joined him in trading. One time some Indians got hold of
their rat poison, and two old women and one girl died. That
made the Indians sore, so the traders had to pay for the
women. They said the two old women were no good, but they
would pay ten skins for the young woman, about six dollars.
The Indians said that was all right! It's a funny country.

"After that a man by the name of Mayo came in with Harper
and McQueston, and in 1886, so this book says, they went
down to Forty-Mile River, where they found gold already
discovered. It was McQueston that founded Circle City, but
it is not really on the line--nearly a degree in latitude
south of it.

"Harper and McQueston seemed to move all around everywhere.
They said they found color on the Peace River and on the
Liard, but did not find anything on the Mackenzie. But on
the Peel River they found good prospects, and some on the
Porcupine also. They were all over that country, where we've
been.

"This Harper party came over the Rat Portage, too, the way
we did, and they describe it about the way we would. But
that was long before the Klondike rush, for they got to Fort
Yukon on July 15, 1873. The Klondike was not known then, nor
until more than twenty years later.

"I guess that the man who really ought to have the credit
for finding the gold in the Klondike country was Bob
Henderson. He was not trading so much as prospecting.
Besides, he got his start about the way most prospectors
do--an Indian showed him some pieces of gold, and showed him
the place where he found them. Anyhow, that is how Harper
found some gold in the Tanana country. But Harper, though he
was around in this country twenty-four years, never found
any big strike. He died in Arizona in 1897. Jack McQueston
stayed in later, and everybody remembered him as a generous
trader.

"They say that the first gold to come out of the Yukon came
from the Tanana River in 1880. A Mr. Holt of the Alaska
Commercial Company took the first party over the Dyea Pass
and down the Yukon, in 1875. They say a very little gold
came out in 1882 and 1883, but nobody had ever heard of the
Klondike then.

"McQueston liked the Stewart River better than any place for
a long while. They got gold in a great many streams running