United States or El Salvador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


It passed. She saw her uncle that great, robust, hearty, splendid old man, with his laugh and his kindness, and his love for her, and his everlasting unquenchable belief that soon he would make a rich gold-strike. What a roar and a stampede he would raise at her loss!

When he returned from the gold-strike in Klondike he came, as was his wont, to the large house to make report to old Klakee-Nah of all the world that he had seen; and there he first saw El-Soo, three years back from the Mission. Thereat, Akoon wandered no more. He refused a wage of twenty dollars a day as pilot on the big steamboats.

"For which we may thank the Lord," said Abel Cumshaw, with cheerful impiety. "Time enough to thank the Lord," the other retorted, "when we've finished the job successfully. All the same, I wish we had a pack horse." "If we had brought a pack-horse," said Cumshaw, "we'd have had half the country-side wondering what the deuce was up. Like as not they'd think there was a new gold-strike on."

On the 25th of August, 1851, the first great gold-strike made in Australia was made here. The wandering prospectors who made it scraped up two pounds and a half of gold the first day-worth $600. A few days later the place was a hive a town. The news of the strike spread everywhere in a sort of instantaneous way spread like a flash to the very ends of the earth.

His mind was orderly, his imagination practical, and he never dreamed idly. When he superimposed a feverish metropolis on a waste of timbered, snow-covered flat, he predicated first the gold-strike that made the city possible, and next he had an eye for steamboat landings, sawmill and warehouse locations, and all the needs of a far-northern mining city.

In the primitive trading days he had been a power over his people, and he had dealt profitably with the white trading companies. Later on, with Porportuk, he had made a gold-strike on the Koyokuk River. Klakee-Nah was by training and nature an aristocrat. Porportuk was bourgeois, and Porportuk bought him out of the gold-mine. Porportuk was content to plod and accumulate.

"If you'd been through the things I've been through," I asserted, "if you'd been in New Guinea when there was a gold-strike on and had to climb hundreds of feet up a straight cliff to get to the fields, hanging on all the time to creepers as thick as your wrist, you'd think this was just Paradise.

On the 25th of August, 1851, the first great gold-strike made in Australia was made here. The wandering prospectors who made it scraped up two pounds and a half of gold the first day-worth $600. A few days later the place was a hive a town. The news of the strike spread everywhere in a sort of instantaneous way spread like a flash to the very ends of the earth.

Daylight's interest was centered in the big flat itself, with deep water all along its edge for steamboat landings. "A sure enough likely town site," he muttered. "Room for a camp of forty thousand men. All that's needed is the gold-strike." He meditated for a space. "Ten dollars to the pan'll do it, and it'd be the all-firedest stampede Alaska ever seen.