tunnel is formed. A foot and a half a day is as much as the greatest industry can accomplish, but that amounts to 150 feet in the season. The pay dirt is piled up and is not washed until the following spring.

CHAPTER V.

MINING EXPERTS AND SCIENTISTS. Professor N. S. Shaler, who is perhaps the best living American authority on geology, has been telling his classes at Harvard for the last twenty years that the coming great discoveries of gold on this continent would be in Alaska. The possibilities for bonanza finds among the Sierras, he explained, had been narrowed to a point where there was little opportunity except to develop known veins, but in the great extension of the Rocky Mountain system to the North there doubtless lay the mother vein, which sooner or later would come to light.

Professor Shaler's prophecy, based on scientific deductions, has come true, and other scien

tists now agree with him that the Alaskan country contains limitless possibilities for the discovery of gold.

And not the scientists alone. So hard-headed a pioneer as John W. Mackay, the last and greatest of the bonanza kings, who went into the California gold fields and dug out a fabulous fortune, which has been growing ever since, expresses his belief in the reports of the marvelous richness of the newly-discovered fields.

"I have no reason to doubt them," he says. "I have had great confidence in the mining possibilities in British Columbia and Alaska-have always believed that those frozen, almost inaccessible regions contain heavy deposits of precious metals. Some enormous 'finds' of gold have undoubtedly been made there, and yet we know little or nothing of the possibilities of the country. Think of Williams' Creek, for instance, in the Caribou region in British Columbia. As long ago as 1860 something like fifty millions of gold were taken out. It was placer mining there, just the same as the Klondike."

Mr. Mackay believes that in time modern mining methods will be carried up into the Yukon country, and that all parts of the country will be

opened. "Capital," he says, "will always go where there is a chance for legitimate investment, and transportation facilities will increase as rapidly as the travelers."

Mr. Mackay thinks the excitement over the discoveries may increase. "I see in it," he says, "something like the excitement of the early fifties over the gold discoveries of the Pacific coast region. The reports of rich individual finds are likely to continue, and the arrival of every ship loaded with fortunate gold hunters will stimulate the imagination, hopes and desires of the would-be gold hunters. We hear nothing of the failures. One man who is lucky is more talked about than a thousand who fail."

Mr. Mackay says that his experience in California was that about one man in ten used to get on, and by "getting on" he means not becoming a millionaire, but making a living and a little

more.

R. E. Preston, the Director of the United States Mint, has become convinced of the great possibilities in the Klondike region. While he thinks it is as yet too early to hail the Klondike as a new Eldorado, he says the history of gold production in Alaska hitherto would prepare

the mind for the acceptance of a belief in the likelihood of further gold discoveries in that region or its proximity.

"The gold product of Alaska thus far," he says, "has been remarkable rather for its regularity than its amount, and is therefore more favorable to the permanency of development of the mineral resources than if it were subject to violent fluctuation.

"Nature seems to have sprinkled Alaska and all Asiatic Russia with gold. The latter region sends annually over $25,000,000 to the mint at St. Petersburg. The production of gold there is such that the annual output of the Russian Empire would, it is claimed, exceed $50,000,000 were it not for the obstacles put in the way of human industry by an inclement climate and an inhospitable soil."

Dr. W. H. Dall, of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, who has for years been regarded as the highest authority on the Alaskan country and who is a geologist of note, says he has no doubt of the truth of the stories told of the richness of the Yukon soil.

"The gold-bearing belt of Northwestern America," he says, "contains all the gold fields

extending into British Columbia and what is known as the Northwest Territories and Alaska. The Yukon really runs along in that belt for 500 or 600 miles. The bed of the main river is in the valley. The yellow metal is not found in paying quantities in the main river, but in the small streams which cut through the mountains on either side. Mud and mineral matter are carried into the main river, while the gold is left on the rough bottom of these side streams. In most cases the gold lies at the bottom of thick gravel deposits. The gold is covered with frozen gravel in the winter. During the summer until the snow is all melted, the surface is covered with muddy torrents. When summer is over and the springs begin to freeze, the streams dry up. At the approach of winter, in order to get at the gold the miners find it necessary to dig into the gravel formation."

George Frederick Wright, professor of geology at Oberlin College, thinks that the "mother lode" may be looked for successfully in Alaska. In his opinion it exists somewhere up the streams on which the placer mines are found. The source of the Klondike gold, he says, is from the south, and the gold was doubtless