oprietors. But the days are past when nuggets were picked up here on
the beach, for it now needs costly machinery to find them in the
interior. Even during the first mad rush, when Nome was but a town of
tents, many who expected to find the country teeming with gold were
disappointed. In those days men would often rush ashore, after restless
nights passed on board ship in wakeful anticipation, catch up half a
dozen handfuls of earth, and finding nothing, cry, "I told you it was
all a fake," and re-embark on the first steamer for San Francisco. It
therefore came to pass that patient, hard-working men like Lindeberg,
inured to hardship and privation, whose primary object in the country
was totally unconnected with mining, have made colossal fortunes solely
by dogged perseverance and the sweat of their brow. The general opinion
here seemed to be that at the present time a man with a capital of, say,
L10,000 could succeed here, but even then it was doubtful whether the
money could not be more profitably invested in a more temperate clime,
and one involving less risk to life and limb.

Although epidemics occasionally occur, Nome cannot be called unhealthy.
The greatest variation of temperature is probably from 40 deg. below
zero in winter to 90 deg. above in summer, and the dry, intense cold we
experienced in Northern Siberia is here unknown. Only a short time ago
the sea journey to Nome was no less hazardous than the land trip
formerly was over the dreaded Chilkoot Pass and across the treacherous
lakes to Dawson City. In those days catastrophes were only too frequent
in that graveyard of the Pacific, Bering Sea, and this was chiefly on
account of unseaworthy ships patched up for passenger-traffic by
unscrupulous owners in San Francisco. Nome City can now be reached by
the fine steamships of the "Alaska Commercial Company" as safely and
comfortably as New York in an Atlantic liner, but these boats are
unfortunately in the minority, and even while we were at Nome,
passengers were arriving there almost daily on board veritable
coffin-ships, in which I would not willingly navigate the Serpentine.
Shipping disasters have been frequent not only at sea, but also while
landing here, for Nome has no harbour, but merely an open, shallow
roadstead, fully exposed to the billows of the ocean. There is therefore
frequently a heavy surf along the beach, and here many a poor miner has
been drowned within a few yards of the Eldorado he has r