arrive on a new creek to make it impracticable to work together in harmony without organization, they hold a meeting and elect one of their number as a register or clerk, and thereafter a record is made of all locations and all transfers, for which a small fee is charged. In prospecting the usual method is followed, i. e., sinking holes to bed rock across the stream and testing the dirt until the pay streak is found. Having located his claim, the miner scrapes off as much moss as he can, and, turning a stream of water on to the frozen ground, gradually thaws, scrapes and digs his ditch. The gold lies at bed rock, fifteen to twenty feet below the surface. A drainage ditch must then be dug, a dam built and sluice boxes placed. Winter mining has been experimented with to some extent. Work cannot be started until the cold weather is settled beyond the possibility of a surface thaw, nor can it be continued beyond the first promise of spring. A fire is built and kept burning until the ground beneath is thawed to bed rock, after which the drift is removed, leaving a hole several feet wide. By banking the fires against the side of the hole every night and removing the soft earth next morning, a 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 |