Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/139

Rh Photo by Sidney Paige

The "First Boat Out" after the Ice. White Horse

city have disappeared, and men shovel and sweat for their daily bread and the other man gets the gold.

Everywhere the sluice box and the piles of "tailings" catch your eye, and the incessant chug chug of pumps and dummy engines with the rhythmic dumping of the gravel greets your ears.

Descending one of the many shafts sunk to bed rock through the frozen gravel, the shift boss will show you where the best pay lies, and while you stoop to examine the spot a chunk of the roof may catch you in the back of the neck. But it seldom sloughs off in more than 40-pound pieces, so there is no danger.

The mass of miners are wage-earners, and they earn their wage. To work all day at the end of a No. 2 shovel is not all honey and treacle, nor does it lead to high ideals and gentle philosophy to sweat out your ten hours in a steam-filled drift of frozen gravel forty feet below the creek, and when the whistle blows issue to a hasty wash, a dinner, and a crowded bunk-house. But there is the ever-present possibility of a good strike or a profitable "lay" on a rich claim. The day is 24 hours long and the sun shines most of the time, and when the snow falls and the trail freezes over, the wage-earner is his own master again. With the hard-earned "grub stake" and his team of dogs he hits the trail for the new country, and it is "mush" until the coming spring, when, if he hasn't struck it during the short days of the Arctic winter, he returns to the end of a No. 2 to try it again next fall. Ask as many as you will if they are "goin' out this winter," nine times out of ten the answer comes, "Not till I go with a full poke." And