 16. Hot springs in cold lands. Hot springs in Alaska, boiling water bubbling out of the beds of glaciers, steam rising from the earth on the edge of ages old ice, several hundreds of feet deep, scalding baths in hot water from Mother Earth's own tank almost in the shadow of the North Pole. These are some of the wonders of our great territory whose shores are washed by the chill, bearing sea and the icy Arctic. I have heard of hot springs ever since I came to Alaska, there to be found from the islands of the Panhandle to the very edge of the Arctic. Fifty miles north of Ketchikan are the Belle Island hot springs where the water is 164 degrees Fahrenheit or hot enough to cook eggs. A little farther north are the Sitka hot springs whose waters register 156 degrees above zero. And on Chichagov Island between Sitka and Juno are the Tenaki hot springs which have been made a flourishing resort for both the summer and the winter seasons. In fact, the geological survey has discovered hot springs in many different parts of the territory. The Baker hot springs which I have just visited are on the Tanana River, about 12 hours by steamer from Tanana and Fort Gibbon and 100 miles from Fairbanks. They lie about three miles back from the Tanana River. And upon landing I got a hay wagon to carry me across to the town near the springs. A fairly good quarter-way road covered with sawdust and muck crosses the lowlands and goes up to the springs. This land is now covered with patches of bushes and grass as high as my knee. Some of the grass is in tassel and the land is sprinkled with wild flowers, white, yellow and red, whose names I know not. Nearing the town we drove over a quarter-way bridge crossing a creek that flows into the Tanana River and stopped at the Post Office which is a wire cage inside the galvanized iron store building of the Northern Commercial Company. American flags floating from high poles above three of the log houses showed the patriotism of their owners. Not far from the Post Office were the burned ruins of a hotel which was once a winter and summer resort. The hotel had great bathing and swimming tanks. It was built of logs and cost, it is said, more than forty thousand dollars. Today there is only one bathing tank left. A cabin is built over it and the water is piped from the springs about a half mile away. I tested the bath with a thermometer and it was just 114 degrees Fahrenheit. It was hot enough to paint my skin scarlet when I jumped in. Leaving the ruins I walked over the hills to visit the springs, passing through a farm of 300 acres on the way. The road is through an oat field where there were perhaps 30 acres ready for cutting. In the center of this field I saw the large glass hot house built to supply the hotel and mines with cucumbers, tomatoes, and other vegetables. Coming to the steaming brook that flows from the spring, we passed a chicken and hog shed about 400 feet in length. When business was booming its owner kept there 650 hens, 50 ducks, and 70 pigs, as well as horses and cows. The sheds were built into the hill from whence the spring comes. The ground is so hot that it kept the poultry and other stock in comfort throughout the winter and that without the stoves necessary to other parts of Alaska. The water moderates the temperature of the land of almost the whole farm. The adjacent hill slopes are a natural hotbed. Snow falling on the warm ground thaws so rapidly that the surface is seldom white for more than a couple of days at a time and the frost goes down only an inch or so. On the edge of the warm land young parsnips have been dug in March from under the snow and all other crops are much in advance of those planted elsewhere. At the springs the warm water flows out at the rate of 150 gallons a minute. It is as clear as a crystal but it is steaming at a temperature of 125 degrees Fahrenheit. I watched Mr. Waring, the hot spring's expert of the geological survey, as he tested the heat and measured the flow. He says the water is hot enough to soft-boil eggs in 10 minutes. Walking down the stream 30 or 40 feet I found another brook flowing into it and supposed this would be of about the same temperature as the one we had tested. I put in my hand. The water was icy cold. Stooping down on the narrow fork between the two streams I put one hand in hot water and the other in cold. Bouncing back in the hay wagon of the corduroy road to the river I sat beside Tom Davis, a farmer who does teeming from the Tanana to the gold mines north of here. He told me that the hay there now unloading from our steamer is worth $90 a ton at the river and $140 a ton when it gets to the mines. I remarked that the price seemed an extravagant one, said Mr. Davis. It is not high for Alaska. I have known hay to sell as high as $800 a ton or at $0.40 per pound. That was in the Klondike when the gold fever was raging. I once sold 1,000 pounds of hay to the freighters for $0.50 a pound and weighed it out on the grocery scales. During my stay in Alaska, I met G. D. Schofield of Seattle, the owner of some of the largest hot springs on the Seward Peninsula. These are even more wonderful than the Baker Springs. They are situated about 70 miles north of Nome at the foot of the Sawtooth Mountains, 50 feet above sea level. A number of them boil out of the ground at a temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, maintaining the same heat winter and summer. The springs form a stream called Hot Creek that runs through a farm of 320 acres. I asked Mr. Schofield about this farm. He replied, we have 40 acres under cultivation and 60 more that could be put into crops. The whole of this 100 acres is kept warm by the springs and the hot water under the ground. If you dig down anywhere inside this tract, you will find hot earth, and the lower you go, the hotter it gets. At a depth of 6 feet, you cannot hold the earth in your hands. There seems to be a stratum of hot water under the whole 100 acres. On the other hand, the land outside that area is frozen solid, so no one knows what depth. Our farm is like the crust of a hot pie, fresh from the oven, set on the ice, but never getting cold. We have a glass greenhouse 36 feet long and 16 feet wide, built above one of the springs. The hot water furnishes the heat, and no matter if the temperature goes to 30 degrees below zero outside, it never goes to freezing within. The plants grow in the hot house all winter, and in the summer we have cantaloupes, cucumbers, mushrooms, tomatoes, and watermelons. We also raise lettuce, young onions, and other green stuff. We have a tree onion that grows well. It does not lie in the ground, but grows on the branches of a tree 12 or 14 inches high. I asked Mr. Schofield whether many people came to visit the springs. Yes, he said, we have a hotel accommodating 30, and the people come in from Nome and all parts of the Seward Peninsula. Our best season is in the winter. The guests come on dog sleds, and you can sometimes see as many as 400 dogs there at once. It usually takes two days to make the trip from Nome in winter, but it can be done in one day in the summer by going over the railway track with the pupmobile, a car drawn by dogs which takes you within six miles of the springs. In coming from Tanana to Hot Springs Landing, I was all day on the Tanana River. It carries down such a vast deal of silt that the water is as thick as bean soup. There are frequent sandbars, and we passed islands in every stage of formation from the bare brown patch of silt to forest clad areas washed by the waves. Now and then there were floating islands, great beds of green with bushes and trees upon them moving down the stream. In places the river is from five to ten miles wide and quite shallow. I saw soil and trees, bushes and the earth fall down into the current before my eyes. The river banks are lined with trees still living and still green, which have fallen this way into the current. At times the water so melts the frozen strata that caves are formed under the matted moss, and where there is an open space and no trees, this green mat slopes down into the stream like a great green carpet laid from the bed of the river up to the shore. At the wood camps where the trees had been cut away to furnish fuel for the steamers were great beds of pink fireweed rising out of high grass. Coming up the river we saw here and there pioneers chopping little farms out of the forests. They first cut the trees and a year later pull out the stumps. The ice is so close to the surface that the roots cannot go down deep so the stumps come up rather easily. After clearing they plant patches of vegetables or fields of oat hay. None of the farms is large and I believe it will be a long time before the local market will be big enough to pay the farmers of the United States to leave their good homes to try their luck here. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 of Carpenter's World Travels Alaska Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Chapter 17 Fairbanks, The Chicago of Alaska Fairbanks, the northern terminus of Uncle Sam's new railway and the point where the river and rail navigation center and join might be called the hub of Alaska. It is in the heart of the territory almost equal distance from Bering Strait and the Canadian border and about halfway between the Pacific and the Arctic oceans. The business of Fairbanks is all the more astonishing when one realizes how inaccessible the town was before the government railroad opened a quick passage to the sea. It took me two days to come up the Tanana River from Fort Gibbon to Fairbanks. The Tanana is navigable for some distance above Fairbanks and its valley has millions of acres of agricultural land. Fairbanks has a delightful individuality. It is a combination of the picturesque and the plain of the shabby and the sumptuous of the old and the new. Altogether it is different from any other town I have ever seen. Take a look at the main business street. It is a wide dirt road with plank sidewalks from which rise frame buildings of one and two stories. The front walls of the stores extend high above the roosts and are cut off horizontally making the buildings look taller and giving a jagged skyline. The shops carry a wide assortment for Fairbanks is the trading center of interior Alaska and goods from here go to the gold mining camps of the Tanana, the Yukon, the Koryukuk and the Inoka rivers. Some of its wholesale firms do a business that runs into the millions and steamers are always lying at anchor just off the principal street. There are establishments filled with mining machinery and stores carrying all sorts of goods for miners including macanaws and khaki suits for rough wear. They sell high boots of white rubber and hobnailed shoes for tramping over the rocks and through the brush. They have also silks and broad cloths and shoes of fashionable makes. They have moccasins beautifully beaded entering the banks you will see them taking in gold dust at one window and handing out banknotes at another. Every bank buys gold and have all their assaying and melting establishments where the metal is tested and made into bricks to be shipped outside. The crowds on the streets are a mixture. They include men and women as well dressed as those of any city east of the Alleghenes and miners clad in blue jeans or khaki. On the street corners are groups of shirt sleeved men in soft hats or sombreros. Now turn your eyes to the roadways. There are scores of motor vehicles away up here in the heart of Alaska and jitney buses go regularly each day to the gold creeks. There is an overland stage that makes the trip over the beautiful road from Fairbanks to Chitina the terminus of the Copper River Railroad. Buy it one can motor more than 300 miles through the wilds and then have a 200 mile railroad ride down to the sea. Fairbanks has several hotels. I am stopping with Tony Nordale on Front Street where I have a sitting room and bedroom at about $3 per day. I get my meals at a restaurant kept by a young lady whose rosy cheeks and toe hair have won her the nickname the little pink suede. Her charge is from 50 cents to 75 cents a meal and the food is delicious. Like many of the restaurants, hers has a pet brown bear, a cub fastened to a chain outside the front door. It does tricks for sugar plums or sweetcakes. When I had my hair cut today, it cost me twice what barbers charge in the States. As I left the barbershop, I stepped into the chair of a boot black outside and the shine cost me a quarter. The day was hot so when a miner asked me in the camp parlance if I would wash my neck, I knew what he meant and said yes. He treated me to a glass of lemonade at a cost of 25 cents. A little farther on, a newsboy offered me the Alaska citizen for which I handed him a quarter, the regular price for the paper. A quarter is the smallest coin in circulation here and means about the same as a nickel at home. Fairbanks is an incorporated town with a mayor and council and claims to be the liveliest city in Alaska. It has much civic spirit and practically all the community organizations and activities of a town many times its size in the States. Its women's club is affiliated with the Federation of Women's Clubs. There are two dailies and an attractive public library built of logs besides a fire department and telephone exchange, more than half a dozen denominations have churches here. The most picturesque feature of Fairbanks is the homes of the people. The residences are chiefly log cabins ranging in size from two room huts to some mansions of a dozen or more rooms. The cabins are built of cypress and birch logs with a bark on or off at the taste of the builder. The logs are chinked with arctic moss and their corners are joined, now in notched shape, now dovetailed and now with the logs sticking out like a dollhouse built of corn cobs. Nearly every home has its porch and on the smaller ones the low ridge roofs extend far out at the front to shade the lounging place of the family during the hot summer days. Some of the houses are half log and half frame. Some are roofed with boards, some with galvanized iron painted green and others with poles covered with earth. The latter have grass and flowers growing upon them. Most of the houses have cellars and all have their walls set deep in the ground and banked up for warmth. In the larger houses there are big living rooms with wide windows artistically set. Most of the log cabins have pretty green lawns with beds of beautiful flowers. All have gardens and nearly everyone has its patch of potatoes and turnips. Hedges of sweet peas the height of a man may wall one side of a garden and great beds of poppies line the walks through the center. I have never seen anywhere flowers so large so fresh and of such a velvety texture and I may add that I have never visited any town where the people seem to love flowers so much and where they have so many for themselves and their friends. There is a friendly strife between families as to which shall have the best and earliest vegetables. I called upon a lady last night who showed me one of her hot house tomatoes weighing three pounds and a cauliflower from her garden with the head as big around as the largest dinner plate. She had lettuce as fine as any raised in the south and rows of peas six feet high with pods as big around as a man's thumb. This woman has the earliest potatoes in Fairbanks by starting them in boxes of earth in her kitchen a week or so before the frost goes out of the ground. To get some idea of the business of Fairbanks and interior Alaska I visited today the headquarters of the Northern Commercial Company at Fairbanks. This company is the offspring of the Alaska Commercial Company which leased the Seal Islands about a year after we bought the territory and established a general fur trading business something like that of the Hudson's Bay Company. It made such vast sums dealing in seal skins that the royalties paid to our government were soon more than the first cost of the territory. The Alaska Company originated and developed the transportation of Alaska and had its stores and trading posts not only in the islands of the southeast the Aleutians the southern coast of the mainland and in Bering Sea but also at St. Michael at the mouth of the Yukon and all along that river to the boundary of Canada. When the Alaska Commercial Company dissolved the Northern Commercial Company took over its business in interior Alaska and now has a number of stores in the basins of the Yukon and the Cascokwim serving the mining camps and fur trading stations. It supplies many of the roadhouses and does a wholesale and retail business over a territory perhaps one-tenth as large as the United States. The company has a capital of three million five hundred thousand dollars the stock being owned mostly in San Francisco and England. There are firms outside the Northern Commercial Company that do a large business but none that covers such a great area and handles everything needed by the people. Their establishment here at Fairbanks for instance consists of stores, warehouses and sellers with a floor space of six or eight acres machine shops and foundries cold storage and warm storage plants branches devoted to wholesale and retail as well as waterworks, steam heat and electric plants. The mercantile department has now on hand more than a million dollars worth of groceries provisions and other supplies and its retail section is like a small department store in the States. Goods have to be bought in large quantities where the country is locked in ice for seven months of the year. With the use of the new railway these stocks will not need to be so large. Less capital will be tied up in goods and merchants should be able to sell at somewhat lower prices. In one of the sellers I saw 10,000 cans of condensed milk, condensed cream and other canned goods including egg powder from which camp cooks, I was told, make up omelets quite as good as from ranch eggs. I saw thousands of eggs in the shell which had been packed in the States carried 1,000 miles to Skagway and after crossing the mountains had come down the Yukon. I saw canned potatoes and canned corn. The potatoes are cooked whole and put up in cans in which shape they realize as much as 40 or 50 dollars a bushel. Some of the corn is canned in the year and had only to be warmed to give the Alaskan minor corn on the cob in the heart of the winter. Goods have to be carefully packed for the Alaskan trade. They must stand the change of climate, the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter. Harishable provisions are coated with gelatin. Hams, for instance, must be so protected that they will not be ruined if dropped in the snow or into a river. Each ham is sewed up in canvas which is dipped in a gelatin to give it a glue-like coating and make it airtight. Cheese is packed the same way. The company keeps billiard and pool tables ready for shipment. It has wagons and sleds, some of the latter with a capacity for a 10 ton load. It has also dog sleds and dog harness with tugs, collars and backstraps. The average dog sled is 10 dollars. Another article of merchandise is dog feed, a great deal of which is tallow. The Huskies are fed once a day when on the trail and that at nightfall. Their usual meal is dried salmon and rice cooked with tallow. The Northern Commercial Company will sell about 100,000 pounds of tallow next winter. In the hardware department are all kinds of machinery and parts. There are great bales of wire cable for hoisting the earth from the mines, steam engines, air compressors, and steam points for thawing the ground. There are bales of wire for chicken yards and fox farms. There's wire netting for fish wheels and some of fine mesh for the gold reduction plants. There are all sorts of farm machinery, plows, reapers and mowers, as well as plumbing supplies, window sashes and porcelain bathtubs. The Northern Commercial Company runs a steam plant which heats the business section of Fairbanks. It has a central station with pipes to all the buildings, including many private homes in an area of several blocks. The plant furnishes heat to its customers at so much a month throughout the year. It keeps the stores and the houses warm even when the thermometer registers 60 or 70 below zero. The steam pipes run side by side with the water pipes so that the ladder are kept from freezing in the winter. Some of the smaller merchants denounce the company as a monopoly. There is probably considerable truth in the statement, but anyone can import goods and there are several firms here doing a very large business for this part of the world. One is ER Peoples, Incorporated, and another is the Dominion Commercial Company, both of which have their headquarters at Fairbanks and sell to the mining camps within a radius of 100 miles or so. Goods are sent by small steamers far up the tributaries of the Yukon. One of the far north trading stations is at Bettles, the head of seamship navigation on the Koryukuk River. From Bettles supplies are carried something like 50 miles across country to place their mines. Another trading station is Wiseman, about 90 miles from Bettles. It is also on the Koryukuk, but the stream is so shallow that the goods are hauled there on barges drawn by horses. As the freight rate is a dollar and 40 cents a ton, the prices at Wiseman are very high. Most of the merchandise is paid foreign gold dust. The storekeeper weighing out the right amount from a miner's poke. Most of the business of Alaska is done upon credit, and anyone who would sell much has to give time. The people here tell me that the merchants are liberal in their advances to miners. I talked last night with a commercial traveler who started to fare banks with six horses freighting goods in over the trail. A cold snap caught him on the way and his horses died. He arrived in fare banks with only enough for a mining outfit, but the storekeeper gave him credit, and in company with a partner, he leased a claim on one of the creeks for 25% of the profits. At the end of the year, he was $2,000 in debt. The next winner he and his partner had no money to pay wages, but by their own work, they got out $3,000 worth of painter. They then paid up their debts and within the next year or so claimed up $30,000 out of the claim. Indeed, few people realize the extent and possibilities of our Alaskan trade. The commerce in this territory in a typical year was $110 million. It was nearly as great as our trade with Spain or Sweden and was one fifth as large as our total trade with all South America. The exports were twice the value of the imports. In proportion to the white population, the trade was greater than that of any other country of the world. The per capita commerce was about $2,200, while that of Great Britain was only $279. This means that the trade of Alaska was, on the average, for every man, woman, and child, almost eight times as great as that for every man, woman, and child in Great Britain. If this is true, when the land is a wild waste so covered with moss and other vegetation that only about one third of it has even a general survey, and not one acre in a thousand has been brought into cultivation, what we not expect of the country with the railroad and with the developments of the future. End of Chapter 17 Chapter 18 of Carpenter's World Travels Alaska, our northern wonderland, by Frank Carpenter. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Homesteading under the Arctic Circle The Tanana Valley has the largest body of good soil in Alaska. Much of the land is in what is known as the Tanana Bottom, a tract about 200 miles long and in places 70 miles wide. Altogether, it is about as big as the state of New Jersey, and its cultivable area is one fifth as large as Ohio. I motored today through a rolling region as beautiful as the foothills of the Alleghenies. It was difficult to realize that we were just below the Arctic Circle. The thermometer was at 90 degrees in the shade. There was no snow on the tops of the mountains and the hills and valleys were covered with green. At times we passed through plains thick with wildflowers. In some places, the ground was covered with blueberry bushes, their fruit as large as cherries and loaded with juice. Now we passed through forests of birch, spruce, and cottonwood. Where the woods had been cut or burned away, there were vast expanses of flaming pink flowers as high as the wheels of the car. And everywhere, the roadside was hedged with grass and red top that reached to the hubs. Now and then, we bumped over Quarterway, our automobile bouncing high under the fast driving of the Yehu of this northern frontier. We passed many small farms cut out of the woods with oat, hay, and potatoes in blossom. We saw cattle grazing and by and by came to the government's experiment farm in the heart of the Tanana Valley, about four miles from Fairbanks. The farm covers 1,280 acres of gently sloping hillsides and bottom land. At one end of the farm stands the new Alaska Agricultural College commanding magnificent views for 50 miles up and down the Tanana Valley, taking in Fairbanks and the Blue Mountains far off in the distance. On a bright day, Mount McKinley, the tallest peak on the North American continent is visible. The campus includes a forest of silvery birch trees as straight as arrows. As we rode by the farm, we could see men cutting trees and burning brush. A little farther on, we came to grain fields not little patches but fields that would be large on any Virginia farm. We passed tracks of oats ready for reaping and rode through barley four feet high. Above these on the hillside were long strips of Siberian wheat ripening side by side with strips of experimental grains of one kind in another. The work of these experiment stations is not like that of the ordinary farm. Crops are not raised to be sold although enough is produced to feed the stock and there is sometimes a surplus. The business of Uncle Sam's agricultural experts here in Alaska is to test out grains and plants and find those best adapted to the country. The old patriarch's agents have scoured northern China, the desert of Gobi and the highlands of Pamir and have ransacked the frigid zone looking for seeds adapted to the territory. They have seeds from Apocinia and samples of grains from the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. And there are no end of plants that have come from Finland and Norway as well as from northern United States and Canada. It has been found that potatoes do well in this part of Alaska. 200 bushels per acre have been grown and the valley is now raising about all that is needed for the towns and the camps. One year the station sold the yield of five acres for $3,500 and it has records of three acres which have produced a value of from $500 to $600 per acre for years in succession. Some claim the tubers lack the mealiness of those of the Rocky Mountains but those I have had have been dry and delicious. The home of the station farmer is a one-story cottage surrounded by beautiful flowers. Near the cottage is a hot house where tomatoes and cucumbers are grown and across the way are barns and outhouses where grain hay is stored for the winter. There is also a root cellar in the side of the hill not far from the barn where the potatoes and other root crops are stored as soon as they are dug which is sometime in August. Just opposite the root cellar and a little below it is a large turnip patch. I climbed the fence and pulled up a turnip which was eight inches thick. By actual measurement the leaves were 17 inches long. The crops at the Fairbanks farm are similar to those grown at the government's experiment station at Rampart right under the Arctic Circle where I stopped for a while on my way down the Yukon to Tanana. One of the things that interested me there was the way potatoes are sprouted. They are often started in greenhouses or cold frames. About four weeks before planting they are put in trays and lightly covered with soil. Sprouts come out to the length of from half an inch to three inches. When they are planted outdoors they are so set that the sprouts just reach the surface. The tubers given such a start indoors more than double the yield of potatoes planted in the ordinary way. Another crop which has turned out well at Rampart is a yellow flowered alfalfa imported from Siberia. In the United States alfalfa roots sometimes go down many feet into the soil. Here in Alaska when the alfalfa roots strike the glacial ice bed that ends freeze off but the roots keep spreading out above the ice stratum. Speaking of Rampart I am reminded that I saw there Rex Beach's deserted cabin. Once it was in the midst of the seething excitement of a log cabin metropolis of the gold fields. Then the place or deposits played out and today the place is practically deserted. Many of its houses have been cut up for firewood and others are falling in ruins. Beach's hut is a one-story shack made of slabs and boards. Over the rude door hangs a pair of white caribou horns from a beast that may have been shot by the novelist. There's a pile of wood outside the cabin lying just as it was when the last occupant left. I am told that Rex Beach came here to mine gold. He failed to find the precious metal but he unearthed the load of human interest stories and tales of adventure that have delighted us all. The history of his stay at Rampart is prosaic. The only story I picked up relates to an Indian woman who, according to the custom of the country, had three straight blue lines tattooed in ink on her chin. Rex Beach had bought some fish of the squaw and wanted to find her to get another supply. Asked to describe her, he said, I don't know her name but she has carried her head in the air. She's short and dirty and has her house number marked on her chin. It is one, one, one. But to return to Fairbanks we left the experiment farm and visited some of the homesteads nearby. The first was owned by a man named Young who came to Alaska some 10 or 12 years ago. He took up 320 acres of government land, a large part of which is now under cultivation. He is raising oat hay and potatoes. He has also a big greenhouse where he grows tomatoes and other vegetables for the mining camps and the town. Mr. Young was not at home when we called but Mrs. Young showed us about. As we looked over the farm I asked her how she liked living in this far off Alaska. She replied that she had been a little dissatisfied until she had gone outside last summer but that since she returned she had had no desire to go out again. This country is my home, she said and a mighty good home it is. You can see what the summer is like. We are perfectly comfortable during the winter. We always have plenty to eat. We get high prices for all that we sell and we are farther ahead every year. At that moment we were looking over the stock in the barnyard which included two big sows each of which had eight or ten little month old pigs running with her. Mrs. Young pointed to them saying we sold a pair of those pigs yesterday for twenty dollars. That will give you some idea of what things will bring in this country. Our next visit was to the dairy farm belonging to a Mr. Hinkley which supplies much of the milk and cream consumed in Fairbanks. Mr. Hinkley also sells butter, butter milk, and cottage cheese. He has twenty cows which average three or four gallons of milk each twenty four hours. They are what we would call in the United States good ordinary stock. The dairy man has not bought any hay for several years but relies on the native grass in his oat hay for his stock. He says the oat hay is quite as good as Timothy and very much crisper. Before leaving I pulled up a handful of the young oats growing outside the barn and measured the stocks. They were eighteen inches long though the oats had been planted only three weeks before. We went on to visit a three hundred and twenty acre truck farm on the very edge of Fairbanks. This is a homestead taken up fifteen years ago by Stacia Rickert the wife of a business man of Fairbanks. Mr. Rickert has built here a very pretty cabin surrounded by flowers and his home is as well furnished and as comfortable as that of any well to do farmer of the states. He has cleared about one fourth of the land and the farm is one of the show places of Alaska. The ground is as flat as a floor and as green as the valley of the Nile. He is now cutting oat hay of which he has many acres. He has also great fields of barley and potatoes the latter in full blossom. The Rickert farm supplies a great part of Fairbanks and ships vegetables to the towns and the mining camps for miles around. It sends green stuff to hot springs and Fort Gibbon as well as to the gold mines of the Iditarod and Ruby. The gardens of this farm cover 20 or 30 acres as we walked through them I asked about the crops and was told that there were in the ground 20,000 cabbages 30,000 stocks of celery and some acres of head lettuce. The celery which is especially fine grows to a height of four feet. Some of it was sent to Montana a few years ago to show what Alaska could do and President Taff sampled it during his trip through that state. He declared it the finest he had ever tasted. As we went through one of the fields I pulled up a cabbage and put it on the scales in the greenhouse. It weighed 26 pounds. There are several hothouses each devoted to a different crop. There is one which is 120 feet long that grows melons only including watermelons, casabas and cantaloupes. The cantaloupe sell for a dollar a pound and some of them bring four or five dollars. The vines are trained upon wires running along under the glass and from the beds up to the roof. From these wires the melons hang down the heavier ones being supported by slings to prevent their breaking the vines. In other hothouses tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are grown. Farming conditions are all together different from those of most parts of the United States. Fairbanks is only about 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle and the growing season is short ranging from three to four months and extending in favorable seasons perhaps a half month longer. The last spring frosts occur about the middle of May and frosts begin again during the latter part of August or the first of September. The long summer sunlight makes the crops grow very fast however. This part of Alaska is a region of scanty rainfall. Heavy showers are almost unknown but it drizzles often in summer and much of the rain is during the growing season. The yearly average is about 10 or 12 inches of water including the snow of the winter. Besides the rainfall there is the moisture from the layer of perpetual ice below the surface of the ground. End of chapter 18 Chapter 19 of Carpenter's World Travels Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter The Slibervox Recording is in the public domain Recording by Betty B Chapter 19 Thawing Fortunes Out of the Ice The country surrounding Fairbanks is the richest of the gold bearing regions of Alaska. Since gold mining began there in 1886 the Yukon Basin has produced over 130 millions of dollars worth of gold about 80 millions of which came from the Fairbanks District. This is one fourth of the value of all the gold taken out of Alaska. When one considers the 7 million the United States paid for the territory 320 million dollars in gold output in something like 40 years seems a pretty fair return on our investment. All the gold of the Fairbanks District has been washed from creeks and their valleys. The valleys are streaked with a bedrock which lies far down under the surface. The gold bearing stratum is five or six feet in thickness and has an average value of more than five dollars per cubic yard. Imagine a strip of land from New York to Philadelphia. Five times as wide as the ordinary road and worth one and one third million dollars per mile and you will have some idea of the gold bearing earth of this land of wealth. The miners are still working on the oldest of the creeks although in places these are almost deserted. When I visited the creeks yesterday I went by log hotels and dance halls now empty and silent and passed great masses of gravel the monuments of the work of the past. Leaving Fairbanks we motored up one stream and down another passing pile after pile of these tailings. We went through villages which were once almost cities now going to ruin and after traversing the valleys of Fox Creek Pedro Creek Engineer Creek Queenie Creek Esther Creek and other creeks named after the dance ladies of early days stopped for the night at Chattanika on Cleary one of the richest creeks of the Fairbanks district. I am told there are places along Cleary where every foot of ground is worth $2,500. Cleary has produced about $24 million worth of gold and it is estimated that there is more gold in the ground than has yet been taken out. They are now working over some of the claims for a second time and with cheap coal, better transportation and modern dredging machinery most of it will be handled again. I heard one miner discussing the possibilities of his men striking for higher wages. They can strike if they want to, said he, but I can make a living working over my dump heap. I can take a rocker and wash out $15 every day in the week. Nearly all of the gold taken out of the ground about Fairbanks has been placer gold. This means it is made up of gold dust and nuggets scattered through the earth and gravel so that it has only to be washed to get the gold out. Of quartz gold this region has as yet produced little. Although several quartz mines are now working and more will be opened with the coming of cheaper fuel from the Ninana coal fields. Placer mining in Alaska is far different from that of the states. In California and in the Rockies, all that a miner needed to start business was a pick, a shovel, and a pan to wash out the gold. He might add a rocker or some other rude pieces of machinery, but all told the outfit costs little. The free gold lay on the top of the ground or on the banks and in the beds of the creeks and it was comparatively easy to find and wash it out. Here about Fairbanks more than 80% of the productive deposits lie at from 40 to 260 feet underground and most of them are in valley bottoms which are subtly frozen and have to be thought out before the gold can be got at. The whole country is covered with moss which must be stripped off to find what lies beneath. To test the ground the prospector must go down to bedrock. The result is that his outfit is much more costly than in the Rockies. It should include a small boiler and pipe for steam thawing, rubber hose, steam points, and steam fittings. He needs a windlass, a cable, and wooden buckets to get the earth out after it is thawed. And if he expects to prospect in deep ground he should have a steam engine as well. There is sold here a prospecting outfit which costs about six hundred dollars. It consists of a four-horsepower boiler, a hoisting engine, steam points, pipe and fittings, and buckets and cable. The outfit is compact and can be carried on a dog sled. One of the best methods of prospecting is with drills but the freight rates have been so high that few have come in. Of course the new railway should mean lower prices for the best drills which were formerly around two thousand dollars. It will be seen that it costs something to grub stake a man in Alaska. Still much grub staking is done. Outsiders will furnish the provisions and the outfit and the miners will agree to prospect. And there are many little claims scattered here and there over the country that are kept going that way. Most of these are honestly managed. Now and then one is not. They tell a story here in Fairbanks about a miner who was working away in good spirits notwithstanding his output, which was practically nothing. He had plenty of money and seemed happy. Ask how he was doing. He replied, fine, fine. Then you have reached the pastry, I suppose. Yes, I struck that at the start. But where is it? I don't see any gold. Oh, was the reply. The pastry is not here. The pastry is in Chicago. While I was at Chattanooga, I went into some of the mines. In the Nolan mine, we got into a bucket and were dropped down a well eighty-four feet deep. Leaving the bucket, we walked through tunnels, stopping now and then to watch the miners thaw out the ice layer. The work is done with steam points or pipes through which steam is driven into the ice. The boilers with which the pipes are connected force the steam through rubber hose into the steel pipes. These end in points in which are small holes to let out the steam. The pipes are driven into the frozen walls with hammers, working their way on inch by inch as the steam thaws out the ice. It melts the gravel for several feet about the pipe. The thawed stuff can then be dug down and thrown into wheelbarrows, which carry it to the shaft and the hoists. We saw the gold bearing earth going out of the mine in the same bucket in which we came down. An engine raised the bucket by a steel cable high above the shaft when it slid on a pulley to the dump over the sluice box. The work of getting out the ore goes on winter and summer, but sluicing or washing out the gold can be done only when the weather is warm. We were fortunate in being at the Nolan mine during one of its weekly cleanups. The gold is washed in a trough, grabs a yard wide, a yard high, and several hundred feet long. This sluice box is made of rough plank and is set up at an angle of 15 or 20 degrees so that it extends to the ground from the high crib containing the dump. When the time for the cleanup comes, a door is opened in the dump and the gold bearing gravel pours down into the sluice box. A stream of water flows over it, forcing it onward and washing the dirt and gravel away. In the bottom of the sluice box are riffles or grates of steel which catch the gold. As the gold is heavier than the rock, sand, and earth, it falls into the riffles while the stream washes out the debris. At first the water came in a flood, carrying down the stone gravel and sand with a rush. Five miners, clad in rough clothing with rubber boots to their thighs, stood in the current and stirred the mass as the water poured down. They threw out the big boulders and pitched forked over the mortar and sand. They stopped it here and there with their shovels so that every bit of gold dust might be washed out. After a time, bits of the bottom of the sluice box were visible. In some places the box had turned yellow. The gold dust had piled up and coated the boards. The riffles became filled with black sand mixed with the yellow and now and then a small nugget was to be seen. The riffles were lifted out and the black sand containing the gold was carefully washed over. The water now flowed slowly and the men agitated it with brushes of seaweed about the size of a whisk broom. With these they separated most of the sand from the dust and the yellow flower and grains were caught in a scoop and thrown into a pan. It covered the bottom of the pan like a coarse yellow corn meal. After getting the gold out of the box we took some of it into the office cabin nearby and dried it over a fire. It was then tossed up by the miners to blow out the bits of sand that were left. They threw the gold into the air much as you throw screenings to chickens blowing the black sand away and catching every bit of the gold in the pan. The cleanup of this week amounted to about three quarts of gold. It was worth over four thousand dollars and the gold contents averaged 17 dollars per ounce. This was the cleanup of a small mine. Larger cleanups sometimes run into the tens of thousands of dollars. End of chapter 19 Chapter 20 of Carpenter's World Travels Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Chapter 20 Stories of Gold and Gold Miners How would you like to stub your toe on a gold mine? That is how the Rhodes Hall Quartz Mine in Bedrock Creek Valley near Fairbanks was discovered. The mine has now more than a mile of underground workings and has netted its owners over 200 thousand dollars. The discoverer was L.B. Rhodes, a prospector who was mushing over the trail. He had made some money placer mining, but fortune had gone against him and he turned his attention to quarts. On his way down the hill to the Bedrock Creek Valley, he stubbed his toe and fell headlong. As he got up he looked for the cause of his stumbling and found it was a rock speckled with coarse yellow bits of gold. He marked the spot, got an outfit, and dug down until he discovered a rich vein of quartz. He staked out a claim and thawed a shaft to the 50-foot level, melting his way through with wood fires. Every week he crushed enough of the best rock to give him gold for his supplies for the week to come. In the winter he worked underground. The next spring he tunneled in on the vein and, to make a long story short, he finally established a mill of five stamps out of which he and his brother-in-law Hall have already cleared almost a quarter of a million dollars. Traveling through a gold country like this makes one covetous. Everyone thinks gold, talks gold, and considering the prices at the restaurants, I might also say eats and drinks gold. One sees so much gold in the mines and the banks that he feels like the beggar boy with his nose flattened against the glass window of the candy store. There's plenty to be had were it not for the barrier between him and the taking. At the clean-ups of the camps I have handled gold nuggets as one handle shell corn. And at the assay offices I have held up $10,000 worth of pure gold in one brick. At Dawson I saw $200,000 worth of bricks wheeled about on a truck such as you find at a country railroad station. The gold bricks were heavy and worth from $15,000 to $30,000 apiece. At the same place I saw a ton of amalgam consisting of quick silver mixed with gold ready to be shipped out to be reduced to gold bullion. I have met at Fairbanks a man who has melted more than $50,000,000 worth of gold dust and nuggets. This is Mr. G. E. Burrow, the assayer of the First National Bank. He's a chemist and metallurgist of note and was the government assayer at Dawson when the Klondike rush was on. All of the banks at Fairbanks have melting pots, where the dust and nuggets are turned into bricks for shipment outside. You see these gold bricks on the bank counters. Some are as small as a cake of sweet chocolate and others are so large that if one fell on your toes it would crush them. The assaying and melting is usually done outside the bank. Mr. Burrow's shop is a rude zinc shed like a portable garage. It contains a little furnace and the various implements of the assayer including molds and bone ash and scales so delicate that they will weigh a pencil mark on a single sheet of fine tissue paper or a single silky hair of a baby. The gold dust is brought into the banks by the miners in pokes or bags of buckskin as big around as your arm and about a foot long. The banker takes the poke and pours the metal out on the scales and then either pays cash outright for the gold according to weight or gives the miner a credit slip which entitles him to his actual value after it has been turned into bouillon. The gold dust is of different values. Some is mixed with silver and is not worth more than $13 an ounce. Other gold dust may be worth $20 an ounce. When the dust comes to Mr. Burrow it is assayed. That is, it is melted and its gold content tested. The assay is made after the gold is cast into bricks. From each brick a corner about the size of a marrow fat pea is chiseled off. This is hammered out on an anvil and run through rollers until it is as thin as a sheet of paper. A little strip of this gold leaf is taken off and weighed on the fine scales. It is so treated by melting in a furnace that the impurities are extracted and a little button of pure gold is left. This button is weighed and its weight is subtracted from that of the strip before it was melted. The result shows the proportion of pure gold in the brick and there are tables giving its value in dollars and cents. I asked the assayer whether he did not covet the metal he handled. He replied, I never think of the value. I have been working in gold so long that the stuff seems to me just like corn or oats in the hands of a farmer. When I first began to assay at Dawson, I had never seen gold dust and nuggets in quantity before and I almost went crazy. I liked the looks of the gold and I bought nuggets and gold pins and chains made of them. I wore a nugget as a scarf pin and had nugget cuff buttons. After a time I grew tired of them and gave them away. I asked Mr. Burrow about his early experiences in Dawson when fortunes were made in a week. Said he, the gold came so easily that they almost threw it about. The miners would go from saloon to saloon treating the crowd and throwing their pokes to the bartender to weigh out the amount of each treat. They were so careless that a man might take out double the quantity and not be detected. A miner might have a thousand dollars worth of gold in his bag and spend it all in an evening. Now and then one would come into a dance hall and taking a seat in the gallery call one of the girls to stand under him while he poured gold dust into her hair. A dance hall girl might thus clean up fifty dollars in a single shampoo. I remember a miner named Hauser who fell in love with a girl and got her to marry him by paying her what she weighed in gold dust. As she stepped on the scales and tipped the beam at one hundred and thirty five pounds Avoir DuPois she weighed more than twenty one hundred ounces Troy weight which at eighteen dollars an ounce made his wife cost him over thirty eight thousand dollars. Similar extravagances prevailed here at Fairbanks when the camp was in the height of its glory. Miners are always generous and communities like this are far more charitable than those in a long settled country. Said Mr. L. T. Irwin, United States Marshal at Fairbanks to me the other day. The people here are the most generous on earth. It is no trick to raise five hundred dollars to send a sick man or woman outside. Only a few months ago a man was taken outside with a trained nurse and enough money was sent along to pay his hospital expenses in Seattle. I have lived in Alaska eighteen years and in all that time I have not seen one person obliged to go begging. We have, you know, many unsuccessful men, the Marshal continued. Mining is to a large extent a gamble and where one man succeeds there are hundreds who fail. I remember an instance of a man who came to Fairbanks to make his fortune leaving his wife and family outside. He found no gold and finally fell sick and died in a cabin on one of the creeks. When the miners looked over his papers they found a letter that had just come from his wife in a little town in Massachusetts. The letter was full of news about the baby that had been born since the father had left and inside it was one of the baby's stockings. The miners stood around the dead body in the cabin as the letter was read and when the stocking was shown the tears ran down their faces. One of them reached out and took it. He pulled forth his poke and poured in enough gold dust and nuggets to fill up the toe. Another miner poured in more dust and this kept on the stocking passing from hand to hand until it was filled but all had not yet contributed. The gold was then poured onto the table. The miner who did so saying we'll dump this and start over again. In the end it was passed around the whole camp with the result that $5,000 worth of gold dust was collected and the money therefore sent to the widow. United States Marshal Irwin has the unique distinction of being the only man who has ever driven a flock of turkeys from the Pacific Ocean across the mountains into the Klondike Gold Region. We had been talking about old times when he told me this story. My father then lived near Danville, Kentucky in one of the chief turkey and goose raising sections of the United States. When I was a boy turkey raising was a regular business there and we sometimes drove our turkeys and geese as far as 60 miles to the markets. We had to put shoes on the geese before starting out. I laughed. You need not smile said the Marshal. That is the truth. We made the shoes by driving the geese through melted pitch and then through sand. The sand and pitch stuck to their feet and gave them a pair of hard shoes. Well when I came to the Klondike and saw the high prices they were getting for poultry I concluded I'd make a fortune by bringing livestock from outside. I left the camp and went to Seattle where I bought 600 chickens and 84 turkeys. I took them on a steamer a thousand miles northward to Daiya and from there sent the chickens by wagon over the white pass. The turkeys I drove. It was no trouble except they would persist in stopping at night. You cannot prevent a turkey from going to roost when the sun sets. I tried it but the turkeys would jump up on the rocks. You might push them off but they would go on a few steps and then get up again. However I finally got them over the range and down to Lake Labarge once I took them by boat into Dawson. How did you succeed in the sale? Very well but I had to learn how to sell them. There was a great competition for fresh fell among the provision men and everyone wanted to corner the market and crowd out the others. When I entered the first store and told them I had 80 turkeys and 600 chickens the dealers face fell for we saw that he could not monopolize such an enormous proposition as that. I changed my plan, kept my mouth shut about the supply and began to peddle them in small numbers. I got $20 apiece for the turkeys and from $8 to $10 for the chickens. Altogether I got $3,000 out of my chickens and $2,000 from the turkeys so that my gross receipts for the trip were $5,000. End of Chapter 20 Chapter 21 of Carpenter's World Travels Alaska Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter This labor box recording is in the public domain Recording by Betty B Chapter 21 Among the Old Timers The winter is coming and Monty Terrell will have to go to jail so we can take care of him. This remark which one hears as the summer ends in Fairbanks gives in a nutshell one of the strange conditions obtaining in the heart of Alaska. This country has no accommodations for vagrants and no laws for the needy poor. There is the pioneers home it is true but that is at Sitka about 2,000 miles from where Monty lives. Monty Terrell is a character his whole life has been a fight against misfortune and still although blind and lame he is not willing to give up the battle. I do not know his age but he has long passed three score and ten. Years ago when he first came to the Klondike he was one of the most ambitious, determined and industrious of the sourdough as hardened Alaskans are called. One day when out trapping he sank through the ice to his waist. The thermometer was 25 degrees below zero and his legs were so badly frozen that one had to be amputated at the ankle and the other taken off halfway to the knee. Equipped with an artificial leg and feet he again took up the battle of life. He got about so well on his wooden pins that but few knew of his infirmity and he obtained a job with a gang working on the Copper River Railroad. He did not want his condition known to his mates in the construction camp for fear he would be fired. But one night when he had taken off his false feet and laid them beside him in his bunk the string attached to one of them hung down and tickled the man in the bunk below. The man gave the string a jerk and the wooden foot came down and kicked him in the face. Monty's lameness was reported to the boss who discharged him at once. After that Monty went about working at anything he could get and drifting from camp to camp. Finally he settled in a cabin on the River Cina not far from Fairbanks where for several years he earned a living cutting wood for the steamers. Then his eyesight failed. It was pitiful to see how he tried to keep people from knowing his misfortune. When he heard a man coming he would straighten up and start to walk about boldly often running into a tree or a fence. He was offered assistance but would not take it. At last he was known to be on the verge of starvation and was arrested on a charge of vagrancy and sentenced to jail for the winner so that the citizens might have a legal right to take care of him. Even then he complained saying that he wanted to go back to his cabin and that he knew he could in some way earn enough to care for himself. This story was told to me by Mr. LT Irwin chief of police as well as United States Marshal at Fairbanks. Judge Irwin has the job of keeping order in a district half again as large as either Germany or France. The district has only 20,000 population but these are so scattered that 15 deputies are stationed at posts over the whole country from the Canadian boundary near Eagle to the Russian mission on the lower Yukon and from the Arctic Circle to the edge of the Cuscoquim region. Here in Alaska marshals and their deputies have to refer almost everything to Washington before they can act. When a crime is committed not a cent can be spent to detect the criminal without authority from the Attorney General five or six thousand miles away. Not long ago a terrible murder was committed just outside the city. No one knew who was the murder and it was important to scour the neighborhood and begin the work of investigation at once. Before he could proceed the Marshal had to send this cable to Washington. Attorney General Washington D.C. Woman Fowley murdered last night along the railroad track within five miles of Fairbanks. Authority requested to pay expense of office deputies and make investigations in the surrounding country signed United States Marshal. It was days before authority was granted. In the Yukon territory the Canadian Mounted Police would have been on the job before the murdered woman grew cold and the arrest would have been made almost immediately. Judge Irwin has had considerable experience in Canada having mined gold in the Klondike before he came here. I ask him whether they did not do these things better there. His reply was characteristic. Yes, they skin us a mile when the Mounted Police have no law they make one settling small offenses out of court. It is said that no murderer of the Yukon territory has ever escaped. The wheels of justice are badly clogged by Washington red tape. I have before me a copy of the Alaska dispatch giving a list of 25 murders which have occurred within the last decade whose perpetrators were not hung, shot or brought to judgment. The paper says that the criminals in every case could have been convicted if the marshals had been allowed sufficient funds for securing the evidence. It gives the details in a number of cases and among other stories tells of two prospectors murdered in the Chandler. The body of one of them, a man named Smith, was unearthed and brought to Fairbanks by the Marshal on a dog sled. The government at Washington objected to paying the expenses of the dog team and refused to allow any funds with which to make a search for the body of the partner or to investigate the murder. I asked the Marshal about crime in this part of Alaska. He replied, The territory is supposed to be full of bad men but that is a mistake. The order here is much better than in the southern states where I was reared. You cannot pick up a Georgia newspaper even now without finding in it a report of one or more shooting a phrase. In the last 11 years I know of only one man killed in Alaska with a pistol. There are but few people in the country who carry weapons. The murders that have been committed have been perpetrated with guns, clubs, and knives. Our people are as law-abiding as any people of the world. Burglary is almost unknown. I lived in Fairbanks eight years before I locked my door. The people will not stand for robberies. We have our strikes but there is no bloodshed and no destruction of property. Our people are charitable. As an instance of the generosity of Fairbanks continued Marshall Irwin take the San Francisco earthquake. The news of it was telegraphed here one Saturday. There was a meeting that night at Eagle Hall and by noon the next day $20,000 had been collected and started on its way to the sufferers. A month later there was a fire in Fairbanks which destroyed almost the whole town. The people outside remembered what we had done for San Francisco and offers of help poured in. They were all refused. The mayor sending this message. We thank you all but we can carry our own skillet and don't need any help. It is surprising that there is not more crime in Fairbanks. The city is in the heart of the wilds and surrounded by mining camps that have produced millions in gold dust and nuggets. At times the banks have been crammed with gold and in the camps are the bags of gold washed out at every cleanup. Gold is often kept in cans and other common receptacles in the log cabins and I have not yet seen a house that could not easily be broken into and robbed. Millions of dollars worth of gold is annually carried out on the steamers going down the Tanana and up the Yukon to Whitehorse. The present method of transporting this treasure is in an old fashioned iron safe with handles on each side. The safe is left out in the open under the decks merely chained to the mast. In the past the gold was kept in a strong room and now and then thefts were attempted. One day a sailor unscrewed the bars of the room and got out a box of dust and nuggets worth $13,000. He and his partner in the crime tied a life preserver to the box and threw it overboard. Thinking the life preserver would act as a float and enable them to find the box when they came back later on. At the next stop one of the men dropped into the water swam to the bank and went back up the river to look for the gold but could not find it. A little later the officers of the steamer found that the strong room had been tampered with and that one of the boxes was missing. They caught the criminals who were tried and sent to the penitentiary. The life preserver was afterward found by an Indian but the box of gold is still in the Yukon. On another steamer a man named Miller came all the way from the outside to steal a big shipment of gold. He got a job as night watchman and one night when the boat was tied up at the wharf he succeeded in getting $40,000 in dust from the strong box putting buckshot in its place. Before he could return the treasure chest two half drunken men came aboard and stumbled over the little safe which Miller had brought out on deck. Realizing what it was they dropped it over the side in the darkness and then buried it in the woods on shore. Next morning one of them frightened over his sheer and the robbery told the steamship people what he had done and helped them recover the strong box but when it was open it was found to contain of course only the buckshot Miller had substituted for the gold. Miller was convicted of the original theft through his purchase of the buckshot and served a sentence in the penitentiary but the gold was never recovered and it is supposed he succeeded in getting it safely to the outside. Though Fairbanks has long since become a settled community without much of the lawlessness usually associated with mining camps many of the picturesque features of the earlier days are still to be found here. One is the habit of nicknames. Everyone calls his fellow by his first name or a nickname and Mr. is almost unknown. One character here is generally known as the man who talked the crow to death. This is a miner who talks so much that his fellows have time and again left him and discussed. One day they left a raven sitting on the fence outside his cabin. As the story goes the man addressed his conversation to the raven and talked to it until it last the bird dropped dead. Another man is known as Short and Dirty. Others are Scookum Bill and Sourdough Bill and the Malamute Kid noted for his fine malamute dogs. The Bear Kid is a husky fellow who got the title by wrestling with the tame black bear before an admiring crowd. While the hungry kid is said to be able to eat at any and all times and never to refuse a meal. One very thin man is called the evaporated kid. His friends say that he is a human string bean with the bean left out. Eat-em-up Frank owns a cabin on the Tanana River between Fort Gibbon and Fairbanks where he has a little potato farm. He is called Eat-em-up because when he gets drunk, which is often, he shouts that he can eat up any man in the crowd. He weighs only 100 pounds. Step and a half Johnson has one leg shorter than the other. Nevertheless, he is fond of racing and can get over the ground faster than the average sprinter. He is said to insist that the racetrack be along the side of a hill where the slope gives his short leg the advantage. Another striking character is Two-Step Louie who got his title during the gold rush at Dawson. He was a successful miner and a nightly frequenter of the dance halls. The usual charge was a dollar a dance, the man being expected to treat his partner at the end. The story is told how Two-Step Louie once sold a claim for $5,000 with the understanding that $1,500 was to be paid in Alemander left chips, each chip being good for one dance. It is said he would sometimes come into the dance halls and pin a $100 note to the curtain over the orchestra telling the men to give the crowd a century's worth of turkey and the straw. The musicians would play two or three dances and then take down the note. These tales are vouched for by the people of Fairbanks, but I am beginning to doubt whether all the stories I hear in Alaska are true. I have just been told about a miner at White River who had his toes frozen so that his feet sloughed off to the end step. The man had his toes amputated and was able to walk on the stubs with the aid of a pair of bear's feet made into moccasins, the bear's claws taking the place of his toes. The man who told me this showed me a photograph of the miner with his bare feet tied on. The people here say that Alaska is as free of snakes as was Ireland after the advent of St. Patrick. They claim that the only snake that ever came into the territory was one brought from the outside several years ago in a bale of Timothy hay. The snake arrived on the edge of water, crawled out of the bale when the thermometer was about 40 degrees below zero and immediately froze solid. It was a long snake and in freezing the head bent over so that it looked like a cane. An Indian chief picked it up and used it for a walking stick all that winter. He's even said to be using it still. He buries it in the ice under the moss as the spring comes on and when the thermometer falls brings it out as a prop for his declining years. And then the fish stories. Judge Wickersham of Fairbanks tells me of a lake near the headwaters of the Tanana River where he often goes for sport in the summer. The water is as clear as crystal and looking down over the side of the boat he can see hundreds of fish swimming about. He picks those out he wishes to catch, dropping his bait in front of only the best and pulling it away when a small fish or one of the wrong variety might swallow it. As I remember he could catch a boatload in an hour but on account of this careful selection and his desire for sport he takes rather longer. It is also said that when the women of Fairbanks go fishing instead of dropping the flies on the water they hold them at the edge of the line some distance above it and wager as to who can make the trout jump the highest. The loser has to treat the crowd to a luncheon. End of chapter 21 Chapter 22 of Carpenter's World Travels Alaska Our Northern Wonderland by Frank Carpenter This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Betty B. Chapter 22 From Fort Gibbon to the Sea Today after steaming down the Tanana River for 275 miles from Fairbanks I am once more on the mighty Yukon this time on my way to Bering Sea and Gnome for the last two months I have been traveling on this great river and its tributaries the section where I now am is known as the lower Yukon and it's about 800 miles long or about one-third the length of the main stream though it drains thousands of square miles the lower Yukon basin numbers its population I venture by the hundreds going downriver we have now and then passed an Indian village and stopped at several towns which form the river ports for gold mines one of the chief of these latter is Ruby 175 miles below Fort Gibbon 10 years ago this was the scene of a stampede when gold was discovered on Ruby Creek it is still the most important settlement on this part of the river with its log and sheet iron buildings so jumbled together that they look as if they had been pitched out of the sky and allowed to lie as they fell the people are supported by the gold mines about some of the houses are gardens and there are two hot houses noted for their fine vegetables the proprietor of one of these who boarded our steamer for gnome had as a sample of his products a cucumber 18 inches long he said that was only a small one a little below Ruby we passed the mouth of the Koyakuk River which is navigable for more than 500 miles north of where it flows into the Yukon its rich mining camps are reached by small steamers a few miles beyond the mouth of the Koyakuk we stopped at Nulato this is an Indian village one of the oldest trading posts on the Yukon it was established by the Russians when Van Buren was president and at about the time that Tyler entered the White House it was taken over by the Russian American Company and became the chief market for the furs of this part of Alaska the Nulato of today is interesting chiefly because of its Indian cemetery our boat tied up right under it so that we had a good view of the native monuments on the steep hill above us scores of little yellow, blue, red, green, and white kennel-like houses were scattered along the top of the hill the homes of the ghosts of the departed into which the Indians now and then put food for the spirits above each house was a cross showing how Christianity is combined with the native superstitions on the roofs of the graves were laid many mirrors which flashed in the sun as well as such belongings of the dead as guns, snowshoes, bags of tobacco, and other treasures it must have been a tedious business to get the bodies up to that lofty perch yet to this day I am told canoes sometimes arrive with the remains of Indians who have asked to be buried there the natives of Nulato are dirty and their houses are not as well kept as those of the upper Yukon tribes the squads object to having their pictures taken and when I pointed my camera at some of them they wrapped their shawls around their heads and threw themselves down on the ground the next town below Nulato is Kaltaq the starting point for a winter trail across to Yunalalik which shortens the way to Nome by 500 miles to the coast by this portage it is some 80 or 90 miles while by the river it is 600 Kaltaq is a trading post and a government telegraph station it also has a wireless tower which was erected by private parties to maintain communication with the Iditarod gold fields while our steamer took on fuel oil I set out on a short tramp into the country passing through the village of a dozen one-story cabins all fastened with padlocks because the Indian owners had gone off for a feast I found myself in a virgin wilderness the ground was covered with moss and spotted with stunted spruce trees and bushes loaded with blueberries cranberries and squabberries the moss was so deep that I seemed to be treading on a feather bed everywhere I went my feet sank into the ankles the moss fell cold and pulling some up I found the bed of perpetual ice just below the matted roots were heavy with moisture though bare of soil on this walk I had my first experience with the Alaska mosquitoes to my surprise these pests were not fierce and their bites not as severe as those of the New Jersey species though I had neither gloves nor headnet I suffered no great discomfort this I am told is very unusual as generally the mosquitoes are almost unbearable they come in May and June shortly after the breaking of the ice at that time everyone who goes through the country must wear a headnet and have his hands protected by gloves it is best to wear boots for the mosquitoes bore their way through the islet holes in one's shoes and their bites raise great buttons of flesh on each side of the tongue I've heard of men being killed by the mosquitoes and they say the horses and other animals go almost crazy from the bites if they are left out in the woods leaving Caltech the Yukon flows almost straight south for a distance of 150 miles or more to the Holy Cross mission near which the Inoko River comes in the Inoko gives access to the gold fields known as the Iditarod the camp is reached by sailing up the Inoko to Dykman at the head of navigation of the Iditarod River a branch of the Inoko the distance is about 350 miles and from there to the camp is 75 miles farther in two years after its discovery the minds of the Iditarod district had yielded six million dollars worth of gold a single claim has produced 40,000 dollars worth of gold a week throughout a season many of the claims have been bonded or bought by the Guggenheims who are now operating large dredges there between Caltech and the Holy Cross mission in Anvik an Indian settlement with a Russian church and still farther down the river in Andriyovsky established by the Russians in 1853 Andriyovsky is now a little trading station on the banks of the Yukon with a great oil tank at which the steamers stopped to take fuel the town is populated almost entirely by Eskimos about the only whites being the storekeepers from Andriyovsky the Yukon widens until it is soon three miles from one bank to the other then it branches out into wide channels each leading to the sea its many mouths form a great fan-like delta 100 miles wide in flood time the whole country is under water islands grow up in a night and new sandbars are sighted every voyage in places the stream is so wide that one can see little except a vast expanse of yellow water rimmed by the sapphire sky close to the shore grows grass as green is that of Holland and the boat seems to be moving through one vast pasture the government has done little to improve the navigation of the Yukon the only lights on this mighty stream with this winding course its scores of tributaries and its thousands of shifting sandbars and islands are where the river flows into the ocean some of the captains put up their own marks to aid them in subsequent voyages as we passed through the delta the captain of our steamers showed me a barrel in the middle of a large sandbar the sandbar was under water during the last trip when he had anchored the barrel there to locate it the captains all keep records of each trip noting the changes and handing their sketches over to the captains following them up or downstream end of chapter 22 chapter 23 of Carpenter's World Travels Alaska our northern wonderland by Frank Carpenter this Libravox recording is in the public domain recording by Betty B chapter 23 the city of golden sands I am in the hotel golden gate in Nome the city of golden sands today when I stood on front street at high tide and threw a stone into the ocean it ricocheted over a beach which was once a gold mine news that gold had been discovered in the beds of creeks nearby was already beginning to bring prospectors to this part of Seward Peninsula when in 1899 gold was found right on the beach here it was discovered by a united state soldier who panned out enough every day or so for an extra meal then Missouri bill made his big strike getting out $12,000 worth in one day soon men poured in by the thousands from all parts of the world to wash out this easy money from the sea sands the gold was in a kind of ruby sand which lay in beds from six inches to two feet deep for 40 miles along the shore as the miners came in each picked out a space drove in his stake where he stood and drew a mark on the sand around him as far out as he could reach with his shovel out of such small holdings within less than two months a million dollars worth of gold dust had been washed from the beach in front of Nome just west of the town two men cleaned up $3,800 in three days when the beach mining was at its height the people went crazy mining cradles were in great demand and the price of lumber rose to $400 a thousand feet coal brought from $50 to $100 a ton and cabins and shacks of one room sold for $600 each wages at once jumped to $10 a day and during a part of the time to $2 an hour then the sands began to play out in 1900 those in front of Nome yielded $350,000 but the next year they had dropped to one seventh as much it is the same with the other beach mines along the coast some of them yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars but they were soon washed out still as I walked up the beach this afternoon I saw a man taking gold out of the sand in one place they had put up an engine and stretched a root tent above it connected with the engine was a pipe about six inches in diameter which carried the water to the top of a sluice box 20 or 30 feet high the men were throwing the sand into the box and the stream was washing it away the gold being caught in ripples or iron gratings in the bottom of the box farther north some men were rocking out the gold in hand cradles and there was patchy mining going on all along the beach I saw a woman laying out a claim and fencing it with poles she seemed to resent my inspection she was a positive woman and did not want visitors I am told there is still gold in these sands in front of Nome and that more comes in at every high tide one can get color almost anywhere by washing the sand a low-grade deposit amounting to something like 50 cents a cubic yard is said to run for miles along the seashore and machinery may yet be invented to get this gold out profitably I doubt not that there is a fortune under the planks of front street and that if the buildings were cleared away from the tundra on which they stand it could be mined at a profit some of the houses have sewers which yielded enough paydirt to cover the cost of the digging the gold is scattered through the earth in patches or pockets and there are probably many pockets yet undiscovered back of Nome one can see the tailings from which the gold has been taken there is a plane about four miles wide running from the shore to a low range of mountains composed of three ancient beaches which have grown up throughout the ages from these beaches millions of dollars worth of gold has been mined I shall not forget my landing at Nome it was early in the morning when our steamer cast anchor a mile or so out we were taken from the ship by a steam launch to a landing above which rose a great tower connected by a cable with another tower of an equal height on the mainland passengers and baggage were taken from the ocean tower to the land in a platform cage which swung dizzily along on the cable high above the billows the city of Nome is a town of shreds and patches the raggedest municipality I have yet struck in Alaska there are houses enough for 10,000 people though the population is today not one-tenth of that the skyline looks like the jaws of a boy just getting his second teeth the buildings are scattered along streets paved with plank, gravel or the sand of the seashore at the upper end is the Eskimo village it is composed of tents, root cabins and shacks of boards most of them put up by the placer miners and now occupied by squatters and eskimos the town proper is farther down the beach the chief street is front street a wide road paved with thick planks and lined with houses of one or two stories some of the buildings contain excellent stores but there are many vacancies and signs of Tourette are to be seen in every block there are but few big buildings in Nome the largest is the Golden Gate Hotel a dreary four-story barn with numerous bay windows across its front and a view as desolate as that of Poverty Flat the building is of light wood which carries sound like a fiddlebox the moving of a bed on the ground floor sends a noise to the rooms in the attic the place is golden only in the high charges for any petty service the guests may want it costs me ten cents to press the electric button which brings the bellboy and the bills for laundry are beyond computation to strangers with the proper introductions perhaps the most interesting place in Nome is the Log Cabin Club famous all over Alaska for its hospitality its picturesque home is a cabin furnished and keeping with its rusted style the table in the center of its huge main club room is 30 feet long and five feet wide it seems to be a single thick slab and is so polished that one can see his face in it the front doors of logs and the great hinges are of hand wrought iron when Nome was started there was no lumber to be had and the first homes were tents later frame houses were built over the tents or as an annex to them many small shacks went up and then came rambling buildings of two or three stories even today there are but few large houses and many a home as only three or four rooms one reason for this is the cost of fuel and the difficulty of keeping the houses warm during the cold winter months the little buildings have to have high stove pipes in order that their draft may not be cut off by the taller structures about them the result is a little cottage will often have a galvanized stove pipe as high as itself rising above it looking down on the town one sees a thicket of these smoke stacks springing out of the roofs they look like handles to the houses below and make one think of so many irish shalales the chimneys being the handles and the houses the knobs on the ends of the clubs many of the houses have gardens for Nome is so far north that though the summers are short the sun works 18 to 24 hours then and the people are able to grow lettuce turnips and other green stuff nearly every woman has some flowers in her front windows and some have flowers growing outside entering you find these homes very well furnished they have their pianos and other musical instruments they are well equipped with books and magazines in fact with all the furnishings of the cultured homes of the states on the street are many women and men as well dressed as those of our cities and there are others clad in the rough closing necessary for hard labor in the far north there are miners wearing shoes laced to their knees or white or black rubber boots to the waist there are eskimos and mucklucks and skin garments their fat mongolian features look out of fur hoods with bristles as long as a hat pin some are clad in parkas of fur or cotton with their feet in boots of seal skin to the knees there are little eskimo women with babies tied to their backs the faces of the little ones peep out over the shoulders of their mothers the eskimos look queerest when the rain comes and this just now is most of the time then the natives put on waterproof coats made of the bladders of the walrus a skin as thin as paper which turns the rain and keeps one dry in the wettest of weather this skin is in small pieces sewed together in bulbous patches among the most striking business features of gnome are the curio shops stores selling mining materials and those dealing in furs of every description some of the latter have polar bear skins costing from $40 to $75 a piece glacier bear skins worth one fourth as much and brown bear skins of great size the stores have also white fox skins reindeer hides and skins of the ermine which are as white as snow with a pinch of black on the end of the tail the places selling mining supplies and hardware are especially large I went through one hardware store that does a business of several hundred thousand dollars a year gnome is a wholesale center for the mining camps not only of the seward peninsula but also for those of arctic Alaska and for much of northeastern Siberia as well the provision stores carry stocks out of proportion to the size of the community especially in the fall when full supplies have to be laid in for the long winter months the last steamer comes late in October from then on for six months or more the country is icebound and such goods as are brought in must be on dog sleds freight charges for such supplies double their price just now in the heart of midsummer the weather is as soft and warm as in new york or massachusetts the air is so full of ozone that one seems to be breathing champagne it is light the clock around and i can read my newspaper at midnight along in october the gnomeites will first sign blocks of ice floating down from the north perhaps the day after the water will take on a slushy look and in a little while gnome will be frozen in for seven months of winter the thermometer drops to below zero and stays there sometimes going to 40 below and back from the coast still lower many of the people leave gnome to spend the winter in the states returning the following summer those who remain adopt a dress much like that of the eskimos they have fur coats shoes and boots and protect their hands with fur mittens most of the citizens are confined to the town at this time but there are trips with dog sleds across country and except during blizzards there is communication between gnome and council city i am told by the residents that the winter is the most interesting time of the year then the people have dances social spares and amateur theatricals it is quite the thing to go across country on skis from the town to the creeks and mining camps gnome has a ski club and tournaments are held in which prizes are awarded both for jumping and for speed slaying with dogs is another amusement a common winter site is malady wrapped in furs sitting in a dog sled with the driver running behind holding on to the handlebars such sleds are used to go to dances held in the neighboring camps and the men run races with each other i like the gnomeites there are but few drones among them and most of them are good boosters they do not expect their city to have the population it once had but they say that owing to the large area of low-grade gold earth about it gnome is bound to be a mining center for generations to come they say also that it will always be the chief port of the seward peninsula a territory which has vast mineral resources yet to be developed end of chapter 23 chapter 24 of carpenters world travels alaska our northern wonderland by frank carpenter the sleeper vox recording is in the public domain recording by betty b chapter 24 creeks that made millionaires seward peninsula which forms the extreme western end of alaska is the golden horn of the north american continent it is twice as big as maryland and half the size of ohio and a great part of it is peppered with gold the district has already produced more than 80 million dollars worth of gold dust and nuggets and the country has hardly been scratched dr alfred h brooks the head of the alaska division of the geological survey has estimated that there are more than 200 million dollars worth of gold mixed with its gravels and the probability is that the total output of minerals will be 50 or more times the amount we paid for alaska i have just returned from a trip with yafet lindberg through the greatest gold mines of the seward peninsula they belong to the pioneer mining company founded by lindberg brintason and linblum the three lucky suites since then more than six million dollars worth of gold has been taken out of that creek and tens of millions have come from the coastal plain through which it runs the pioneer mining company now owns about 3000 acres of gold bearing earth and is capitalized at five million dollars when gold was discovered lindberg and his partners washed out the first dust by hand melting the frozen earth with hot water today the washing is done with the finest of mining machinery rivers of water have been carried over the mountains to supply the hydraulic giants and the gold bearing earth is forced up through pipes to a height of 50 feet into sluice boxes in which the gold is washed out some of the company's land is phenomenally rich 300 acres or about one tenth of it will run so mr. lindberg told me from 75 000 dollars to 100 000 of gold to the acre or in all from 20 to 30 million dollars the remaining 2700 acres carry more or less gold and the company has enough work in sight to keep it busy for many years i've seen much of yafet lindberg who with john brintason and eric linblum made the discovery that resulted in the great gold fields of gnome none of the three men had had much experience in gold mining brintason had come from the iron mines of michigan to search for coal linblum had immigrated from sweden to san francisco where he had worked as a tailor and came to alaska on hearing of the gold discoveries at kotsby sound lindberg had come from norway to aid the united states expedition which took reindeer from norway to the starving miners at dawson having heard of clondite gold he took the reindeer contract so as to get to the mines when he landed with the deer he heard that gold had been discovered on the seward peninsula and came on north to saint michael he was prospecting near there along the fish river when he fell in with brintason and linblum and the three decided to go westward and test the country about the snake river at the mouth of which gnome is situated they had tested a half dozen creeks flowing into the river finding more or less gold when they made their discovery on anvil creek that was the 20th of september 1898 the weather was already cold but by using hot water they were able to wash the gravel and took out $1800 worth of gold within a few days the pioneer properties are in and about anvil creek and include the site of the original discovery the chief agent in getting out the gold is water which bursts forth from pipes and streams as big around as a telegraph pole and often several hundred feet long the force of these streams is so great that they would cut a man in two if he tried to cross one they are so swift you cannot pierce them with an axe they are sent against the hills and lift up rocks and gravel and shoot them in clouds through the air at one point of my trip one of these streams came between me and the sun and the sand, gravel, and water composing it took on all the colors of the rainbow I stood for a while and watched the men working they were clad in slickers and white rubber boots the pipe from which the stream came was so delicately poised on a pivot that it could be moved with the touch of a finger and made to carry the gold-bearing earth where the man directing it willed the water boiled and foamed as it struck the glacial ice in which the gold and gravel is bedded it melted the ice, tore the earth away from it and carried the mass of earth and gravel to the hydraulic lifts in one place I saw such streams moving mountains of gravel and everywhere they were forcing the gold sand and gravel upgrade pipes into the sluice boxes with Mr. Lindeberg I watched the torrent rushing down the sluice boxes the force of the flood is so enormous that if one should fall into it he would be crushed to a jelly if he were caught near the bottom of the pipe leading up to a sluice he would be drawn into it by the suction such an accident happened not long ago a minor fell and was sucked into the hole every bit of blood was taken out of his body and his arms and legs were torn off after we'd examined the sluice boxes Mr. Lindeberg took us to the sides of a hill and demonstrated the richness of the gold-bearing sand of that part of the mine he drove a shovel into the hill and carried a couple of quarts of the sand and gravel to one of the little streams that ran through the bed of the pit he dipped the shovel into the water and moved it slowly about washing away the dirt and the sand at the end he showed us a good-sized pinch of pure gold in grains ranging from the size of coarsely ground coffee to that of fine table salt my daughter who was with me expressed a wish to wash out some gold she scooped up about a hat full of earth and succeeded in getting out about 75 cents worth of gold in my talk with Mr. Lindeberg I asked him to tell me something about the changes in mining said he we started by digging the earth with pick and shovel and we used the old-fashioned rocker to wash out the gold later on we made sluice boxes and had horses and scrapers then came the steam shovel and now we are doing most of our mining with water and the hydraulic lifts there's been a great change in the amount of gold saved ground that could not be worked at a profit in the old way now pays very well with our hydraulic sluices we're able to thaw the glacial formation down to where the gold bearing gravel lies we can strip this off with the water and within a month or so the air will thaw the gravel to such an extent that we can force it into the lifts and get the gold out after the glacial earth has been removed we find that the gold bearing material runs to a depth of 40 feet or more it varies in richness but there is so much of it that we expect to be mining for an indefinite period to come this far north the mining season is short running only for 90 to 100 days of summer I spent some time today in the melting room of the merchants and miners bank here at Nome the gold smelting was done in a little room adjoining the bank in a furnace that looked much like a kitchen stove in the shelves around the walls were melting pots of one kind or another and under them were bins of soda and other materials when the lid of the stove was lifted I observed that it was lined with fire clay and I was shown that it had a blowpipe connected with it it was as hot as the burning fiery furnace into which the heathen Nebuchadnezzar cast the three Israelites the assayer was a young man from Sydney, Ohio and a graduate of the Ohio State University he is melting about two million dollars worth of gold every year I watched him at work first he put some soda and other chemicals into two half gallon pots of graphite then he poured in about two quarts of gold dust and nuggets handling the stuff as if it were so much cornmeal setting the pots on the blazing bed of the furnace he covered the hole and sent in a draft which raised the temperature to around 2500 degrees Fahrenheit it takes only 1800 degrees to melt gold so the stuff was soon a liquid mass which boiled and bubbled when he opened the furnace the stew was a golden red and the pots themselves were red hot he lifted them off with pincers and poured the molten mass into steel molds as the gold cooled the impurities in it rose to the top as slag which crumbled off leaving a brick of pure metal worth thousands of dollars the assayer dumped it into a wooden tub filled with cold water and a few moments later took it out and scrubbed it off with an ordinary nail brush he then wiped it with a 15 cent towel and showed it to me as bright and shining as a new wedding ring end of section 24