since developed into one of the
richest mines in the world. It is not a placer mine,
however, but a quartz mine, one needing capital for its
development and with no charms for the ordinary gold-seeker.
The gold is found in a friable and easily worked rock,
enabling low-grade ores to be handled at a profit, and
to-day fifteen hundred stamps are busy and the mines are
highly profitable.

The placer miners, however, have no use for gold that rests
in quartz veins and has to be obtained by the aid of costly
stamping mills. The gold they seek is that on which nature
has done the work of stamping, by breaking up the original
veins into sands and gravels, with which the freed gold is
mixed in condition to be obtained by a simple process of
washing. The wandering miners thus prospected Alaska,
following the long course of the Yukon and trying its
tributary streams, many of them making a living, a few of
them acquiring wealth, but none of their finds attracting
the attention of the world, which scarcely knew that
gold-seekers were at work in this remote and almost unknown
region.

Thus it went on until 1897, when on July 16 a party of
miners arrived in San Francisco from the upper Yukon with a
large quantity of gold in nuggets and dust and a story to
tell that deeply stirred that old land of gold. On the 17th
another steamer put into Seattle with more miners and
$800,000 in gold dust, nearly all of it the outcome of a
winter's work on a small stream known as the Klondike,
entering the Yukon about fifty miles above Forty-Mile Creek.

The discovery of this rich placer region was made in the
autumn of 1896 by an Illinois man named George McCormick,
who, in the intervals of salmon fishing, tried his hand at
prospecting, and on Bonanzo Creek, a tributary of the
Klondike, was surprised and overjoyed to find gold in a
profusion never before dreamed of in the Alaskan region. The
news of the find spread rapidly through Alaska and before
winter set in the old diggings were largely deserted, a
swarm of eager miners poured into the Klondike region, and
the frozen earth was torn and rent in their eagerness to
reach its yellow treasures.

The news of the discovery spread as far and fast as the
telegraph could carry it. The richness of the find surpassed
anything ever before found and the whole country was agog.
The stories of wonderful fortunes made by miners were
testified to by a display of nuggets and sacks of shining
gold in s