in 1894 yielded good results. The gold was in coarse flakes and nuggets, so that $40 a day was made by some men, while all did well. The drift is not as deep here as in most other streams, and water can be applied more easily and copiously,— a vast advantage. Molymute, Crooked, Independence, Mastadon and Preacher creeks are the most noteworthy tributaries of this rich field.

The Koyukuk River, which flows from the borders of the Arctic Ocean, gathering many mountain tributaries, to enter the Yukon at Nulato, was also prospected in 1892, '93 and '94, and indications of good placers have been discovered there, but the northerly, exposed and remote situation has caused them to receive little attention thus far.

THE KLONDIKE.

During the autumn of 1896 several men and wo men, none of whom were "old miners," discouraged by poor results lower down the river resolved to try prospecting in the Klondike gulch. They were laughed at and argued with; were told that prospectors years ago had been all over that valley, and found only the despised "flour gold," which was too fine to pay for washing it out. Nevertheless they persisted and went at work. Only a short time elapsed, when, on one of the lower southside branches of the stream they found pockets of flakes and nuggets of gold far richer than anything Alaska had ever shown before. They named the stream Bonanza, and a small tributary El Dorado. Others came and nearly everyone succeeded. Before spring. nearly a ton and a half of gold had been taken from the frozen ground. Nuggets weighing a pound (troy) were found. A thousand dollars a day was sometimes saved despite the rudeness of the methods, but these things happened where pockets were struck. Probably the total clean-up from January to June was not less than $1,500,000. The report.

spread and all those in the interior of Alaska concentrated there, where a "camp" of tents and shanties soon sprang up at the mouth of the Klondike called Dawson City. A correspondent of the New York Sun describes it as beautifully situated, and a very quiet, orderly town, due to the strict supervision of the Canadian mounted police, who allowed no pistols to be carried, but a great place for gambling with high stakes. It bids fair to become the mining metropolis of the northwest, and had about 3,000 inhabitants before the advance-guard of the present "rush" reached there.

Hundreds of claims were staked out and worked in all the little gulches opening along Bonanza, Eldorado, Hunker, Bear and other tributaries of the Klondike, and of Indian River, a stream thirty miles south of it, and a greater number seem to be of equal richness with those first worked. All this is within a radius south and east of 20 miles from Dawson City, and most of it far nearer. The country is rough, wooded hills, and the same trouble as to water is met there as elsewhere, yet riches were obtained by many men in a few weeks without exhausting their claims.

So remote and shut in has this region been in the winter that no word of this leaked out until the river opened and a party of successful miners came