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Updated: May 19, 2025
I came to see him." The childish face hardened instantly. "I don't know. He cleaned up the sluice-boxes late last fall after the first freeze. Mother helped him clean up. He got a lot of gold the most yet and he took it with him and all the horses. He said he was going out for grub but he never came back. Then the big snows came in the mountains and we knew he couldn't get in.
The sluice-boxes were soon cleaned and the sand and gravel reduced until we could almost see the bottom of the pan but no gold. After the entire contents was retorted with quicksilver and burned out there was not twenty-five cents worth of gold. The Captain assured me that his partner had taken several ounces out of the claim and had sent it to the assay office for melting and refining.
All these Mackenzie streams had proved rich in gold. The wing-dams, flumes, and sluice-boxes on the lower five or ten miles of their courses showed wonderful industry, and the quantity of glacial and perhaps pre-glacial gravel displayed was enormous. Some of the beds were not unlike those of the so-called Dead Rivers of California.
The ground about them is strewn with battered prospecting-pans, picks, sluice-boxes, and quartz specimens from many a ledge, indicating the trend of their owners' hard lives. The ride from Murphy's to the cave is scarcely two hours long, but we lingered among quartz-ledges and banks of dead river gravel until long after noon.
The creek caught it here and there, until, in grim irony, it seemed to bear their broken sluice-boxes and useless engines on the very Pactolian stream they had been hopefully created to direct and carry. But by some peculiar trick of the atmosphere the perfect plenitude of that golden sunset glory was lavished on the rugged sides and tangled crest of the Lone Star Mountain.
Go out on the creeks and see the hills denuded of their timber, the stream-beds punched with innumerable holes, filled up or filling up, the cabins and sluice-boxes rotting into the moss, here and there a broken pick and shovel, here and there a rusting boiler, and take notice that this region has been "developed."
"He wants to know if you'll be pumpin' again?" "Yes, after awhile. Tell him to stay there. I'm going to squeeze out the 'quick' I've taken up, but I want to get as near finished to-day as I can. You come and help me." As Bruce walked back to the sluice-boxes with bowed head he was thinking that the day was well suited to the ending of his roseate dreams.
At present he was not washing out a diurnal thousand dollars; but his dumps grew, shift by shift, and there would come a time when those dumps would pass through his sluice-boxes, depositing in the riffles, in the course of half a dozen days, several hundred thousand dollars.
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