t
my freight. My friends here have all theirs. The two men are smoking and
talking while I write, and the Eskimo dogs not far away are howling in
their usual interesting nightly manner. I will now try to get a little
more sleep."

We had heard much of beach mining at Nome, but saw little of it. Stories
were told of men who, in the summer of 1899, had taken hundreds of
dollars in gold dust from the beach sands by the crudest methods, and
thousands of men were now flocking into the camp for the purpose of
doing beach mining. They were sadly disappointed. Not, however, because
there was no gold in the beach sands, but because it was so
infinitesimally tiny that they had no means of securing it. No hand
rocker, copper plate, nor amalgam had been used with success, neither
did any of the myriads of prospective miners bring anything with them
which promised better results. Great heaps of machinery called by
hopeful promoters "gold dredgers" were being daily dumped upon the beach
from the ships, signboards were covered with pictures of things similar,
while the papers continually bloomed with advertisements of machines,
which, if speedily secured by the miners, would, according to the
imaginative advertiser, soon cause all to literally roll in riches.

One flaming dodger ran in large letters thus: "Calling millions from the
vasty deep. A fortune in one hundred days. Our dredger will work three
thousand yards of sand in heavy surf at Cape Nome. It will take out
twenty-four thousand dollars in a day. You can make more money with us
than by taking flyers in wild-cat oil schemes, etc." The poster was
illustrated by a huge machine gotten up on the centipede plan; at least,
it resembled that hated insect from having attached to its frame two
sets of wheels of different sizes along the sides like the legs of a
centipede, but with a steam boiler for a head, and a big pipe for a
throat from which the salt water was disgorged to wash out this immense
amount of sand and give the gold to the miner. It did not save the gold.

Thousands of dollars of good, hard-earned money were dumped upon the
beach in the shape of heavy machines of different kinds, which were
worse than useless, and only brought bitter disappointment to their
owners. Men had stripped the beach the summer before of all coarse gold
which had, perhaps, been ages in washing up from the ocean's bed, or
down the creeks from the hills, and only the fine, or "flour gold," as
i