners and crews, tossed idly in San Francisco Bay. Three years later there was a much larger migration to Australia. A hundred thousand gold seekers entered the port of Melbourne in 1852! But the Klondike stampede is without a parallel in history because of the conditions to be confronted. Never before had a gold region been so inaccessible, so remote. Never before had such masses of men flung themselves against an Arctic wilderness, determined to do or die! The result was only what was to be expected. The physically unfit perished. Only the hardy survived. Hundreds of men, fresh from offices and shops, came, bringing their city-bred habits and customs. They found them of no value in this land where Nature, in her fiercest and most savage mood, awaited them. They died,--died in almost every conceivable manner. They perished of exhaustion, of starvation, of disease. They were the victims of their own ignorance and lack of experience. They were drowned. They were smothered in snow-slides. Only the fittest held out. These, making long journeys up and down the frozen rivers, through