Alaska (74 page)

Alaska did not produce supermen, but in its formative periods it was served by men of character and determination, and it is a fortunate land which knows such public servants.

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GOLD

he cataclysmic incidents which produced the scenic grandeurs of Alaska began at least a hundred and twenty million years ago, but the events which gave rise to the most dramatic development in Alaskan history started much earlier.

About eighteen billion years ago, insofar as science can determine from signals left behind, an explosion of indescribable magnitude took place, and what had previously been a void became occupied by gigantic clouds of cosmic dust. Different men with different insights or mind-sets have described this beginning of the beginning in different ways, but regardless of its cause, the event seems to have set our universe spinning; all that happened thereafter stemmed from its complexity and overpowering force.

We cannot reasonably guess what happened to the major portion of the dust thus set in movement, but about nine billion years ago a minor portion staggering in size though only a fraction began to coalesce into what would ultimately become the galaxy of which we are a part. In this galaxy some two hundred billion stars would form, the one we see rising each morning as our sun being one of the smaller. We must not take too much pride in our galaxy, wonderful as it is, because it is merely one of more than a billion; quite often the others are greater in dimension and larger in their starry populations.

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About six billion years ago an immense agglomeration of cosmic dust within our galaxy began assuming the shape of a huge swirl much like the ones we will see in the heavens this night if we have a good telescope, for all the processes here mentioned are still being repeated in other parts of the universe. Out of this swirling mass of cosmic particles a star began to evolve and with it the nine or ten accompanying planets which together would make up our solar system. Our sun, therefore, is probably about six billion years old, with some of the planets slightly younger.

Now our figures become more precise. About four and a half billion years ago cosmic dust somehow related to what was happening in the sun began to agglomerate into what would ultimately become our earth. For the first billion years of its existence the earth seems to have been a turbulent cauldron in which violent physical and chemical alterations were taking place.

Composed at first mainly of hydrogen and helium, the interior of the earth accumulated such heat and pressure that nuclear reactions occurred, and out of them began to take form the more than one hundred distinct elements upon which the earth would be constructed. Iron, one of the principal elements, being heavier than most, concentrated in the central core, where in a part molten, part solid form it would exert the unifying force which held the earth together, determine much of its movement, establish the magnetic poles, and lend stability to the whole. Mixed with generous amounts of nickel, this central core of iron helped in manifold ways to keep the earth functioning.

At the center, in a heat inconceivable, under pressures never known on the surface and driven by nuclear reactions, the semiliquid components of the earth were sorted out, forming all the basic elements which would later comprise the earth as we know it. Essential substances as diverse as lead, sulfur, nitrogen and arsenic emerged, each with its peculiar atomic weight, each with its preassigned and unique position among its neighbors.

One of these elements, Number 79 in line with an atomic weight of 196.9, which made it conspicuously heavy, was a bright metal with an alluring appearance and a curious set of propensities. Gold, far from copious in its distribution throughout the mass of the earth, had a specific gravity nineteen times that of water, so that if any one of the major oceans had been comprised of gold rather than water, its sheer weight could have collapsed the system.

A major characteristic of gold was its reluctance to react with other elements, staying stubbornly to itself. In this re-452

spect it differed strikingly from the element carbon, which formed relationships with almost any substance with which it came into contact. Carbon formed more than four hundred thousand different compounds, gold almost none. Also, carbon metamorphosed itself into an almost endless chain of useful or valuable products: petroleum, carbon black, anthracite, graphite and limestone. A notable characteristic of carbon was its capacity to restructure itself late in the life of earth, when altered conditions produced altered forms. Thus diamonds, one of the spectacular manifestations of carbon, did not come into being until relatively late, when a unique combination of elementary material, heat and pressure transformed carbon into something quite dazzling.

Gold, on the contrary, began as gold, and remained gold, despite the hammering of heat, and atomic reactions, and the ever-present invitation of other metals to join them in exotic new combinations. Gold tended to associate with the heavier elements related to iron, but it also showed a slight affinity for sulfur. It combined occasionally with the exotic mineral tellurium, but refused to do so with oxygen, the way so many other minerals did. There would be no gold oxide. Gold did not rust.

Because of its insularity, gold was known as a noble metal, an adjective applied also to those rare gases which refused to combine with other gases. The word did not refer to lineage, or attractive appearance, or value; a metal or a gas was noble

if it stood by itself, had great persistence and a reluctance to deform itself in union with another element. According to such definitions, gold was certainly a noble metal.

It seems to have moved upward from its originating cauldron by following fissures in rocky formations, depositing itself here and there in arbitrary and diverse patterns.

At times, like any other liquid under pressure, it found some convenient crevice and spread laterally, coming to rest at various levels, never in great concentrations like lead or sulfur, but in areas so widely scattered that no logical reason could explain their placement.

When man succeeded in exploring most of the surface of the earth, he would find deposits of gold in places as varied as Australia, California, South Africa and on the banks of a trivial snowbound stream on the Canada-Alaska border, close to the Arctic Circle.

Gold could be found in two dramatically different circumstances. Like other metallic elements, copper and lead for example, it might rest well below the surface of the earth in concentrations laid down millions of years earlier. This gold would be mined, as metals have been mined for some four 453

thousand years, and there would be no great difference between the mining of gold and the mining of the other metals. A deep shaft would be sunk; walls would be shored up by timbers; and at promising levels laterals would be sent out to explore veins.

What would be found in such a below-the-surface gold mine? Not concentrations of the noble metal, waiting to be dug out and brought to the surface. What was common was a quartz rock containing flecks of gold so minute that the unpracticed eye could scarcely recognize them. A find of tremendous value would be a hunk of quartz whose cross section showed traces of gold no larger than pinpoints not pinheads and so widely dispersed that the uninstructed would have to look twice to see them.

Such rock, broken loose from its underground hiding places and brought to the surface, would be crushed and sluiced with water, and now the weight of gold became important, for invariably it would sink to the bottom, where it would be trapped in riffles while the apparently heavier but lighter quartz rock was carried off by the water.

To mine gold in this way required courage to delve into the earth, dynamite to break the quartz loose, and a constant flow of water to sluice the crushed mixture.

The second way of finding gold was the more exciting. Through millions of years as the upper crust of the earth shifted and rose and fell, veins of rock containing minute traces of gold were exposed to the elements, allowing abrasion to take place.

Freezing winters fractured the quartz; incessantly dripping water broke down the rock; gravel at the bottom of swift-moving streams acted like sandpaper on wood; and volcanic displacement brought to the surface new deposits to be abraded.

As the suddenly released flecks of gold found their freedom, their fate was determined by their weight. They moved for a while with the motion of whatever stream was carrying them, then irresistibly they fell to the bottom, and as they came to rest, certain hydrodynamic forces dictated where they would accumulate. If a stream was tumbling headlong down an incline, they would seem to be almost internally driven to seek some quiet nook in which to escape the turbulence. If a quiet creek was meandering over fairly level land, its cargo of gold would fall into some outer curve where the relative speed of the water slowed. But all the flecks came to rest somewhere.

The finding of this surface gold was known as placer mining the word rhymed with gasser and the mark of the placer miner was a man with a beard holding a tin basin 454

beside a creek, panning a load of gravel to see if it showed colors, flecks of gold, then building a crude sluice of some kind Ťto bring lots of water to wash away lots and lots of gravel. To find gold locked in quartz, a man had to dig deep into the earth; to find placer gold in its easier locations, one sometimes had to dig only two feet and lift up not tons of rocks but only a covering of gravel or sand.

Through centuries of gold seeking, men had devised a dozen rules of thumb to guide them in locating where placer gold was hiding, and men who had been on the various gold fields became uncanny in their ability to-find the noble mineral. If you brought onto a new field a gang of men practiced in the fields of Australia, California and South Africa, they would find the gold, while amateurs from Idaho, London and Chicago would not.

Three practical rules seemed to prevail. The first knowledgeable men on a new field preempted the good spots; those who arrived late found little or nothing. However, the second rule kept the hopes of the general public alive; just often enough some lucky prospector who knew nothing about gold stumbled upon colors, scouted about, and by sheer chance staked himself a bonanza. This did not happen often, but it did happen.

The third rule was not widely understood, but it accounted for some of the great finds. In seeking placer gold, one followed stream beds, because moving water was the only possible agency by which placers could be deposited. But since the gold had been laid down over millions of years, and since a stream could wander notoriously during even one man's brief lifetime, what the prospector should investigate was not necessarily the little stream as it existed today but the mighty one that might have existed a thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand, or even a million. Perhaps, along the Yukon River and its tributaries in 1896, the place to look for gold was not along the banks of the Klondike, that magical stream with the magical name, but on ridges hundreds of feet high where some river of significance had laid down its gold three hundred thousand years earlier.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1896 A BROKEN-DOWN AMERICAN

prospector with an unfavorable reputation because of his propensity for lying, George Washington Carmack, happened to strike up an acquaintance with a dour, proper Scotsman born in Canada. Robert Henderson could have laid claim to the title gentleman had he preferred, for he favored 455

strict personal behavior and austere business rectitude. Had he no weaknesses? He was an inveterate snob.

The two formed a solid but unlikely partnership, because although each was willing to work hard and undergo privation when seeking gold, there was one difference which superseded all others. Carmack was a squaw man, legally married to an Indian woman whose two shiftless brothers, Shookum Jim and Tagish Charley, occasionally helped him in his prospecting. Henderson did not countenance this; he was honor bound to share information and potential profits with Carmack, even though Lying George, as he was called, did have an Indian wife, but he could not tolerate the two brothers-in-law.

Therefore, when Henderson announced that he had made a find on a small tributary to the Thron-diuck River, which debouched into the Yukon, Carmack and his two Indians went over the hills to help him develop his find and share in the profits. But Henderson made things so unpleasant for the Indians, refusing insolently to sell them tobacco, that Carmack decided to reject his share of the claim and strike out on his own.

The three men, leaving Henderson to his modest find, climbed over the hills to the west and started their own prospecting on Rabbit Creek, an insignificant tributary to the Thron-diuck. There, on the afternoon of 17 August 1896, they sluiced the gravel from their pan and found settled on the bottom gold flakes and nuggets worth four dollars. Since a pan which showed gold worth ten cents was known as an exciting find, Carmack and his brothers-in-law realized that they had struck a bonanza. Hasty additional trials maintained the exhilarating average of four dollars a pan.

In the wild excitement, Carmack remembered that he had two obligations to discharge, one moral, one legal. Morally he must inform his partner Henderson of the find, but he was so irritated by the latter's treatment of the two Indians that he remained on his side of the mountain, leaving Henderson unaware of the stupendous discovery and unable to share in it.

Carmack's legal obligation could not be avoided. When a miner found gold he was required to do two things: file a proper claim with the government and immediately inform other miners as to where his find was and its probable richness, so that they could stake their claims. Carmack, leaving the Indians to guard his rights, sped down the Yukon to the old mining town of Forty mile on the left bank of the river, and there he staked his title to what would thereafter be known as the Discovery Claim,

five hundred feet running along the bank of Rabbit Creek and across it on both flanks to the crest of the first rise.

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His legal obligations discharged, he then proceeded to the saloon, where he announced at the top of his voice: 'The biggest strike of all!'