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Updated: May 25, 2025
He had heard of the miners on the Yukon, and of the Klondike strike. Gold-miners had never invaded his territory, for which he was glad. But the outside world to him did not exist. He tolerated no mention of it. Nor could Labiskwee help Smoke with earlier information. She had been born on the hunting-grounds. Her mother had lived for six years after.
Sometimes they stayed up at the tavern, drinking and carousing with the Dutch travellers who brought the supplies of Hollands and Cape brandy and lager beer, and the American or English gold-miners and German drummers who put up there from time to time. Then the child lay in the outhouse alone. It was a frail, puny creature, always frightened and silent.
Your "old-timer" anywhere is commonly laudator temporis acti, but there is good reason to believe that these early, and certainly most adventurous, gold-miners, some of whom forced a way into the country when there were no routes of travel, and subsisted on its resources while they explored and prospected it, were men of a higher stamp than many who have come in since.
And here, on the Fortymile, we passed several men "sniping on the bars," as the very first Alaskan gold-miners did on this same river, and probably on these same bars, twenty-five years ago. One hand moved the "rocker" to and fro and the other poured water into it with the "long Tom"; so was the gold washed out of the gravel taken from just below the ice.
At last there came a day when these fortunate gold-miners cried, "Hold! enough!" an unwonted cry not often uttered by human beings. Standing beside the camp fire one evening, while some of the party were cooking and others were arranging things inside the tent Captain Samson looked around him with an unusually heavy sigh. "It's a grand country, and I'll be sorry to leave it," he said.
To this day there are to be seen in the southern provinces of Egypt excavations and the remains of old mine buildings and appliances left by the ancient gold-miners, who were mostly State prisoners. Some of these mines were worked by the Pharaohs of, and before, the time of Moses; and in these dreadful places thousands of Israelites were driven to death by the taskmaster's whip.
In fact, they were all three exceedingly, almost disreputably, shabby. They looked more like tramps than respectable gold-miners. "Tom, you are looking very ragged," said Dick Russell, surveying our hero critically. "I know it, Dick. I feel as though I had just come out of a rag-bag. I can't say that you look much better, nor Ferguson either." "This rough work is hard on clothing," said Russell.
If Jack had put more questions, he would have received clear and emphatic replies, but he merely said, "Pooh!" and when a man says "pooh!" to conscience, he is in a very bad way indeed. At Higgins' store gold-miners assembled to buy and sell, to talk and drink and gamble.
And he had neither gambled nor drank, which are the two rocks on which gold-miners are apt to wreck their vessels. All this gave him an air of power and self-assertion which might, perhaps, have been distasteful to an indifferent acquaintance, but which at this first meeting was very pleasing to the father.
But I know from what I have heard that gold-miners are, almost to a man, full of fancies and superstitions, and that they will often take up claims from some idea of luck rather than from their experience and knowledge of ground." After the work was over Abe and Frank went down to the claim.
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